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Scene bust triggered historic drop in ‘pirate’ releases

torrentfreak.com

61–70 of 138 posts

Re: Scene bust triggered historic drop in ‘pirate’ releases

#61
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's not kid ourselves, finding a torrent for a movie or looking up which service it streams on are both the same level of easy.[] The issue is you have to subscribe to all those different services, which is what most people are probably not willing to do. Now if a show or movie doesn't stream in your region or isn't otherwise easily online accessible, that's a different story. In that case it's on the industry to d…

More than once I’ve torrented a movie series because of hostile DRM. I used to play things on a Mac that was connected to a TV. DVDs wouldn’t play on an external screen. Actively preventing me from viewing the content caused me to just torrent it, then after a few occurrences I stopped buying or renting DVDs. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.macworld.com/article/311641...

I'll admit to torrenting things I have total access to because the particular material that I already pay good money for doesn't run on the device on which I wish to view the paid for content. If your service doesn't stream to linux devices, and your customer is stuck in an airport hotel with only his linux laptop, either stop complaining about torrents or fix your service.

Re: Scene bust triggered historic drop in ‘pirate’ releases

#62
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not blaming you as you aren't the one to set them in the first place, but the goal posts keep moving! Two decades post-Napster we finally have what everyone wanted all along: an easy, cheap way to watch almost every movie without leaving the couch / listen to almost every song from almost any device. But now it's not good enough unless it's literally every piece of content from a single origin 0_0

I mentioned this elsewhere in the thread, but it's frustrating paying for a subscription to a streaming service when there's no guarantee the content - unless it's original content created by that service - will always be there. We're seeing more and more content getting split up and requiring more and more separate subscriptions as time goes on.

You're kind of wanting it both ways, to some extent.

I mean, I'm annoyed that Netflix had a bunch of Marvel movies, but not all of them. I'm annoyed that I used to watch them on Netflix all the time and now they're gone.

On the other hand, it's because Disney+ exists, and there's no reason for Disney+ to ever remove them (preasumably), since they own the rights to them so there's no licensing deals to work with. That means that they should be there "forever".

Likewise, I don't want to also have to pay for CBS All Access to watch the latest Trek, but, if I do, it does mean that I don't have to worry about Star Trek: Discovery disappearing down the road.

The only way for things to be there "forever" is to be streaming from the company that owns the copyright, and more and more such companies are setting up their streaming services and can then guarantee that "foreverness", but that comes at costs for them, and thus costs for us. It's unfortunate, but it feels as though it's either one or the other.

Re: Scene bust triggered historic drop in ‘pirate’ releases

#63

What would people consider the ideal realistic system? Something fair to content creators, distributors, and consumers. I, personally, would like to be able to purchase one time "unlimited" licenses (like buying a book or a DVD) that can be easily validated by the publisher's web API and enable non-subscription content to be served by netflix/hulu/amazon/etc. To enable (for example) streaming an amazon show through n…

Some of the streaming music services do something like this. They scan your local music library and unlock those tracks to stream regardless of your subscription accesses. I used Google Music for this a while back.

Re: Scene bust triggered historic drop in ‘pirate’ releases

#64
post #62
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mentioned this elsewhere in the thread, but it's frustrating paying for a subscription to a streaming service when there's no guarantee the content - unless it's original content created by that service - will always be there. We're seeing more and more content getting split up and requiring more and more separate subscriptions as time goes on.

You're kind of wanting it both ways, to some extent. I mean, I'm annoyed that Netflix had a bunch of Marvel movies, but not all of them. I'm annoyed that I used to watch them on Netflix all the time and now they're gone. On the other hand, it's because Disney+ exists, and there's no reason for Disney+ to ever remove them (preasumably), since they own the rights to them so there's no licensing deals to work with. That…

Right, that's my point, and the fundamental quandry at play the entire time streaming has been an option. For a brief moment, most content was consolidated on just a few select services and most people found it more affordable than cable services.

Now, in order to guarantee that we always have access to content, we're ultimately being asked to pay for more services at a total cost that looks more like the cable fees we didn't enjoy paying to begin with. We cut cords because of cost, and now that savings is almost gone and we're back to square one.

I don't have an answer and it's not an easy question to solve, I'm just saying that that's the point of frustration for a lot of people.

Edit: In some sense, what we have now - and seem to continue expanding upon - is worse than before. We used to be able to find it all on one cable provider with one UI, now we have to pay the same amount that many people found to be "too much" and have to deal with countless different UIs.

Re: Scene bust triggered historic drop in ‘pirate’ releases

#65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand how all the people here, who all want to be the next Bill Gates and make a ton of money selling software, services, or Juiceros, think it's "ok" to steal content. (The same content that they probably deny they watch because it's not hip enough.)

Stealing has a specific meaning. It is nonsensical to describe failure to follow copyright law stealing. Nobody calls exceeding the speed limit stealing velocity nor jaywalking "stealing the street". Rich people convinced other rich people that it would be a good idea to let rich people decide which bits I'm allowed to transmit to you in order to maximize the revenue of people who for the most part are in the busines…

I am a tv producer. Stealing is if I invest years of blood, sweat, and capital into a project with the paradigm that in a free market exchange you can pay in some form to view it or not and happily find some alternative way to enjoy your time. Nobody is forcing you to watch what I make and you won’t die if you don’t watch it.

