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Netflix, HBO and Cable Giants Are Coming for Password Sharers

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Re: Netflix, HBO and Cable Giants Are Coming for Password Sharers

#251

Post by basch »

LeoNatan25 wrote: post #233
basch wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rehosting and serving that file is costing the streaming company electricity, bandwidth, cpu etc. Your agreement with them is that you can press pay an unlimited number of times in a month, but they didnt agree to serve that file to other people in other households. It's not quite the same as lending someone a disc, because in this case you agreed to terms of service that specifically address sharing.

Going by that logic, if I watch a movie twice or more, I should be charged more? What is the difference, “electricity” and “bandwidth” wise if I watch twice, or me and my coworker watch once?

You signed an agreement for your own use, not to allow your friends to use their servers. Its about the agreement you made.

Re: Netflix, HBO and Cable Giants Are Coming for Password Sharers

#252

Post by TulliusCicero »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #242
bryanlarsen wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disney has admitted that they will lose money at their current price level. Which implies strongly that they'll be increasing prices substantially in the future.

How do you lose money on content you already own? This is just Hollywood accounting in effect.

There's a cost to providing the service in terms terms of bandwidth, servers, and development staff.

There's also a cost to the new, original content they're putting on there, like the Mandalorian.

Re: Netflix, HBO and Cable Giants Are Coming for Password Sharers

#253

Post by harryh »

Thriptic wrote: post #185
harryh wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember 10 years ago that the answer to rayiner's question was always "I don't want to pay a ton of money for a whole bundle of crap I don't want when all I want to watch is one specific thing." I saw it all the time. Now people complain about the complexities of unbundling. It's fairly clear to me that these complaints, while real, aren't the core issue which is: people would rather get content for free than pay…

> It's fairly clear to me that these complaints, while real, aren't the core issue which is: people would rather get content for free than pay for it. So a lot of the time they will. That's not a fair framing. It's not that people want everything for free, it's that they aren't willing to pay an arm and a leg to get everything. I'm happy to pay for 2-3 networks (and do) for 30-50 or so a month but in return I want EV…

"I want something for cheaper than you are willing to sell it to me so therefore I will steal it" is....not a great answer.

We don't accept that answer for other products.

Re: Netflix, HBO and Cable Giants Are Coming for Password Sharers

#254

Post by Marsymars »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #245
maxsilver wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The entitlement people feel to steal is always surprising. It's not stealing when you already paid in full . Sharing my Netflix password with my wife and/or child is not stealing , I paid in full for that account, and have now for many many years. My Plex server is full of DVDs and BluRays I paid full retail price for (that's $20 to $30 USD each), it's not stealing to use it, and it's not stealing to let some frien…

If you're in the US, those DVD rips aren't actually legal. You can only format shift audio recordings. You also had to use a circumvention device to make those rips so they're DMCA violations.

Solution: Get a virtual assistant in a low CoL country without DMCA applicability to purchase, rip and upload Blu Ray movies to your server on demand.

IANAL

Re: Netflix, HBO and Cable Giants Are Coming for Password Sharers

#255

Post by paulmd »

BubRoss wrote: post #148
megablast wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are coming for them too. Don't think that they have forgotten about them.

HBO has been monitoring torrents for a long time and sending letters to ISPs. VPNs and seed boxes get around this.

In fact, HBO is perhaps the most aggressive monitoring/enforcement of all content-creators. They are very, very proactive.

Re: Netflix, HBO and Cable Giants Are Coming for Password Sharers

#256

Post by crazygringo »

Huh? You don't need password resets or thumb prints... that sounds ridiculous.

Just limit playing to one device at a time. Spotify does this and it works great, and the instant sync/control actually makes it seem like a feature rather than a limitation. Most people watch in the evening at around the same time, so problem solved real quick.

Or pay an additional fee for a family plan to allow a set number of multiple users to stream simultaneously, if Mom and Dad want to watch something in the living room and the kids want to watch something upstairs.

