Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's easier to list the reasons not to pirate.
1. Piracy is theft.
I would amend this to piracy of media within a reasonable copyright term of say 10 or at most 20 years is theft.
Google News is shutting down purchased magazine content, offering refunds
61–70 of 87 posts
Re: Google News is shutting down purchased magazine content, offering refunds
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think people should expect accurate information. Kinda the same as with justice. We know justice is served by people in nice togas and juries of peers who are really a nice name for your neighbours. And yet we still demand and hopefully will continue to demand justice, even if those people make mistakes or sometimes behave fraudulently. The problem with Israeli-Hamas conflict isn't that the accurate information isn…
>> It is that both sides of the conflict decided to use misinformation to bolster their media presence and their right to defend themselves. In the wars I've seen in my lifetime, this really seems something that only started with Ukraine/Russia. I know in the Gulf War the sides would spin news to portray them in a more favourable light, but not (to my knowledge) masses of lies like in Russia/Ukraine or Israel/Hamas.
From Weavers, Scribes, and Kings: A New History of the Ancient Near East:
> a few decades later King Enmetena of Lagash (c. 2450 BCE) was still fighting Umma over the same territory. Fortunately for historians, he wrote a long summary of the conflict, setting his own actions in the context of decades of what seem, in retrospect, to have been rather futile wars. This is one of the earliest attempts anywhere at writing a history of events.
> He started his history not with the life of his great-grandfather King Ur-Nanshe, but with the gods. According to King Enmetena, it had been the god "Enlil, king of all the lands, father of all the gods" who had "fixed the border (between the god) Ningirsu and (the god) Shara," meaning the border between the kingdoms of Lagash and Umma. The border had not been created by men; it had been the work of Enlil himself, the greatest of all gods. This obviously meant that it had to be maintained just where the god had set it and it had to be protected from movement. And so, as he described it, one Lagash king after another had attempted to do just that, against what they saw as the dastardly incursions of the kings and armies of Umma.
> No doubt the kings of Umma saw things differently.
Royal inscriptions [anywhere] and, in the ancient Mesopotamian context, year names, are generally not viewed as particularly accurate sources of information about what happened during the events they commemorate. Later in the book there is a discussion of a king who issued a year name memorializing his conquest of a city on his borders; meanwhile, documents formalized in that city continued to use the year names issued by an entirely different king.
Re: Google News is shutting down purchased magazine content, offering refunds
#63I was impacted by this, I have some digital magazines from the 2010s; Conde Nast Traveller. Honestly I don't care, like print magazines I read the issues a long time ago and haven't thought of them since. I can download the PDFs and then reupload to drive if I want (the only annoyance here is that I have to do that, there's no simple "export to drive" button, or I can just pretend that I got them in the mail, read th…
Apparently so was I. I'm treating is as two free magazines I never knew I had.
Re: Google News is shutting down purchased magazine content, offering refunds
#64Its cool that they're letting people download PDFs, but I see two problems:
1. People can't download everything. 2. People have to find a new way to read the content.
On #1, its as if I had my personal library stored in my buddy's garage and he said
> "hey, you've got to come take your books out--by the way some of them were damaged but here's the money to buy new ones".
Its a nice gesture but now my library is incomplete an I've got to go replace it if I want to get back to where I was. Still, I should've known better and held onto my library myself.
On #2 I have long since tired of apps always changing the ways I access my content. I self-host where I can to have control over it and its feels like stepping off a busy street into a quiet library--sure less exciting stuff is happening but I feel like I can focus.
I get why there's a stronger pull these days for people to download files. I hope the market sees that and puts the mechanisms in place for people to pay to do it.
Re: Google News is shutting down purchased magazine content, offering refunds
#65I wonder if this is just due to something internal at Google or if there has been some more global change that has made them uninterested in continuing this? Normally I'd guess the former given Google's legendary propensity for getting rid of services, but a couple months ago Amazon did something similar [1] which makes me wonder if the two are connected somehow: > Effective September 4, 2023, Amazon is no longer sel…
I think it's more that print magazines aren't really a thing anymore. Yes, they exist, but if you have a computer you're far more likely to consume publishers' content by going to their site and either generating advertising revenue for them as a free user or subscribing digitally, which gives you (and them) much more flexibility in the types of content you can consume and they can create & share. The same has been h…
This is likely the case. We have Apple News but we don’t open any of the magazines. We just read whatever the feed gives us. If Apple were to follow, it would help confirm our hunch.
