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U.S. senators introduce new pirate site blocking bill, "Block BEARD"

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Re: U.S. senators introduce new pirate site blocking bill, "Block BEARD"

#131

Post by Me1000 »

chollida1 wrote: post #113
Me1000 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is an old relatively low budget TV movie, it's not on TV+ (which I subscribe to). Nor can you rent it on iTunes, it doesn't even show up when you search for it. Same for Prime Video, etc.

Re: U.S. senators introduce new pirate site blocking bill, "Block BEARD"

#132

Post by eagerpace »

mmcclure wrote: post #72
blackjack_ wrote: post #30

I'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…

I recently joined a local independent video rental store and it's so, so good. My partner looked at me like I was crazy when I told her, but she was a convert after one trip to pick out a movie in person. Something about browsing in person is just so much more enjoyable than flipping between 9 services. Having a cinephile right there behind the desk that wants to nerd about movies and help pick something out is aweso…

Out of curiosity, what formats do they rent?

Re: U.S. senators introduce new pirate site blocking bill, "Block BEARD"

#133

Post by tomwheeler »

parliament32 wrote: post #105
blackjack_ wrote: post #30

I'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: I pay Spotify, they have 95% of music content I could ever way, the UX is good enough. I have no reason to pirate music anymore.

> Why is this so hard for the film industry?

My theory is that the United States has compulsory licensing for music, but not movies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsory_license#United_Stat...

To my knowledge, a radio station or music streaming service doesn't have to negotiate with the record label to play a given song, they just have to pay a small royalty as defined by law. However, that doesn't hold true for movies. Each video streaming service has to negotiate the right to carry a given movie with the film studio that owns it. Those film studios play the streaming services against one another, often allowing the exclusive right to offer certain content for a limited time, after which they then lease the rights to a competing service.

Re: U.S. senators introduce new pirate site blocking bill, "Block BEARD"

#134

Post by standardUser »

FirmwareBurner wrote: post #115
bilekas wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 playi…

> 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.

Well if the market can't provide, Pirate Bay can. Maybe they should fix "the market".

Re: U.S. senators introduce new pirate site blocking bill, "Block BEARD"

#135

Post by a2tech »

larrik wrote: post #70
blackjack_ wrote: post #30

I'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…

Just wanted to watch a relatively recent movie yesterday (Antichrist) and the only place that has it is a streaming service called Mooby. Not signing up for a service to watch one movie. Would have gladly paid 4 bucks to watch it, so had to find it in the usual places instead.

Re: U.S. senators introduce new pirate site blocking bill, "Block BEARD"

#136

Post by supertrope »

cvoss wrote: post #54
rcpt wrote: post #9

Our own great firewall

The Great Firewall of China is a censorship program. This proposed US legislation puts the power of blocking under the authority of its court system and only in the domain of copyright law. The courts are historically very concerned with upholding 1st Amendment rights to a degree that often (but not always) surpasses analogous rights in many sister liberal democracies. Anything that remotely smells of censorship woul…

YouTube's copyright strikes create a chilling effect. Google takes the easy way out in tuning their system to minimize false negatives at the cost of lots of false positives. This minimizes their liability under the DMCA and minimizes cost but allows lots of abuse by those claiming to hold copyright.

Re: U.S. senators introduce new pirate site blocking bill, "Block BEARD"

#137

Post by hyghjiyhu »

MSFT_Edging wrote: post #116
parliament32 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 si…

If you have Indie artists on the music side of the comparison, you should have barely paid tiktokers and YouTubers on the movie side.

Re: U.S. senators introduce new pirate site blocking bill, "Block BEARD"

#138

Post by chollida1 »

Me1000 wrote: post #131
chollida1 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure i just watched that via apple+. But your point generally valid regardless.

This is an old relatively low budget TV movie, it's not on TV+ (which I subscribe to). Nor can you rent it on iTunes, it doesn't even show up when you search for it. Same for Prime Video, etc.

https://tv.apple.com/mx/movie/pirates-of-silicon-valley/umc....

??

Re: U.S. senators introduce new pirate site blocking bill, "Block BEARD"

#139

Post by standardUser »

LeonardoTolstoy wrote: post #36
blackjack_ wrote: post #30

I'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…

How's your local library system?

I wonder what the material difference is between borrowing a film from the library (is this DVD? Blu-ray? Streaming?) and downloading it from a peer-to-peer network.

I suppose it's an act of support for your public library. But no one with a financial stake in that particular media is impacted in any way by using either method to obtain the film.

Re: U.S. senators introduce new pirate site blocking bill, "Block BEARD"

#140

Post by gchamonlive »

blackjack_ wrote: post #30

I'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…

And good luck trying to find anything marginally erotic, like "Bliss (1997)".

Not only you don't own anything anymore, you can't purchase anything anymore and you can't view content that the overseers deem imoral. At this point pirating is just civil disobedience against the stronghold that corporations have on the American society that ripples across the globalized world.

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