Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I'm done with Google

deijin.bearblog.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 327 posts

Re: I'm done with Google

#141

Post by jl6 »

snowwrestler wrote: post #80
scambier wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Piracy is a service problem" means that most people pirate because they don't have access (or difficult access) to the product/service they want. They would gladly pay for it, but they can't, or can't be hassled to. I don't know if it's been backed up by real data, but services like Steam and Spotify tend to confirm this intuition.

Spotify confirms that piracy was in fact a pricing problem. With a Spotify subscription, you get way more music for a far lower price than under the previous “buy it to hear it” model a la iTunes or CDs. And artists make way less money now from recorded music than they used to. Studios only agreed to the Spotify pricing model because the alternative was rampant file-based piracy. They figured that getting something i…

Another thing to consider is that there is so much more music today than 20 years ago in the Napster era. There has been an explosion in content creation, as the means of production have become ever-more accessible, and it all accumulates over time, so the older stuff never goes away. The supply of music only ever increases, and naturally when the supply of something increases so dramatically, we would expect the price to go down.

What about demand? We are certainly listening to more music than ever before, and the population is growing, but not at the 10x or 100x rate that has happened to the supply of music. There’s an upper limit of 24 hours per day listening time per person. There is already more music than it is possible to listen to in a lifetime. Soon there will be more good music than it is possible to listen to in a lifetime.

Re: I'm done with Google

#142

Post by paraselene_ »

halfbrite wrote: post #12

> She has a copy of it I got on google play for her which she can play on her tablet. > So I pirate the movie (please don't arrest me, it's google's fault). Is it pirated if you already own a legally valid license? How about rips of blu-rays you own, which you solely use and do not intend to share? Is that pirating or using your legally owned product on a different medium?

"using your legally owned product on a different medium" You're refering to format shifting[1]. Legality will vary differently between jurisdictions, but there are rulings in the UK making it illegal for personal use so there's that.

Ripping blu-rays, most likely means getting around AACS which is probably illegal under DMCA. See 17 U.S. Code § 1201 and some rulings[2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Format_shifting [2] https://www.copyright.gov/1201/2018/

Re: I'm done with Google

#143

Post by leehuffman »

indrora wrote: post #9

The issue here isn't that it's Google, it's that Google is doing what they're told to do. Movie and music licensing has been absolutely destroyed recently and the hoops that you have to agree to are becoming untenable. Recently, I mentioned to a band it was sad they pulled their music off Spotify. Puzzled, they were not even aware that the licensing was pulled, and they had to go yell at their record label (who was u…

> Recently, I mentioned to a band it was sad they pulled their music off Spotify. Puzzled, they were not even aware that the licensing was pulled, and they had to go yell at their record label (who was unaware they were even on Spotify because they made less than a dollar in royalties per year on it) who has sat on it for over a year and refused to release the rights back to the artist so they can have it available on Spotify.

That band didn't own their music and the "label" likely didn't either. They got fronted money that was never repaid (as per contract) and their shit traded hands multiple times. There was wild consolidation in this world over the last 10 - 25 years. What used to be money printing turned to "GOT EM!!" dollar signs in bold on contracts, which turned to small joints falling over (dollars and commas in bold didn't map on the backend) and now some banger owns their shit.

Most likely the banger who owned their shit lost it in the shuffle of the more banger shit they owned, or the overhead of the split with the 5% the small label who was able to retain that cut didn't even render on the P&L and they just shoved it in the virtual vault because who gives a fuck?

Re: I'm done with Google

#144

Post by FullMetalBitch »

I left google a long time ago but this is how digital good work. Steam works like that, amazon video works like that and probably online music stores work like that too.

There is a reason gog sells games without drm and you can download and keep the installer forevers, that's what differenciates them from the rest.

Re: I'm done with Google

#145

Post by ce4 »

userbinator wrote: post #136
usui wrote: post #16

> So I pirate the movie (please don't arrest me, it's google's fault) I really like the frank tone of the article and I wish people in general would just write unabashedly more often when it comes to stuff like this. Writers online love to dance around the idea of "pirating" their digital goods when communicating on the topic: "Ooh my 'friend' may or may not have downloaded 'xyz' movie from 'abc' website, but I don't…

I really like the frank tone of the article and I wish people in general would just write unabashedly more often when it comes to stuff like this. I still remember when not pirating would get you strange reactions, and it was considered polite to share (on a USB drive or similar) the media you had recently consumed; some PMPs even had a USB host mode, which let users exchange files with others easily, and P2P was als…

