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Piracy in the UK: the failed war on illegal content

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Re: Piracy in the UK: the failed war on illegal content

#31
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>No one wants to steal any content, they view content elsewhere due to ludicrous rights management systems on digital video content. Actually I think they do. The median salary is quite low in the UK so there are a lot of people for whom piracy is an economic act rather than being about DRM.

Nonsense. A Spotify Premium or 1080p Netflix subscription costs one hour of work at UK minimum wage. If you're willing to settle for ads you can get Spotify for free, or Netflix for the cost of a single pint of beer. That's incredibly cheap entertainment, if you're not too picky. I pay for a Spotify Premium subscription. It has 99% of the music I want to listen to, and it works on all my devices - including Linux. I…

>Nonsense. A Spotify Premium or 1080p Netflix subscription costs one hour of work at UK minimum wage.

And yet the only growing sector in UK retail at the moment is discount shops.

Re: Piracy in the UK: the failed war on illegal content

#32
post #15

I don't know. TPB seems less active than ever. I know that's not UK specific, but does not bode well nonetheless.

Most piracy has moved to online streaming instead of distributing files for later offline viewing. Here's a site I found with 30 seconds of googling: https://westream.to/home - surprisingly polished and with much better UX than any legal service, because it doesn't require account creation or logging in. It just works. I clicked on Dune 2, waited for a moment, and it started playing. Picture quality is fairly muddy,…

This is a shame, because streaming is no replacement for good old files in your own storage.

Re: Piracy in the UK: the failed war on illegal content

#33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>No one wants to steal any content, they view content elsewhere due to ludicrous rights management systems on digital video content. Actually I think they do. The median salary is quite low in the UK so there are a lot of people for whom piracy is an economic act rather than being about DRM.

I am from the UK and you are right to some extent, but I don't know many that pirate music (outside of bootleg recordings and unreleased mix CDs such as the gray album by danegrmouse because Spotify and Apple Music are affordable and have an extensive range of content so anyone that wants to listen to music often can afford a subscription. If movie or TV was collated in the same way, no one would be pirating either.…

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Re: Piracy in the UK: the failed war on illegal content

#34
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neither of those services are successful. They don't make any money. They are, essentially, only useful learning experiences in what not to do.

Looks like Spotify will report a profit for the first time in 2024

this might be nice for the shareholders, and quite surprising compared to most platforms, but not everyone is content.

from the artist's perspective, it is quite bad money wise (https://www.rocksoffmag.com/the-impact-of-music-streaming-on...).

from a consumer's perspective however, music streaming enjoys the relative lack of "exclusive" content that other media suffers from. so i personally have no issues with its current state.

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