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Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

theguardian.com

821–830 of 960 posts

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#821

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I went down a similar rabbit hole when I bought my OLED monitor, finding that you can neither stream UHD nor play UHD Blu-Ray (it was possible on a few generations of Intel chips before SGX was deprecated because it was not in fact secure; 10th-gen was the latest) Well, okay then -- chump don't want the money, chump don't get the money

Amusingly if your have MakeMKV and patched firmware, you can rip them without even blinking.

Yep. As is often the case the DRM screws over the paying customers. At that point I certainly wasn't going to give them money for a disc they didn't want me to let me play

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#822
post #144

I know this is pedantic but it is so annoying: downloading shows is not piracy. It is totally nuts to conflate unauthorized copying and sharing with the violent act of going on somebody’s boat and killing/threatening them until you loot their stuff. Calling it piracy was funny during the early Internet when it was all pirate and ninja memes. But really letting them conflate this very minor crime with violence was a b…

You are a couple of centuries late: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_infringement#%22Pira...

the irony https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Joseph_Ferdinand_Keppler_...

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#823

In a related vein, Ebooks. I have a Kobo e-reader that is fantastic. I just ran into a situation where I really wanted to buy two e-books. Unfortunately, both are on Amazon. Amazon doesn't let you just download them to your computer anymore, you need to transfer them to a Kindle. A kindle I do not have. I tried to find any possible workaround, but they've totally locked it down. So, I didn't buy either book. I really…

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Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#825

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, it's too expensive because the _service_ is too poor. If the service was good, it would be a fair price.

… if it was offered for the same price as the current service.

No? I would be willing to pay more if it actually had things I wanted to watch. Right now it's technically cheap enough where it's not painful when it lapses for months where I don't use it, but it's still a waste of money so I finally cancelled it about half a year ago. I'd be willing to pay a lot more if it had and retained a sizeable library. But it keeps rotating in nuggets of gold with a deluge of cheap trash. At least in Norway, I am aware it varies wildly by region. Not my problem as the customer, that's theirs to solve.

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#826

My current strategy is account hopping and ad blocking. I pay for Amazon Prime but I'm happy to pay less and have Firefox clean out the ads. I've cancelled my Netflix subscription for the third time. I'm soon going to re-enable Apple TV; probably for 1 or 2 months. And apparently HBO Max and Disney+ are now finally entering the German market. I will never pay for all of those at the same time. The more this market fr…

It is very sad the the entire BBC archive, or most of it anyway, isn't available to paying customers in the UK

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#827
post #615

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stealing is when you take something from him, and he no longer has the thing you took. Piracy is when you see something for free that everyone else paid money for. You watching doesn't prevent anyone else from watching. Piracy isn't stealing: piracy only deals in intangibles. Stealing is for finite goods. There's a whole "how do we pay to make stuff if people can watch for free" problem around piracy, but it's fundam…

> Stealing is when you take something from him, and he no longer has the thing you took. People commonly use "steal" to refer to someone making a copy of data they are not authorized to have. Even you have used it that way: "I know my credit card company allows me to set a password to prevent unauthorized access from someone who might have stolen this kind of data" [1]. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=900187…

Language is complex and nuanced. Identity theft is an interesting edge case - your identity is an intangible, but it's also not something that someone else can use without harming you. They're effectively stealing your reputation. It's not a physical thing, but especially in the age of digital tracking, there's only one instance of it.

Regardless of the linguistic semantics, the campaign to conflate piracy and stealing was a manipulative mind game that tried to dissuade people from a common activity by overstating its harms. Pirating a movie is victimless, except for aggregated market effects where too much piracy can impact the financial viability of film production. It's very different than stealing, which has a discrete victim.

If you download a movie or a game without authorization, that's a societal no-op, unless it's a thing you would have paid money for. At scale, pirates do include people who would have paid, which is problematic for the film business. That's bad and worth solving, but it's not the same as stealing.

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#828

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re not considering that many of these points are in no way illegal to provide as a streaming service.

I didn't say it. but the comment we are replying to says "piracy offers:", so direct your complaint to that guy. I agree with you. How about launch a better service instead of pointing out how breaking the law is beneficial to the breaker. Duh it always is, I wonder why??

Ah sorry i misread you.

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#830

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes! Someone came after me on here because I said there really is no 4k streaming.

The marketing of a resolution really won out. People will fight you if you suggest a high bitrate 1080p encode can look better than a low bitrate 4k.

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