Netflix, HBO and Cable Giants Are Coming for Password Sharers • Hacker News Board

Re: Netflix, HBO and Cable Giants Are Coming for Password Sharers

#411

Post by manigandham » Sat, Nov 09, 2019, 4:12 AM UTC

sp332 wrote: post #382

comeondude wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dude ... This comes off as incredibly self-entitled and arrogant. That piece of art? It takes years and tremendous amount of people hours to bring these films into existence your enjoyment. I grew up in Hollywood, in family of filmmakers. My friends are actors, producers, and well anybody else who is involved in the business - and we all dedicate unbelievable hours of love and labor into the “non copyrighted cat vide…

It's not that you can't make money. It's that this particular business model doesn't jibe with reality. There's a reason iTunes switched to DRM-free formats early on. For video games, piracy can actually increase profits, because people really like a try-before-you-buy model. (Piracy is not as helpful for movies.) It's possible, actually not super difficult, to make money for "bringing films into existence" without t…

Paying for content to consume is a perfectly valid business model and has done extremely well for music and video streaming.

It seems that you specifically do not like the deal, which is fine of course, but that doesn't excuse stealing and copying content that you didn't pay for.

Re: Netflix, HBO and Cable Giants Are Coming for Password Sharers

#412

Post by sp332 » Sat, Nov 09, 2019, 4:13 AM UTC

fouric wrote: post #390

comeondude wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dude ... This comes off as incredibly self-entitled and arrogant. That piece of art? It takes years and tremendous amount of people hours to bring these films into existence your enjoyment. I grew up in Hollywood, in family of filmmakers. My friends are actors, producers, and well anybody else who is involved in the business - and we all dedicate unbelievable hours of love and labor into the “non copyrighted cat vide…

It's especially obnoxious because, unlike educational materials or programming tools, you can't make an ethical argument that the content impacts the quality of life of people who receive it. It's entertainment, and so nobody is entitled to access it, ever - you must pay for the right, and the price and terms are entirely up to the owner to set however they like.

First-sale doctrine means that, generally, creators don't have any control of their product after they have sold it to someone else. Intellectual property is not an inherent right in the US constitution. In fact the only purpose is to promote artists and inventors - a kind of subsidy. The legal exclusivity is a gift from society, not something that is owed to the creator.

Re: Netflix, HBO and Cable Giants Are Coming for Password Sharers

#413

Post by ripdog » Sat, Nov 09, 2019, 4:15 AM UTC

comeondude wrote: post #394

sp332 wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not that you can't make money. It's that this particular business model doesn't jibe with reality. There's a reason iTunes switched to DRM-free formats early on. For video games, piracy can actually increase profits, because people really like a try-before-you-buy model. (Piracy is not as helpful for movies.) It's possible, actually not super difficult, to make money for "bringing films into existence" without t…

Still stealing. The dude above is freely admitting to grabbing movies wholesale and distributing them in a glib manner. And I’m addressing him, because it’s wrong. I’m the guy on the other end of the economic equation. End of the day it’s a choice to do the right thing and respect the artists behind the work you enjoy regardless what the “reality” is.

Not even remotely close to stealing. Stealing causes an actual loss to the victim - they owned an item which is worth money, and now they don't. Copyright infringement, OTOH, causes a potential loss to the 'victim'.

The copyright industry's propaganda about 'piracy = theft' is based on the frankly absurd concept that anyone who pirates media would have paid for it had piracy not been an option. This claim doesn't hold up to the slighted shred of scrutiny.

>End of the day it’s a choice to do the right thing and respect the artists behind the work you enjoy regardless what the “reality” is.

Except when you pay money for TV, movies or video games, your money either doesn't go to the artists behind it, or very little of it does. Rather, the money goes to the investors who funded the work, or the publisher contracted with the musician. The real people lacking respect for artists are the publishers/record labels whose entire contribution to the process is making the initial investment, paying artists the bare minimum - and moaning about internet pirates, it seems.

Re: Netflix, HBO and Cable Giants Are Coming for Password Sharers

#414

Post by mkl » Sat, Nov 09, 2019, 4:15 AM UTC

javagram wrote: post #403

mkl wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's entertainment, and so nobody is entitled to access it, ever You seem to have been indoctrinated by the big media companies, to believe their profit-maximising false narrative. Copyright was designed to terminate, at which point everyone is entitled to the material. Media companies have repeatedly pushed law changes that are purely in their own interest, to extend the original fairly reasonable short terms to w…

Pirates watch plenty of movies and TV newer than the original 14 year copyright term. People aren’t getting too worried about people pirating Gunsmoke or whatever.

Sure, but that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the belief that it is fair and just for all this media to be controlled by a few companies forever. The person I replied to said "nobody is entitled to access it, ever", and I think it's very unfortunate for anyone to believe that.

