71–80 of 268 posts
Our own great firewall
The Great Firewall of China is a censorship program. This proposed US legislation puts the power of blocking under the authority of its court system and only in the domain of copyright law. The courts are historically very concerned with upholding 1st Amendment rights to a degree that often (but not always) surpasses analogous rights in many sister liberal democracies. Anything that remotely smells of censorship woul…
I've been trying to watch old 80s-90s movies recently. I'm happy to pay $5 or whatever, and they just aren't available anywhere. Rental stores are dead, so I can't go rent them from blockbuster or whatever, and streaming sites have splintered to the point I'm not even sure what is a scam and what is a legitimate business anymore. Trying to even find availability of what films exist on which streaming sites has been a…
Something about browsing in person is just so much more enjoyable than flipping between 9 services. Having a cinephile right there behind the desk that wants to nerd about movies and help pick something out is awesome. It's not a big store, but they've got thousands of movies in their catalog, which is (apparently) way bigger than any of the streaming services.
This doesn't solve your problem, but for the folks that are near the few remaining physical rental stores: consider supporting them, because they're great.
Edit: Actually, on the "your problem" part...maybe give the store a call? Looks like he'll mail discs too: https://myvideowave.weebly.com/services.html
I've recently switched to privacy respecting computing options, so of course lost access to everything I've bought from Apple and Amazon for the last 20 years. If I never paid for content again they'd still be in my debt. You wouldn't steal a car would you? No, but I'd repossess one from some delinquent son of a bitch in a suit.
"If buying isn't owning, then piracy isn't stealing."
And since its a rental, and the company still retains control, that's a lot of capex they failed to declare with the IRS. And yeah, tax fraud.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It happens to me often enough. Might be a matter of taste in movies?
I’m sure it’s related. I’m curious for any examples
A recent example is Hot l Baltimore. It's an early Norman Lear production and stared James Cromwell and Charlotte Rae.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_l_Baltimore
I planned to add Turn On (1969), Tim Conway. It was canceled while the 1st episode was airing.
But since the last time I looked for it, some ethical soul uploaded it to wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turn-On
I've been trying to watch old 80s-90s movies recently. I'm happy to pay $5 or whatever, and they just aren't available anywhere. Rental stores are dead, so I can't go rent them from blockbuster or whatever, and streaming sites have splintered to the point I'm not even sure what is a scam and what is a legitimate business anymore. Trying to even find availability of what films exist on which streaming sites has been a…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Both major parties are corpo-authoritarian, with the main dynamics of elections being to gauge how much the public is willing to accept and to make half the people think they actually wanted the resulting policies. And for this round the people have spoken that they want it good and hard.
I don’t think they care about the policy. They just see a one sided debate: companies will to pay and an indifferent public.
That versus cash.
Isn't torrenting way down from its heyday? Streaming companies are not perfect, but I always thought they were at least moderately successful such that in 2025, average, casual, non-techies no longer bother to jump through the VPN and private tracker hoops just to download a movie.
I've been trying to watch old 80s-90s movies recently. I'm happy to pay $5 or whatever, and they just aren't available anywhere. Rental stores are dead, so I can't go rent them from blockbuster or whatever, and streaming sites have splintered to the point I'm not even sure what is a scam and what is a legitimate business anymore. Trying to even find availability of what films exist on which streaming sites has been a…
You can’t find them to rent on iTunes and similar platforms?
Amazing. These kind of bills / laws are being passed left and right "recently".
It hasn’t been passed!
> Block BEARD does not mention VPNs, but its broad definition of “service provider” could be interpreted to include them. The prospect of all VPN providers being required to block pirate sites, or being unable to operate in the US, is very scary indeed
Like archive.is or other news aggregator and paywall-bypass sites.
Or, just needs 1 falsely filed DMCA to ban. And whoops, made a mistake, and no process to unban.
By sneaking in with 'piracy', they're setting the stage to block any content they don't like.