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The Long, Slow Decline of BitTorrent (2017)

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Re: The Long, Slow Decline of BitTorrent (2017)

#511

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I could see an argument made that the placement of the subtitles in an arrangement for ease of reading, without blocking key visual information, placed such that a viewer can identify which subtitle is spoken by which character, timed such that jokes are not given away prematurely, has a creative aspect in order to make sure that all such constraints are met when creating subtitles. It isn't a good argument, but I co…

Subtitles are literally just the scripted dialogue in textual form, so the copyright would belong to the studio (having purchased the script from the screenwriter). Translated subtitles would be copyrighted by the translator under a derivative license from the studio owning the film. Subtitles of the type you suggest don't currently exist as standalone products; the level of detail and information you are describing…

ASS subtitle format is rich enough to encapsulate this. You see it in anime subs. They're distributed with the product, but it's a separate stream in the MKV.

Re: The Long, Slow Decline of BitTorrent (2017)

#512

Site is down, but I noticed recently that the bit torrent client is looking more and more like 90s malware every time I download it. It has been streaming commercials for a while now. Ive decided to look for an alternative client next time I need to install one

I've used transmission before, its a bit basic vs bittorrent/utorrent.

That's because it does everything you need. It hasn't had much in the way of updates for years.

Re: The Long, Slow Decline of BitTorrent (2017)

#513
post #351
post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I first wanted to write something in that direction, but realized that is not true. Since the common cpus are all produced by US-american firms, they'd indeed be affected by something like this. Though you are of course correct afaik, the real production happens in Asia.

Companies like IBM or Intel are international, not "US-american" in any meaningful sense.

Maybe, but it is definitely meaningful in the sense discussed here: In what it means for US copyright overreach and the USA applying their jurisdiction on those companies/products.

Re: The Long, Slow Decline of BitTorrent (2017)

#514
post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand what is the profit for movie companies in narrowing down their own market. The movie company sold the rights to show that movie in the UK to some other company instead of Netflix, probably for more money than Netflix offered them. Also, you're paying a fixed monthly fee, and unless you're part of the small minority that travels a lot, you're not likely to drop Netflix over not being able to watch c…

While only a small minority might travel (across country borders) a lot in the US, I imagine in Europe it's a much higher proportion of the population that regularly travels to other countries.

Europe is small in comparison to US and in EU borders virtually do not exists exactly like between states in US. You can go and work in any country in EU if you are EU citizen without any permissions or special paper. Plus there is a lot of countries like Czech, Slovakia, Slovenia, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Luxembourg and couple more which are so small/have so good highway system that from any place in that country you can cross the border in under 2 hours which is basically like driving from SF to Sacramento or from NYC to Philadelphia. The point is that a lot of people travels cross country in Europe, very often it's they daily commute.

Re: The Long, Slow Decline of BitTorrent (2017)

#515

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The law/studio deals have to change. Netflix offers great movies and they lock it down to certain countries. For example I am big fan of Back To The Future. I can watch may favourite movie every month when I'm in UK but when I am in Poland then no luck. Same goes in other direction. While being in Poland I downloaded via Netflix National Lampoon Animal House to watch on plane. I watched half of it on plane then tried…

Do you really watch the same movie every month?

Movies no but I often watch comedy series like a "re run". Just turn it on when I am doing stuff in the kitchen to have Friends running in the background so I don't have to pay full attention to it.

This is also not the full story. Recently I was watching one TV series on Netflix and when I was in the middle of the season Netlfilx informed me that by the end of January they will remove it because of copyright deal (they could stream it only for certain period of time in Poland). Of course that series is still available in UK.

Re: The Long, Slow Decline of BitTorrent (2017)

#516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Torrenting for me has always been about convenience, not money. I recently wanted to watch a new show called A.P. Bio. It's free on NBC's website. But after struggling through one episode with lags and ads with no volume control, I gave up and just torrented the show. Until they master such exotic technologies as "streaming video" and "volume control" they're going to keep driving people to torrenting. Netflix figure…

The law/studio deals have to change. Netflix offers great movies and they lock it down to certain countries. For example I am big fan of Back To The Future. I can watch may favourite movie every month when I'm in UK but when I am in Poland then no luck. Same goes in other direction. While being in Poland I downloaded via Netflix National Lampoon Animal House to watch on plane. I watched half of it on plane then tried…

You can use playon cloud [0] which is an online dvr service for sites like Netflix, Hulu, etc. They appear to be legal which is good.

