Well, Spain was a dictatorship as recently as 1975.
And the subsequent PSOE admins show precisely why Spain had to be a dictatorship.
Spain to expand internet blocks to tennis, golf, movies broadcasting times
401–410 of 482 posts
Re: Spain to expand internet blocks to tennis, golf, movies broadcasting times
#402This is how greed works. The players want as much money as they can get. The owners want to charge as much as they can for everything while paying the least possible amount. The networks that buy the broadcasting and other rights want to most they can charge for them. Sports have gotten way out of hand, even without the betting aspect. People criticize gambling, porn, and other less desirable forms of entertainment w…
>This is how greed works. The players want as much money as they can get. The owners want to charge as much as they can for everything while paying the least possible amount. The networks that buy the broadcasting and other rights want to most they can charge for them. And the buyer wants to pay as little as they possibly can. That's not greed. That's called a market and it's functioning as it should.
If it were a true market, the price would be much lower because it wouldn't be a monopoly.
Re: Spain to expand internet blocks to tennis, golf, movies broadcasting times
#403Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most games are cracked within days. The number that survive for over a month without a crack is small, largely limited to Denuvo protected games. > But to be precise, even if all of the above is covered, this is not proof that DRM increases sales, but that crack availability for Denuvo-protected games decreases sales depending on the timing — it is a subtle distinction, but perhaps publicity of a crack availability m…
It is not the same until you test the effect of illegal copies of games not having any DRM protection at all (easy to copy/use illegally) on sales. Specifically, the conditions this was tested under were always-DRM, always-Denuvo, crack-becomes-available, and conclusions cannot easily be extrapolated to other scenarios if we are trying to be really scientific. If most games are cracked within days, that sounds like a…
By definition, illegal copies of games don't have DRM protection. I'm not sure what you mean by this.
The analysis studies pre-crack and post-crack sales, and specifically observed the dip in sales after the crack. The dip was larger, the closer to release the game was cracked. A theoretical day 1 crack caused a 20% drop in sales.
I'm also not sure what you mean by games that are cracked almost immediately are a better sample. You can't measure sales before and after the crack was released because you only have the latter. Sure, if we could somehow measure how the game would have sold in an alternate universe where it wasn't cracked that would be a more robust finding. But obviously that's not possible.
The study focused on denuvo protected games because those are essentially the only games that go for extended periods of time without being cracked. They're the only games that actually offer any insight into how games sell without a crack available.
Re: Spain to expand internet blocks to tennis, golf, movies broadcasting times
#404Can Spaniards work around this with a VPN? I know that causes other issues though. To what degree is it feasible for a startup to move around in Europe? This is the sort of heavy-handed, tech-illiterate, authoritarian activity that might make me seriously consider moving my infrastructure or headquarters if I was a Spanish startup.
Come together as a country and boycott couple of games, cancel subscriptions and see how quickly stream owners turn around.
Re: Spain to expand internet blocks to tennis, golf, movies broadcasting times
#405Earlier quoted context omitted.
Any metric that treats the US as one single data point instead of 50 should be taken with a grain of salt. Denmark has 6 million residents, Minnesota has 5.7 million. You can't compare an entire continental nation, whose 50 states all set their own 50 different health, education and public spending policies, against e.g. Sweden or Spain. That's a bad comparison.
Why do we judge other geographically large and politically divided nations like Canada, Russia or China in aggregate but the USA gets special treatment that conveniently provides an excuse for facing the reality that America is not actually a very good place to live unless you are very wealthy?
I don't know who does this except mostly western Europeans trying to score points on the "I happened to be born in the place that has the most perks for people like me" scoreboard. If you want to compare large geographic areas, you could at least start by including Eastern Europe in these "Europe versus everyone else" comparisons, which would make things look much less flattering for Europe.
Re: Spain to expand internet blocks to tennis, golf, movies broadcasting times
#406Any word on if Starlink is being forced to comply? They have ISPs blocking DNS requests iirc, seems like Starlink may be a viable alternative? Not that you should have to find a new ISP due to soccer being pirated too much, just wondering really Edit: Oh...seems VPNs work. That's probably much easier as a work-around
Oh man, if there was one way to win Spaniard commie hearts for Elon is to solve sports streaming.
Re: Spain to expand internet blocks to tennis, golf, movies broadcasting times
#407If you know Spain, you know this makes total sense: - Half the country or more just doesn't work or do anything else when there's an important match anyway. - There's a big intersection between "people that doesn't care about soccer" and "people that knows how to use a VPN" - Matches are usually at night, past 7pm. It's well after the average citizen work hours. - There's not really huge internet companies there that…
> So in short, the ruling is incredibly stupid because they're allowed to do so, save for the vocal minority, the vast majority of the population doesn't care: they're watching the match.
Is it actually worth fighting for principles to prevent slippery slopes? It seems most political battles in the US, especially the culture wars, are just about people's personal beliefs. It’s not that these issues affect them directly. It's they just want to make sure the other side doesn’t change their vision of the future.
Re: Spain to expand internet blocks to tennis, golf, movies broadcasting times
#408Earlier quoted context omitted.
The question is about the authority to pass laws that only some countries need to obey. To my knowledge, the EU does not have the authority to do that.
They don't have to do anything like that. Just create a law that says no country in the EU is allowed to block sites.
The EU doesn't work like that. It's a union of sovereign states, not a central government.
Banning the member states from legislating something would require changes to the Treaties of the European Union. And that in turn would require unanimous consent from the member states.
The EU could legislate the matter on its own, which would override national laws. But it's not in the habit of doing narrow single-purpose laws, because that's not in the culture of the people who run the union. Instead, there would probably be a comprehensive law on internet blocking and censorship, which would be a very bad idea.
Re: Spain to expand internet blocks to tennis, golf, movies broadcasting times
#409Earlier quoted context omitted.
For many users it's just not true. I run a subscription weather forecast service for pilots, with a free trial period. A significant number of users reset their device every week to avoid paying 10 euros a month. These are aircraft owners .
Just because you own an aircraft, doesn't mean you have a budget to pay random EUR 10/month subscriptions. People save money to buy expensive stuff. Or take out loans. One cannot assume that everyone doesn't care about spending < X dollars, where X is = 1% of the most expensive asset they own (see e.g. $3000 gaming PC vs. $30 software, elsewhere in the thread).
Then don't use it. Use BBC weather. The sense of entitlement is insufferable.
Re: Spain to expand internet blocks to tennis, golf, movies broadcasting times
#410Earlier quoted context omitted.
For many users it's just not true. I run a subscription weather forecast service for pilots, with a free trial period. A significant number of users reset their device every week to avoid paying 10 euros a month. These are aircraft owners .
There will always be some amount of people who are too cheap to pay. However, that doesn't mean that if you plug all the holes that they will pay. No. They'll just not use your service. In the long run it's better to keep these types of people around because they at least advertise your service. But getting any money out of them is a pipe dream. People often frame piracy as "oh 5% pirated instead of paying!" Well...…
In the short term, maybe. I don't think that's the case in the long run. They normalise the behaviour for others, even telling them about how to get around paying. I see strong clustering of the behaviour.