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Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

theguardian.com

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Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#301

Post by firecall »

8fingerlouie wrote: post #167
ryandrake wrote: post #153

Piracy offers: 1. Unrestricted access to an absolutely huge library of movies, music and TV shows, nearly unlimited. Certainly not limited by opaque "licensing deals" between various companies. 2. Highest resolution/bitrate/quality that was available at the time of the work's original release. 3. No arbitrary device/OS limitations. 4. Can watch/listen/download from any location on earth with sufficient bandwidth. I d…

>I didn't even mention that it's free or that there are no ads It's free in the same way shoplifting is free, until you get caught. You are very much in violation of copyright laws if you pirate.

Depends on where you live.

Copyright infringement is generally a civil offence in Australia.

Whereas theft of physical goods is generally not.

Penalties for copyright infringement differ between countries as well.

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#302

Post by anonymars »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #249
l72 wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really wish we had laws that producers of content cannot also be distributors. That just creates perverse incentives to use content to lock people into their distribution platform. If they had to be separate, that gives content producers the ability to cross license and those licenses to be better deals. We’d actually have competition in distribution companies as distribution providers would then be competing on pr…

> I really wish we had laws that producers of content cannot also be distributors. We have laws like that for beer and cars, and they're disasters in both cases. Why would we want to implement an incredibly stupid idea a third time?

I think you're going to have to back that up with a bit more than "it's stupid"

Here's a much more relevant precedent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Paramount_Pic....

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#303

Post by crote »

Levitz wrote: post #247
RajT88 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The film and music industries really shot themselves in the foot when they got a tax on recordable media introduced in Canada. OK, CD-R's and flash memory cost a bunch more now. Streaming is legal, because customers already paid the record companies for their music they downloaded and put on that media. At least, someone explained this was the current state of Canadian law ~10 years back when I first visited.

This is basically the case right now in Spain. We pay a tax on every piece of recordable media (don't think it's only SD cards or hard drives, it applies to phones, laptops, mp3 players, ebooks, even smartwatches). In exchange, sharing media for personal use is legal, and P2P is sharing media. Doesn't stop corporations from trying to scare people off and complaining about piracy though of course.

The Netherlands has the same tax, but they managed to ban the "sharing media" part.

First they outlawed uploading media (you could make a copy for your own use, but as you didn't hold the rights you weren't allowed to offer it to anyone else), then they outlawed the downloading as well (you can still make a copy for your own use, but you can't obtain it from someone who doesn't have the rights to offer it to you).

You aren't even allowed to download a copy of a piece of media you already legally own, so the only thing left is making a copy of a physical disk - which is of course made nearly impossible by copy protection.

The organisation behind it is now even claiming that you should pay the tax when a streaming service uses storage space on your device to temporarily make an offline copy...

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#304

Post by jayd16 »

codedokode wrote: post #107

When billion dollar companies, which are praised and supported by governments, download pirated material and do not pay, why should ordinary people restrain themselves and pay? I cannot see how one can make moral arguments against piracy now. It makes no sense to pay if others are not paying and not punished for it. People also have a right to train their real neural network for free without paying.

Real question... Is it actually legally tested to torrent any media, and claim its for training purposes?

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#306

Post by [deleted] »

Waterluvian wrote: post #233

Now more than ever before, for me, it’s exclusively because of UX and not price. The most recent example: every Star Trek (TNG, Voyager, etc) on Netflix simply doesn’t work on my Chromecast. After a minute the video goes all screwy, split 1/3 across the screen and loses half its colour. But this doesn’t happen with Plex.

[deleted]

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#307

Post by lezojeda »

sunrunner wrote: post #24

"Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem" -- Gabe Newell [1] And I think he was largely correct, although the term _service_ seems like it now has to do a lot of heavy lifting as it now encompasses: - Availability by Company - Availability by Global Region - Stream Quality - Advert Policy (why does the lowest tier need to be ad supported? What am I paying for aside from being upsold?) - Qu…

[dead]

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#308

Post by prepend »

ryandrake wrote: post #153

Piracy offers: 1. Unrestricted access to an absolutely huge library of movies, music and TV shows, nearly unlimited. Certainly not limited by opaque "licensing deals" between various companies. 2. Highest resolution/bitrate/quality that was available at the time of the work's original release. 3. No arbitrary device/OS limitations. 4. Can watch/listen/download from any location on earth with sufficient bandwidth. I d…

Don’t forget that piracy allows for front ends that actually want to make the user happy and have good UX.

I use Plex and it shows what I’m currently watching first. So continuing to a new episode is easy. If I sub to 50 episodes they just show up on my first line. Hulu makes me scroll down a few rows to continue watching.

It also shows cast and crew and other movies with the same.

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#309

Post by LelouBil »

dilDDoS wrote: post #82

I actually think pirating encourages a healthier approach to watching TV/movies. I've fully made the switch to pirating instead of subscribing to any streaming services, and it's led to me thinking more critically about what I want to spend time downloading and watching rather than just flipping mindlessly through endless amounts of readily available garbage on a streaming service. I do still have Kanopy though, whic…

> led to me thinking more critically about what I want to spend time downloading and watching rather than just flipping mindlessly through endless amounts of readily available garbage

For me it's a bit different. I have the *arr stack fully automated (with 22Tb of storage for now maaaaybe it's overkill), for friends and family too.

And the experience is nice because it makes content "crowd sourced". If something is on the server it means someone else purposefully added it, so you can still browse, but it's curated based on your friend/family circle.

But also the automation part can be a bit "mindlessly click download on everything even stuff I probably won't watch", but disk space constraints force you to delete it if nobody's watching.

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#310

Post by crote »

mxfh wrote: post #235
gjvc wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

with a sample size of one, there is no obvious problem. presumably any given household wants to watch more than just pokemon, though and this is where things become unstuck. suddenly, to satisfy the demand for the range of things people in the household want to watch they are forced to make subscriptions to multiple services, perhaps sometimes for one-offs. scale this up, and you have a population forced to make mult…

That's not how streaming worked, ever. You had to deal with what Netflix had to offer and that was it. These were the happy monopoly days. It was simply the lack of choice and nobody felt left out at watercooler talks. The paradox now, is that if you're FOMO inclined you feel the need to subscribe to multiple ones at all times to satify all needs in a household. You don't have to. You can keep baseline Disney if you…

> On a ROI basis of adults with disposable income "buying" (aka personal licenses, ideally shareable with some other accounts what some might call a family) 4-5 movies for like 5 dollars on platforms like Apple TV each a month is actually cheaper than pirating.

Yes, and I still pirate. It's more expensive, but the user experience is substantially better. It has always been a supply issue,

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