Re: Netflix, HBO and Cable Giants Are Coming for Password Sharers

#415

Post by scarface74 » Sat, Nov 09, 2019, 4:15 AM UTC

sp332 wrote: post #408

fouric wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's like saying that "trying to prevent kids from doing hard drugs doesn't jibe with reality". Piracy of entertainment content is straight-up immoral, and the only reason it's not viable as a business model is because certain groups of people actively work to prevent it from being such.

You can deal with people in good faith. You don't have to be so cynical as to think that piracy is going to kill your business or livelihood. Game of Thrones was HBO's most-pirated show and also one of the most profitable shows of all time. There are whole stores like GOG that are DRM-free because piracy is not the biggest barrier to making a profit. Getting your content to people and letting them give you money are…

There isn't anyway of knowing it was the most profitable unless you can prove that the number of people who signed up for HBO because of GOT was enough of an increase to make up for the cost.

Maybe? But I haven't seen any surveys.

Re: Netflix, HBO and Cable Giants Are Coming for Password Sharers

#416

Post by LeoNatan25 » Sat, Nov 09, 2019, 4:16 AM UTC

comeondude wrote: post #397

kempbellt wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can concede that I am certainly self-entitled and arrogant in many ways, but I fail to see how I am being so here. This project was built as a fun proof-of-concept. Less than a dozen people used it, and none of them cancelled their other paid services to use it. Also, like I mentioned, it was never profitable and I never made any money off of it. Also this is coming from a fellow content creator, of many types (mus…

You’re bragging about stealing the movies and distributing them. That’s not cool. Simple.

The project sounds pretty cool.

Re: Netflix, HBO and Cable Giants Are Coming for Password Sharers

#417

Post by tenebrisalietum » Sat, Nov 09, 2019, 4:21 AM UTC

AVTizzle wrote: post #375

tenebrisalietum wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean most of this in a devil's-advocate sense: The proper economic arrangement for those who wish to make a living with creative works is patronage. Someone asks you to make something, you make it for them, then you get paid. You then don't get paid until you make another work. Thus content creators shouldn't have an automatic entitlement to get paid each time someone reads/listens to/watches a work. If you work on…

This doesn't make economic sense. If I create a piece of art that many people can enjoy, why shouldn't I get compensated for adding that value to their lives? Same is true for software.

Expecting endless (or effectively endless) compensation, or any compensation you demand unilaterally, for adding value once, seems abusive.

Re: Netflix, HBO and Cable Giants Are Coming for Password Sharers

#418

Post by scarface74 » Sat, Nov 09, 2019, 4:21 AM UTC

kempbellt wrote: post #212

quineoa wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am curious to know about the infra / tech stack, if you're comfortable with sharing any information.

Sure. As @diminoten mentions, legality is questionable here, so I do not recommend. If you do dabble, restrict access, and encrypt everything so that if you lose your keys, they only option is to destroy the stack and start over. Cloud provider of your choice Plex media server running on a high-throughput instance, with cloud storage mounted locally for reading. (Redundantly created in multiple regions depending on w…

How many users were trying to support simultaneously? I can stream maybe four or five streams at various levels of real time transcoding on my Core I3. But I do have about 900Mbps up.

Re: Netflix, HBO and Cable Giants Are Coming for Password Sharers

#419

Post by sp332 » Sat, Nov 09, 2019, 4:24 AM UTC

scarface74 wrote: post #415

sp332 wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can deal with people in good faith. You don't have to be so cynical as to think that piracy is going to kill your business or livelihood. Game of Thrones was HBO's most-pirated show and also one of the most profitable shows of all time. There are whole stores like GOG that are DRM-free because piracy is not the biggest barrier to making a profit. Getting your content to people and letting them give you money are…

There isn't anyway of knowing it was the most profitable unless you can prove that the number of people who signed up for HBO because of GOT was enough of an increase to make up for the cost. Maybe? But I haven't seen any surveys.

HBO knows how many people watched, yeah. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-television-gameofthrones/... Here's an estimate of the costs and revenues. https://decider.com/2019/05/21/game-of-thrones-hbo-profits/ ThinkMoney had a somewhat lower estimate but they don't say how they got those numbers. https://www.finance-monthly.com/2019/05/how-much-money-has-h...

Re: Netflix, HBO and Cable Giants Are Coming for Password Sharers

#420

Post by scarface74 » Sat, Nov 09, 2019, 4:24 AM UTC

tomnipotent wrote: post #359

AYBABTME wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I pay for streaming service Z but don't like their streaming tech or the geofraphical restrictions they put on show Y that I was watching while traveling, I feel that there's no ethical harm happening if I obtain a copy of Y for private storage. It might not be legal or might be in violation of ToS, but personally I wouldn't call this theft. Would you agree?

> no ethical harm According to whom? If region enforcement is in place, it's because of legal obligations. So yes, there's ethical harm involved when you do something like this because you're intentionally circumventing a business's legal obligations to their partners.

That's a bridge too far. If I have Netflix and I'm in the US and then I travel overseas on vacation and I can't watch the same content, I would have no problem pirating it.