Re: Google News is shutting down purchased magazine content, offering refunds
#66Last line is good: "Remember, all online content purchases are really just rentals."
Partly why paying for streaming never made sense to me. You can't even take screnshots of shows you've paid to watch!
> You can't even take screnshots of shows you've paid to watch!
This has got to be one of the most short-sighted/stupidest decisions content providers have ever made. It's literally free advertisement and they eschew it in the name of "piracy".
Good thing all the TV shows that don't allow screenshotting have never shown up on pirate websites /s
Streaming sites should allow for screenshots and clip export, people aren't stealing/watching shows in ~1-2 min chunks. Add a border around the clip, put your streaming service name in the bottom corner with a QR code to the show (maybe even the timestamp as well). Let people "burn in" subtitles, add effects, etc (a la TikTok, or something, I don't use TikTok). Literally can only be a positive thing for the company. Heck, spend the bandwidth to host the new clips/pictures so people just link directly to you. Put all those GIF sites out of business overnight almost overnight.
Re: Google News is shutting down purchased magazine content, offering refunds
#67It seems pretty likely that everyone saying "just pirate" never had any content in the service. I got an email with a link to a page that let me download PDFs for all of the magazines I had in the service ("all of the magazines" being 4 of them that I got for free in 2012, but the point stands). If I had pirated those magazines, I doubt the quality would have been as good as an official PDF from the source. Lately it…
> Google to make it a pretty easy experience for users when they inevitably shut things down
Pretty easy after you've recovered from the shock of possibly losing everything and now having to think about where to store your stuff, probably at an inconvenient moment.
Re: Google News is shutting down purchased magazine content, offering refunds
#68It seems pretty likely that everyone saying "just pirate" never had any content in the service. I got an email with a link to a page that let me download PDFs for all of the magazines I had in the service ("all of the magazines" being 4 of them that I got for free in 2012, but the point stands). If I had pirated those magazines, I doubt the quality would have been as good as an official PDF from the source. Lately it…
All of the pirated magazines, for current magazines, are taken directly out of emagazine vendor systems and are basically directly from the publisher's distribution system.
Re: Google News is shutting down purchased magazine content, offering refunds
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think people should expect accurate information. Kinda the same as with justice. We know justice is served by people in nice togas and juries of peers who are really a nice name for your neighbours. And yet we still demand and hopefully will continue to demand justice, even if those people make mistakes or sometimes behave fraudulently. The problem with Israeli-Hamas conflict isn't that the accurate information isn…
>> It is that both sides of the conflict decided to use misinformation to bolster their media presence and their right to defend themselves. In the wars I've seen in my lifetime, this really seems something that only started with Ukraine/Russia. I know in the Gulf War the sides would spin news to portray them in a more favourable light, but not (to my knowledge) masses of lies like in Russia/Ukraine or Israel/Hamas.
This is par for the course. We've had the gulf of tonkin incident, and weapons of mass destruction. The difference is now we have more information, so it only looks like it's gotten worse.
Re: Google News is shutting down purchased magazine content, offering refunds
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nobody should be expecting accurate information on either conflict. Sometimes accurate information is hard to come by. I'm not sure the problem is that platforms are being "pressured to provide the public with accurate information", though. I would guess there's far more pressure to provide information that favors certain viewpoints, whether that information is accurate or not.
I think people should expect accurate information. Kinda the same as with justice. We know justice is served by people in nice togas and juries of peers who are really a nice name for your neighbours. And yet we still demand and hopefully will continue to demand justice, even if those people make mistakes or sometimes behave fraudulently. The problem with Israeli-Hamas conflict isn't that the accurate information isn…
People should expect it, but it’s a fool’s errand. Misinformation has been used as a tool of war forever. Russia especially has been known for it.
The problem is that there is no trustworthy source of truth, so you’re forced to pick who you trust.
Just think about the Palestinian hospital. Is it a Hamas stronghold? Hamas says no, Israel says yes, the US says yes, some doctors say no. Some past doctors said yes. Hamas has used hospitals and human shields in the past (depending on the source you follow), so it’s possible they’d do it again.
Looking beyond the hospital story, this plays out everywhere. Countless stories are manipulated or have contradictory sources. You have to pick a source. Should US citizens believe their government? Maybe the “terrorist organization” that’s seeing its people massacred? The government that is currently mass bombing a city?
The media doesn’t even have reliable information because the truth is not apparent. Everyone has an incentive to be the truth-teller. Unbiased news only exists for unimportant news.