811–820 of 960 posts
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Only consequences, physically speaking the two are not the same at all. Copying of anything digital is not actual theft, nor will it ever be.
no true scotsman wordsmithing on theft is the only defense thieves have
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None of them are paying the cost to create the content for movies and TV, except for their own original shows. I also have no problem paying a company to watch their original content…that’s completely fair. I also have no problem paying toward the “cost of creating content” as you say. I have a problem with how media is carved up to make sure you have to use multiple services and maximize profit. I have a problem wit…
What do you do instead to make sure the creators are fairly compensated?
Ah wait, that's the other set of streaming services that also don't pass on the profits to creators...
The problem here is that distribution companies have always been a wedge between creators and customers. There have been attempts to provide better ways. I subscribed to eMusic until Sony came along, raised the rates and cut out the indie bands.
YouTube was great for independent creators until Google took it over and slowly squeezed the life out of it. Now it's a janky system that's milking creators as hard as possible.
Hopefully we will get a new system that will work for creators until they are crushed by the system.
Oh, I have a question to all of the people who pirate but live in a country where that’s illegal and punished (with huge fines, I assume). I’m very interested in listening to some stories of how it’s technically done (vpn, a seedbox, or you just keep things simple and don’t care). E.g. I’ve been trying sophisticated backlists of IPs, but I have no idea whether they work. But even more I am interested in a legal aspec…
Argentina. Have been using BitTorrent directly from my home connection for close to 20 years now without issue, no VPN or anything. Never heard of anyone getting a fine, a warning, or anything like that. Never ran into transfer cap issues either; despite my ISP having a stated monthly cap of 250 GB down (although that was years ago; it may have changed), I handily exceed it every month, and some months I've passed 1…
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 think the key thing it misses though (usually) is that you usually have to go grab things. I'm not willing to go download something in order to view it. Not even spending a few minutes time grabbing a whole season of a series and then storing it somewhere, even if viewing it takes many hours. Spotify's convenience killed the mp3, and Netflix is hyper convenient compared to most piracy. No one (to a rounding error,…
I have been a happy user of JellyFin for a couple of years. Then when Spotify raised its prices again I realized I mostly listen to the same songs, most if not all I still own the CDs.
So with Navidrome and a couple of Python scripts to transform playlists, I made my own little home Spotify as well (Homify? Hopify?)
Works perfectly. No fees. No ads. No stupid email at the end of the year bragging about all the data Spotify collects and stores about me. Perfect.
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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
This was what made me cancel Netflix 10 years ago. They decided to remove stuff that cost them nothing to have in their library like Gone with the Wind. I'd never watch it but it was clear then they had decided they would be gatekeepers of what people can and cant watch.
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I really want to support the creators! But by paying for movie tickets or streaming services, very little of the money I pay goes to the creators. It mostly goes to the executives and financiers, or the megastar actors that I don't really care about.
Piracy gives zero money to the creators.
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.
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TLOO came out in 2006, 16 years after the DDR collapsed. I wondered if GP was thinking of another movie so I asked ChatGPT, which told me: "The German film you’re thinking of is "Good Bye, Lenin!" — released in 2003, exactly seven years after the formal end of the DDR in 1990. " (My emphasis.) So much for GPT-5.
That's hilarious. Imagine going back two years and showing someone GPT-5? They might think the Pause AI movement had won. It makes you ponder an alternate timeline where the OpenAI brain trust wasn't dismantled Which version did you use, though? GPT-5, GPT-5-Thinking, GPT-5 Pro, GPT-5-Mini, GPT-5 with Thinking (reasoning effort=high) or one of the other 18 options? Did you tell it to think harder? Maybe you are just…
But branding that router "GPT5" is a huge marketing mistake, because now, every time a smaller model says something stupid (as they often do), it seems that's the best OpenAI has to offer...
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What do you do instead to make sure the creators are fairly compensated?
Go to shows and buy merch. Ah wait, that's the other set of streaming services that also don't pass on the profits to creators... The problem here is that distribution companies have always been a wedge between creators and customers. There have been attempts to provide better ways. I subscribed to eMusic until Sony came along, raised the rates and cut out the indie bands. YouTube was great for independent creators u…
The predatory nature of the industry isn’t much different than current laws on the service industry wages and tipping. For anyone not a big name movie star paid millions for their appearance, they are getting (comparably) below-minimum wage pay and hoping for tips (royalties, if any). The industry puts a lot of the real risk on the lowest levels who have no decisions, but they take the highest reward while blaming those people for bad decisions. That doesn’t sound fair to me.
It’s also a lot like our grocery supply chain…layers upon layers, each trying to take their cut of revenue as it passes from distributor, to distributor, to distributor, to… most people have no idea how many different companies are taking a cut while the farmers are squeezed. Not much different for content creators.
The problem isn’t that goods and services are expensive, it’s all the companies adding little or no value, or underpaying creators, just to maximize their own profits from the creations. YouTube sells ads, demonetizes the creators, but still run ads and keep all the revenue. Spotify just decides not to pay creators who don’t make enough while they sell ads that run before and after their music.
People are happy to pay toward the creation of content, otherwise Patreon, Twitch (I know…as bad as YT but at least a decent amount goes to the creator), and other “direct” (relatively) to creator sites wouldn’t exist.