  [0] https://www.playon.tv/cloud

Re: The Long, Slow Decline of BitTorrent (2017)

#517

So show actual decline the article would have to use some metric based on absolute bitorrent bandwidth. Instead it uses percentages of total traffic. So it could just be showing that Nefix has gotten popular, not anything about bitorrent.

Especially since we know that Netflix has grown to be a ridiculous percentage of all traffic

yeah I take issue with the way the stats are presented in this article, and I hoped that more people would be saying it in the comments. a smaller share doesn't directly mean smaller usage, it might as well mean bigger usage of services (which we know increased) while p2p remained constant. the fact that it hasn't grown with the rest of the internet doesn't mean that it isn't as big as it used to be

Re: The Long, Slow Decline of BitTorrent (2017)

#518

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Licensing a movie in such a way that it can be played in France but not Poland seems as ridiculous as licensing it such that it can be played in Pennsylvania but not Minnesota. When will this Stone Age practice go away?

Are you saying it shouldn’t be legal? Or that the business practice doesn’t make sense? Let’s say you’re a French movie distributor. You know the French market, you know which movies will sell, you know how to market to French audiences. Because of this you can bid more on the rights to distribute movies in France than a global company that doesn’t have any specific knowledge about the French market (your return is l…

yes, it shouldn't be legal. EU single market and all that.

http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-17-4781_en.htm

Re: The Long, Slow Decline of BitTorrent (2017)

#519

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Distribution rights for huge back catalogs were sold to third party local to a given country/region distributors long ago. There's a lot of entropy there, and each has exclusivity to control distribution for the given region. It's not that easy to work away from. Which is why Netflix has been paying more to create or co-create content (most Netflix content isn't world-wide exclusive it seems).

> Distribution rights for huge back catalogs were sold to third party local to a given country/region distributors long ago. There's a lot of entropy there, and each has exclusivity to control distribution for the given region. Which is another reason not to use regional licensing going forward, and pass laws to disfavor it in general. It increases transaction costs -- then when Netflix or any of your hundred other b…

> Which is another reason not to use regional licensing going forward, and pass laws to disfavor it in general

I'm curious what your proposed legislation would be. Just outlaw exclusive licensing? Would you prohibit vertical integration between content producers and distributors or just force vertically integrated companies to license content to competing distributors?

How about a distributor that has an inherent market advantage and so can bid higher on the rights than other distributors? Would that be allowed? Or would you require producers to charge some lowest common denominator fee so that you can't create releases that are effectively exclusive?

I just can't imagine how you would ever effectively police this without taking away a lot of free market rights from participants.

BTW, just so it's clear, I fully support the current EU Digital Single Market rules that try to enforce the fact that you should be allowed to watch your content while you are traveling. I think that's much easier on all sides of the equation because you're not forcing anyone to make additional deals that they don't want to make (i.e. distributing content to other companies when they want it to be exclusive). I just think it's a big step from that to actually legislating away exclusive distribution deals.

Re: The Long, Slow Decline of BitTorrent (2017)

#520
post #62

I can't read the article because the website is down. But I have something to say about torrenting movies. Late last year, my old parents who don't speak English came to visit me for a couple of months in the US. I'm just a graduate student with a limited budget, and my mom is car sick so we couldn't go out every night. I didn't want them to waste time on Facebook after dinner until we went to bed, so I had to think…

Torrenting for me has always been about convenience, not money. I recently wanted to watch a new show called A.P. Bio. It's free on NBC's website. But after struggling through one episode with lags and ads with no volume control, I gave up and just torrented the show. Until they master such exotic technologies as "streaming video" and "volume control" they're going to keep driving people to torrenting. Netflix figure…

> Until they master such exotic technologies as "streaming video" and "volume control" they're going to keep driving people to torrenting.

They won't master. They focus on monetization before they got the basics in place. Case in point MSNBC. Unbelievable where in the world the page is loading scripts from and phoning home to. Add weak streaming and of course the experience is brittle and virtually unusable. If MSNBC wants to share information with serious partners they may do that but the cheap way they let everyone add a tracker is embarrassing.

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