The creators like myself you valorize don’t exist in a vacuum. If distributors who finance the projects upfront with risk capital don’t get paid then there is nobody to pay me for making content and thus content does not get made. Financing the speculative production of a movie or tv series is inherently high risk.

Let me flip the script a little michaelmrose. What do you do for your money and why should you not have to do it for me for free?

Re: Scene bust triggered historic drop in ‘pirate’ releases

#66
post #63

What would people consider the ideal realistic system? Something fair to content creators, distributors, and consumers. I, personally, would like to be able to purchase one time "unlimited" licenses (like buying a book or a DVD) that can be easily validated by the publisher's web API and enable non-subscription content to be served by netflix/hulu/amazon/etc. To enable (for example) streaming an amazon show through n…

Some of the streaming music services do something like this. They scan your local music library and unlock those tracks to stream regardless of your subscription accesses. I used Google Music for this a while back.

Mp3.com That was attempted back in the day with CDs. It did not end well.

"To make the service easy to use, MP3.com did not require users to load their own music into the virtual lockers. Rather, a user merely had to insert a copy of the music into the CD-ROM drive of a computer, at which point MP3.com would verify that the person had possession of a CD, then the company would automatically put a copy of the music into the person's virtual locker."

"However, the lawsuit by the record companies asserted that MP3.com had violated copyrights by creating the digital database of albums to which they held the copyrights. In April, U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff ruled that MP3.com had infringed companies' copyrights."

"In the ensuing months, MP3.com reached settlements with four of the record companies, including Sony Music, Time Warner, EMI Group and Bertelsmann. Details of the settlements were not made public, but analysts estimated the company paid $20-million to each company."

https://www.tampabay.com/archive/2000/08/29/mp3-com-chief-de...

Re: Scene bust triggered historic drop in ‘pirate’ releases

#67
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's not kid ourselves, finding a torrent for a movie or looking up which service it streams on are both the same level of easy.[] The issue is you have to subscribe to all those different services, which is what most people are probably not willing to do. Now if a show or movie doesn't stream in your region or isn't otherwise easily online accessible, that's a different story. In that case it's on the industry to d…

More than once I’ve torrented a movie series because of hostile DRM. I used to play things on a Mac that was connected to a TV. DVDs wouldn’t play on an external screen. Actively preventing me from viewing the content caused me to just torrent it, then after a few occurrences I stopped buying or renting DVDs. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.macworld.com/article/311641...

Heck, I've torrented movies and TV shows that are on streaming services I'm currently paying for. The main reason I do that is to get subtitles which aren't on the streaming services. Did you know that HBO, at least in the USA, has virtually no non-English subtitles on their streaming service? Even for HBO-original content that has been released on DVD/Blu-ray and thus does have subtitles for a large number of languages.

Re: Scene bust triggered historic drop in ‘pirate’ releases

#68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not blaming you as you aren't the one to set them in the first place, but the goal posts keep moving! Two decades post-Napster we finally have what everyone wanted all along: an easy, cheap way to watch almost every movie without leaving the couch / listen to almost every song from almost any device. But now it's not good enough unless it's literally every piece of content from a single origin 0_0

Don't we benefit from moving the goalposts its how literally every issue works. Only people who don't want to win settle for "reasonable goals" because in actuality the other side will happily shift the goal posts the other way until they have a decidedly one sided situation. The content industry would prefer the all content is charged per view based on who is in the same room as the screen with differentiated costs…

This week? That story's from 2003!

Re: Scene bust triggered historic drop in ‘pirate’ releases

#69

It's much easier to pirate the content and have a single source of media than trying to figure out which pay service a show/movie is available on. 'Piracy' of tv/movies won't go away until that problem is solved.

I'm not blaming you as you aren't the one to set them in the first place, but the goal posts keep moving! Two decades post-Napster we finally have what everyone wanted all along: an easy, cheap way to watch almost every movie without leaving the couch / listen to almost every song from almost any device. But now it's not good enough unless it's literally every piece of content from a single origin 0_0

> Two decades post-Napster we finally have what everyone wanted all along: an easy, cheap way to watch almost every movie without leaving the couch / listen to almost every song from almost any device.

That may be almost true for music, but is not remotely true for movies. Sure, recent releases are usually available on _some_ streaming service, but back catalog movies are often only available on DVD/Blue ray. The big streaming services are not great for movie catalogs (Netflix is much worse than it used to be). We have regressed from the Blockbuster days in that regard.

Re: Scene bust triggered historic drop in ‘pirate’ releases

#70

One of the biggest successes of the music and movie industry is getting everyone to call unlicensed distribution “piracy”. It equates a completely non-violent act with a very violent act that was once a capital crime.

The only pirates around today in common culture are the Somalis who took Captain Phillips and Jack Sparrow. Barely anyone thinks about the former, so a handsome lovable rogue with a penchant for loving rum and being silly is what you get. If anything, that makes piracy sound glamorous.
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