Without piracy no llm
U.S. senators introduce new pirate site blocking bill, "Block BEARD"
111–120 of 268 posts
Re: U.S. senators introduce new pirate site blocking bill, "Block BEARD"
#112I've been trying to watch old 80s-90s movies recently. I'm happy to pay $5 or whatever, and they just aren't available anywhere. Rental stores are dead, so I can't go rent them from blockbuster or whatever, and streaming sites have splintered to the point I'm not even sure what is a scam and what is a legitimate business anymore. Trying to even find availability of what films exist on which streaming sites has been a…
The Roku app is actually really good at determining where everything ever is currently streaming (or purchasable). It's not 100% perfect, but it's generally correct. I go there first for basically everything. For example, it tells me Wake Up Ron Burgundy (which isn't even a "real" movie) can be purchases on Prime, Fandango, or iTunes. Actually, iTunes and Prime have mostly everything for rent, what movies were you ac…
It gets worse when you're looking for a movie only to realize it's different from what you remember. Either a change of substance (different scenes), or a change of form (adjusted color palette). Occasionally the original version is no longer officially available anywhere.
Re: U.S. senators introduce new pirate site blocking bill, "Block BEARD"
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can’t find them to rent on iTunes and similar platforms?
Not OP, but yes believe it or not it's impossible to find certain movies anywhere other than pirating them. One example is "Pirates of Silicon Valley", I watched it when I was young and recently wanted to watch it again. I pay for basically all the streaming services, I'm would have been happy to rent it from any service at all. I spent several hours trying to find a way to pay to watch it and never could.
I'm pretty sure i just watched that via apple+.
But your point generally valid regardless.
Re: U.S. senators introduce new pirate site blocking bill, "Block BEARD"
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
I watch a decent amount of movies, I can count on one hand the number of times I couldn’t rent it for I think there are plenty of problems with the streaming model, but I think it’s borderline bad faith to try and make the claim that piracy is needed because it’s hard to navigate streaming sites. It’s certainly easier than finding obscure movies was pre-streaming
>I watch a decent amount of movies, I can count on one hand the number of times I couldn’t rent it for delve deep into most directors filmography from the 60s/70s/80s and you'll find plenty missing. Ken Russell, Robert Altman, etc
You have to go pretty deep though for the record. At least, using one of your examples, for Altman if you look at his top 25 films on Letterboxd, 20 of them are available to rent or stream online. And for me at least the other five I can get at the library. There are none that are totally unavailable of those 25.
Re: U.S. senators introduce new pirate site blocking bill, "Block BEARD"
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Try to buy Need For Speed Most Wanted (2005). You can't. I searched the biggest used online (flea)marketplace in my country and I could find the DVD for sale from several people. So I can buy it and play it right now legally if I want to, without resorting to piracy. What point were you trying to make with this? Because I also can't buy a brand new 1969 Ford Mustang. Nothing is made forever.
The point could be made that if it's not available from the publisher for sale then piracy is not illegal.
Agree. However I'm willing to cut EA some slack here. NFS series (like some other games) has music in it that's been licensed by the devs for a limited time.
Selling the game today would mean either ripping out the music which is what made the game fun, or paying the record labels more money, which will not be offset by the few sales to 30+ year old nostalgics.
But at least EA isn't actively preventing you from playing that old game if you own a licensed copy by requiring always-on DRM.
BTW: today is the last day to sign the Stop killing games EU initiative : https://www.stopkillinggames.com/eci
Re: U.S. senators introduce new pirate site blocking bill, "Block BEARD"
#116I've been trying to watch old 80s-90s movies recently. I'm happy to pay $5 or whatever, and they just aren't available anywhere. Rental stores are dead, so I can't go rent them from blockbuster or whatever, and streaming sites have splintered to the point I'm not even sure what is a scam and what is a legitimate business anymore. Trying to even find availability of what films exist on which streaming sites has been a…
This is precisely the problem, and the whole reason why we still pirate TV/movies. I would have no problem paying $XX to a unified service that has basically everything; I have no interest in paying a dozen different streaming platforms for effectively "cable packages" that often add/remove/shift content around. The music industry figured this out: I pay Spotify, they have 95% of music content I could ever way, the U…
> The music industry figured this out
> Why is this so hard for the film industry
Music industry runs on barely paying any artist that cant fill a stadium. Movie industry runs on constantly re-licensing content to min-max their returns from IP. Music industry can happily barely pay musicians via the spotify model, but the Movie industry can't continually re-license their stuff to a higher bidder if it's all on one site.
Re: U.S. senators introduce new pirate site blocking bill, "Block BEARD"
#117When have these blocks ever succeeded?
Re: U.S. senators introduce new pirate site blocking bill, "Block BEARD"
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
Video games too. Try to buy Need For Speed Most Wanted (2005). You can't.
>Try to buy Need For Speed Most Wanted (2005). You can't. I searched the biggest used online (flea)marketplace in my country and I could find the DVD for sale from several people. So I can buy it and play it right now legally if I want to, without resorting to piracy. What point were you trying to make with this? Because I also can't buy a brand new 1969 Ford Mustang. Nothing is made forever.
[deleted]
Re: U.S. senators introduce new pirate site blocking bill, "Block BEARD"
#119> "Block Bad Electronic Art and Recording Distributors Act of 2025” (Block BEARD) I really wish destitutely uncreative people would stop pretending to be clever.
Agreed, these backronym bill names are obnoxious at best.
Re: U.S. senators introduce new pirate site blocking bill, "Block BEARD"
#120> "Block Bad Electronic Art and Recording Distributors Act of 2025” (Block BEARD) I really wish destitutely uncreative people would stop pretending to be clever.
Agreed, these backronym bill names are obnoxious at best.
I used to think so, but now I think they're just intended to make it easy to refer to the bill in a context people can recall quickly.