And https://www.theoatmeal.com/comics/game_of_thrones

Re: I'm done with Google

#146

Post by kelnos »

Karsteski wrote: post #86
f1refly wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A service problem is when the media mafia refuses to sell me files that I can keep. I'd like to open some website and pay 15 bucks for a movie (the same as I'd buy for a recent bluray in a store) where I'm then allowed to just download a .mkv that I can throw on my nas. Major streaming sites refuse to serve me content with resolution higher that 480p (I think?) because my computer obeys me and not them. Sure looks gr…

I think it's 720p but yea, it's why I will never pay for Netflix and I often pirate stuff that's available on there despite having access to my mother's account. I've not pirated games since I was a teenager, because Steam is such a good service, and I'm happy to pay for games. Meanwhile I constantly bring up how much better my media consumption experience is because I pirate high quality movies and shows instead of…

> I've not pirated games since I was a teenager, because Steam is such a good service, and I'm happy to pay for games.

I'm happy to pay for games too, but I've stopped buying from Steam unless they're not available elsewhere. GOG has been my go-to, as they only sell games without DRM.

If Valve someday goes belly-up, or just decides to stop running their license servers, all those games we've bought on Steam are just gone, absent (illegal, in the US, anyway) third-party tools to strip the DRM. I believe some versions of Stream DRM can be removed, but not all.

I just don't see the need to reward a company that treats me like a criminal when I can get the same games from a company that respects me and my purchase.

(Bonus: Steam-the-software even allows you to add non-Steam games to the app, which makes it easy to run non-native games I've bought from GOG under Proton, for example.)

Re: I'm done with Google

#147

Post by gorgoiler »

usui wrote: post #16

> So I pirate the movie (please don't arrest me, it's google's fault) I really like the frank tone of the article and I wish people in general would just write unabashedly more often when it comes to stuff like this. Writers online love to dance around the idea of "pirating" their digital goods when communicating on the topic: "Ooh my 'friend' may or may not have downloaded 'xyz' movie from 'abc' website, but I don't…

If you pirate something for which you’ve already bought a license, is it even pirating? If the license is for a particular set of bits then unless you are pirating those exact bits I guess so. You licensed Lemonade.drm.mp4 so downloading Lemonade.mp3 is pirating.

But then again it’s not pirating to re encode your audio files once you’ve downloaded them. So I feel more confident in saying it’s not the bits that are licensed, it’s the work itself. The act of downloading it from piratewarez.example.com feels fishy, but if you download it from musicbackups.example.com — a hypothetical site that says you should not download copies of files unless you have bought a license for them in the past — then it starts to feel like a more interesting gray area. You’ve licensed a digital copy of the work, so why is it wrong to get a copy of it from some place else? The person distributing the work is probably in hot water, but you shouldn’t be, as long as you have the receipt for the original purchase and/or a copy of the license.

For me, the big one here is ebooks. If I buy a physical copy of a book then as far as I’m concerned I’ve bought the license to the work as well as that particular piece of physical media. I don’t lose sleep about pirating the ebook version as well.

Re: I'm done with Google

#148

Post by bo1024 »

charcircuit wrote: post #117
rapht wrote: post #58

There's a language issue which has not been tackled by regulators and which is actually the mere definition of what happens when I choose to "buy" or "purchase" something. This is because until recently (by the timescale of "buying things") there were no intangibles to be bought or sold. An intangible is mostly a right to something - in other words, it's paperwork. But some things are both tangible and intangible, i.…

You are buying a license to watch the movie. You are not renting it.

Those aren't exclusive -- isn't renting an example of "buying a license"?

But I would be okay if they had to change the misleading "Buy Movie" to a phrase like "Buy a Limited License to Watch Movie". Or "Buy Limited Access to Movie".

Re: I'm done with Google

#149

Post by ngoilapites »

I am done long ago with all of them: nothings feels better than the multiverse, and I also would like my Amazomb audio books ready to use in any platform of my choice (please EU help us here), and my social graph with any available contact details from all social networks and email clients I have used.

Re: I'm done with Google

#150

Post by chronogram »

silisili wrote: post #102
di4na wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No they are not. The courts have been swift and merciless on this shit for music, video and similar things. Google may seem big but they do depends on the law still.

In the current system where Google plays lame duck, sure. But all G has to do is say 'yeah if you want us to feature your content, you must agree to X' With 90% of the search market, half of phones, and who knows what percentage of the smartTV market, they could institute a death sentence to those they wanted to. IF they wanted to.

Even the currently sleeping market watchdogs would wake up for that free promotion.
Post reply on HN