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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

#431

Post by ninetyninenine »

Why do people try to justify theft? That’s what I’m expecting to see in all the comments here. Like everyone is trying to somehow spin the whole situation into some story that makes their act of theft morally correct.

Don’t get me wrong. I pirate my self. But I’m honest about it. It’s theft. I steal because I’m a cheap ass thief. Why can’t you admit that about yourself?

If someone makes their product annoying and hard to access that’s really their free will and desire. Enshittification is not a crime. When you choose to pirate that work you’re doing something morally unethical.

Yet every pirate here tries to justify it. Just admit it.

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#432

Post by School-Cotton »

cosmic_cheese wrote: post #392
Dylan16807 wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Subtitles are often a very dumb failure point, especially when English subtitles aren't available in half the world for basically no reason.

Similarly annoying is when original language subtitles aren’t available in your region for some reason, even when the audio track of the same language is . Really puts a damper on using foreign media for immersive language learning purposes.

One of the streaming services (I forget if it was Netflix or Amazon) had the original German audio track for Deutschland 83, as well as German subtitles, but the German subtitles were machine-translated from the English subtitles. Maddening!

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#434

Post by maest »

hbn wrote: post #177
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 censorship-free I swore off streaming services when they started pulling episodes of comedy shows and editing out scenes because they were worried someone might be offended

The DnD episode from Community (S2E14) can't be seen on any streaming services because one Asian character wears black makeup while cosplaying as a drow.

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#435

Post by extraduder_ire »

marak830 wrote: post #221
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…

Subtitles is a big one for me. I can stream something in Japan, that I have seen other places has english subs, but due to licensing I cannot see them. I know I could vpn around this, but why should I pay even more just for subtitles? In the end I'm paying for Netflix, Disney and Amazon. My son uses those as he is bilingual, I just pirate what I want to watch personally.

From a cursory search, there are browser extensions to display your own subtitles on sites like netflix. At least for firefox.

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#436

Post by pezezin »

scheeseman486 wrote: post #418
pezezin wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DVDs support progressive scan and most movies were encoded in 480p; the player then just sent half the picture on one field and the other half on the other field. Your point still stand though, these modern 4k editions are far higher quality.

The DVD releases of the original theatrical versions of Star Wars were encoded in 480i non-anamorphic, drawn from analog video masters intended for Laserdisc, which employed an early version of DNR that created a bunch of ugly temporal ghosting artifacts. Blown up onto a modern display it looks really bad.

I watched the PAL edition and I don't remember those artifacts, but it was a million years ago so my memory could be wrong xD

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#437

Post by 1212312523 »

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 found that people around me pick movies a lot less of what they want to watch and more of just what is available right now on Netflix. Maybe having an unlimited library also means you have to be lot more picky of what you watch and developing your taste a lot more.

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#438

Post by matheusmoreira »

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.

> I cannot see how one can make moral arguments against piracy now.

I cannot see how these arguments could ever have been made. Intellectual property is logically reducible to monopolistic ownership of numbers. It's such a schizophrenic distortion of reality. It should be abolished.

> It makes no sense to pay if others are not paying and not punished for it.

It's not just "others", it's trillion dollar corporations!

In the end I don't even blame them... There's no reason why technology should be held back because of intellectual property nonsense. I want them to train AIs on the entire body of works of the entire human race. And when they're finished doing that, I want their AIs to get leaked and pirated so I can run them locally on my computer.

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#439

Post by wyre »

crote wrote: post #291
yalogin wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a good point. Stealing is a crime only for end users and not for companies. Why should end users feel any shame violating the DMCA when the government itself says it’s ok for companies to not honor it

You're not downloading a movie to watch, you are just "acquiring training material" and "reviewing" it to make sure you can use it to train a high-quality model.

This is/would be a fun point, but the illegality isn’t around watching the pirated media. When I torrent a copy of Terminator, the illegal act is acquiring the material, not my watching of it.

I’m not a lawyer so I’m sure there is more to this definition.

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#440

Post by komali2 »

efilife wrote: post #424
godelski wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Piracy also offers: 0. Ability to watch offline! 1. Ability to fix subtitle issues with minimal tweeks like change size or moving location. 1.2 Ability to get subtitles if they aren't offered (or offered in your language) 2. Ability to normalize audio. 3. Ability to buffer videos when on a poor connection. 4. Ability to create collections, organize, and track your movie as you wish 5. Arbitrary number of user account…

What do you mean by audio normalization? Aren't you talking about compression?

Some movies have portions that are really quiet and others that are quiet loud. Depending on your taste you may prefer to not have the experience of turning up the audio so you can hear a quiet conversation, then having your ears blown out by a loud explosion or whatever. Director's tastes be damned, I'm trying to relax over here!
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