Re: Netflix, HBO and Cable Giants Are Coming for Password Sharers

#257

Post by golover721 »

These threads are always interesting on HN. I'm not going to pass judgement on folks who think they its ok or not ok to pirate media based on cost or sometimes how difficult it is to obtain "legitimately".

What I do think is interesting is that folks seem to solely place the blame on the large media distributors and seem to place no blame on the content creators. Creators have a huge influence on the industry, from the writers, to directors to the actors etc. Big names in the industry could easily choose to pressure to change things. But they don't, so they are just as much to blame as the distributors themselves.

Re: Netflix, HBO and Cable Giants Are Coming for Password Sharers

#258

Post by tptacek »

wmorgan wrote: post #112
rayiner wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are people downloading things that they believe the copyright should have already expired on? (Under the original copyright act it was 14+14. So stuff older than 1991). Or are they downloading the latest Avengers movie?

That's a timely question with the holidays coming up. A lot of people will be wanting to watch movies from the 1940's and 50's. Many of them don't realize those works are still under copyright. It's not just hypothetical. In our family we subscribe to 3 or 4 streaming services, but last year we still had to pay $5 to watch It's a Wonderful Life (1946), a movie that was literally in the public domain for 20 years. A C…

You think an ordinary person's expectation is that It's A Wonderful Life is public domain? I think the opposite thing is true, and that most Americans generally assume that any major motion picture or television show is copyrighted no matter when it was produced.

Re: Netflix, HBO and Cable Giants Are Coming for Password Sharers

#259

Post by tenebrisalietum »

dobleboble wrote: post #171
LeoNatan25 wrote: post #131

No worries, I'll just use the torrent sharers. I bet those will give me a constant 4K quality on all my devices, no ridiculous DRM, get to keep them once I terminate my "subscription", etc. Oh and it's free, not 10-15$ USD for each service.

Convenience does not justify theft. You don't have an entitlement to consume specific content.

I mean most of this in a devil's-advocate sense:

The proper economic arrangement for those who wish to make a living with creative works is patronage. Someone asks you to make something, you make it for them, then you get paid. You then don't get paid until you make another work.

Thus content creators shouldn't have an automatic entitlement to get paid each time someone reads/listens to/watches a work.

If you work once, it's only fair for you to get paid once. The idea of royalties that pay beyond the initial act of creation is unfair because you should not get paid to do nothing.

Copyright is meant to be temporary scheme to encourage creative works. It is not meant to establish ownership over non-physical goods like music, art, etc. though it is definitely currently abused to be that way.

I guess at some point in history we needed copyright to encourage more creativity, but honestly look around you - we are saturated with so much intellectual property. So many movies, software UIs, rehashes of rehashes. Does society really need/benefit from the incentive of copyright/royalty any longer? It seems only entrenched legacies are significantly benefiting currently.

Re: Netflix, HBO and Cable Giants Are Coming for Password Sharers

#260

Post by sorenjan »

kempbellt wrote: post #212
quineoa wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am curious to know about the infra / tech stack, if you're comfortable with sharing any information.

Sure. As @diminoten mentions, legality is questionable here, so I do not recommend. If you do dabble, restrict access, and encrypt everything so that if you lose your keys, they only option is to destroy the stack and start over. Cloud provider of your choice Plex media server running on a high-throughput instance, with cloud storage mounted locally for reading. (Redundantly created in multiple regions depending on w…

$400/month and multiple cloud instances sounds like overkill though. The same could probably be achieved with a Raspberry Pi or Intel NUC on your home network. Maybe an RPi wouldn't be great for multiple reencodings, but I don't think that's really needed. How often do you really want to watch low resolution TV-series on your mobile data connection?

One feature I haven't seen on any commercial service is the ability to integrate with your IMDb watchlist, and automatically download "Linux ISOs" when they become available.

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