The only service I pay for is Criterion, which has done a great job at keeping vintage films alive, stuff I can't find on torrents, streaming services or even youtube.
Buying the Zatoichi box set has been one of my proudest purchases.
Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy
851–860 of 960 posts
Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy
#852Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Often this is the only way. 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 hig…
> 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).
This really gets to me, you hear about folks complaining about Spotify but they don't seem to get that before Spotify unless you were Guns and Roses, you did not get any royalties. 0.1c per song is actually better than people were getting via radio plays in the 80/90's. In fact back then you probably owed if they played your song.
Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy
#853I feel like Disney+ really cemented the decline here. I enjoyed watching Reservation Dogs, which I think I had pirated originally because it was one of those smaller shows with awkward distribution rights. I genuinely wanted to just go and buy the second and third seasons up front when they were airing. It's fine if it's unreasonably priced and it takes a day or two for the episodes to be available, I needed to absolve my guilt for pirating it. So I tried iTunes, which has basically everything if you bring cash, right? Used to, anyway. Not anymore. The only way to watch this show is if you subscribe to Disney+. I don't know why they make this hard, and I don't care either. Episodes were available immediately on TPB. I felt bad, but Disney made me do it. To be fair, Netflix does the same thing, but they don't have their fingers in so many places.
Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy
#854Why 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 har…
Piracy is not theft. We already had this debate decades ago, and your side of the debate lost. It's not "theft" by any reasonable interpretation of the word. It may not be legal, and it may be many other things, but it's not theft. As to why "people justify it", what's the point of even asking when the article and many comments here explain the reasons? You may disagree with the reasons, but they exist and they are c…
> We already had this debate decades ago, and your side of the debate lost. It's not "theft" by any reasonable interpretation of the word.
That's only true when you ignore many, many common usages of the word "theft". I would hazard a guess that your interpretations are along the dictionary lines of "depriving a person of their property." However, here are some commonly used forms of the word (supported by wikipedia and government sites) that don't fit that definition:
- Wage theft: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_theft
- Time theft: https://www.adp.com/resources/articles-and-insights/articles...
- Identity theft: https://www.usa.gov/identity-theft
- Theft of services: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theft_of_services
- Theft of trade secrets: https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?req=TRADE+SECRETS
- Attention theft: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_theft
- Data theft: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_theft
- Electricity theft: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_theft
- Joke theft: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joke_theft
- Stolen valor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stolen_valor
And here are more colloquial usages of theft of abstract things:
- Credit card theft (it's really just the number that is "stolen")
- Password theft (usually "stolen" during a data breach, more numbers being stolen)
- Bitcoin theft (even more numbers being "stolen".)
Here's a very simple explanation for this: In common parlance, "theft" generally means taking something of economic value -- either physical, like property, or abstract, like labor -- from someone without giving any value in return against their wishes.
If you extend this line of thought, you'll see why IP laws exist and why these abstract forms of theft are illegal.
And when examined from that perspective, those coherent reasons are basically just different ways of saying "because I can get away with it."
Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy
#855Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you pirate you used someone’s work without their permission and you caused them to foot the bill for the creation of your product. That is fundamentally immoral. It is logistically impossible to support any industry with your logic here. That is why axiomatically your justifications are wrong. It’s just not sustainable. On the other hand the owner of a certain IP can make his product as inaccessible as possible an…
> someone’s work We don't recognize ownership of ideas as a legitimate concept. Intellectual property is logically reducible to ownership of numbers . All information is a sequence of bits, and all sequences of bits are numbers. All numbers already exist. Humans performing intellectual work are merely discovering those numbers. The entire set of laws supporting intellectual property boils down to making knowledge and…
> The entire set of laws supporting intellectual property boils down to making knowledge and transmission of certain numbers illegal.
It's illegal for me to write certain numbers on a piece of paper and give the paper to you.
That's just absurd and unacceptable.
Your bank account credentials are a bunch of numbers, would you be willing to share those? Surely you wouldn't bother changing them after the fact, I mean, literally victimless if someone copies them for their own use right? ;-)
Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy
#856Earlier quoted context omitted.
Piracy gives zero money to the creators.
Not always, it has generated cult classics that have built a valuable fan base of support for many cases. Downstream it can increase in person popularity that wouldn’t otherwise exist.
Ah, this is like the "trickle down" theory of piracy.
Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy
#857Earlier quoted context omitted.
But that's unrelated to why tech. People advertising one version instead of another does not have a technical solution. The only thing tech can provide is the ability to keep copying the old version, regardless of what the original creator/distributor thinks.
You don't understand, it's terrible to censor movies but absolutely vital to make sure people can't make movies I disagree with. edit: It's funny, I wouldn't be happy about a version of the old HBO series Rome reedited with anything gay taken out, but I'd be absolutely excited to watch a version of Queer As Folk with all the gay stuff edited out.
Calling removing scenes that you're bigoted against (and that's what it looks like in this case) "making a movie" is a large stretch. I wouldn't have a problem with it if it 1) was actually interesting in some way; 2) didn't pretend to be the original (i.e., different name in title). It's a problem if someone thinks that they're getting the original show and then gets something else, especially if it isn't obvious that it's something else.
Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy
#858Earlier quoted context omitted.
I could copy A New Hope once for every atom in the universe, and no money is lost and the original continues to exist. Theft is moving stuff. You can't move software or digital assets, you can only copy them. If I committed a burglary and instead of taking your TV I go to Walmart and buy a copy, then that's not burglary. You certainly wouldn't report me to the police.
Then how come a month ago you were talking about preventing zero-days from stealing files: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44578850 ?
This is the worst no you I've ever seen.
I'm not concerned about my files being leaked because that's stealing. I'm concerned because they hold sensitive information that can be used for actual stealing, like for example with money.
Malware isn't bad because it's stealing. That's stupid. I know you know it's stupid, so I don't know why you said it.
Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy
#859Oh, 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…
Minimize seeding on torrents. I've still gotten a few strikes from various ISPs though. Some ISPs seem to care more than others, in my experience.
Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy
#860Earlier quoted context omitted.
Piracy is not theft. We already had this debate decades ago, and your side of the debate lost. It's not "theft" by any reasonable interpretation of the word. It may not be legal, and it may be many other things, but it's not theft. As to why "people justify it", what's the point of even asking when the article and many comments here explain the reasons? You may disagree with the reasons, but they exist and they are c…
> We already had this debate decades ago, and your side of the debate lost. It's not "theft" by any reasonable interpretation of the word. That's only true when you ignore many, many common usages of the word "theft". I would hazard a guess that your interpretations are along the dictionary lines of "depriving a person of their property." However, here are some commonly used forms of the word (supported by wikipedia…
As I said, we already had this conversation ages ago and your side lost.
Shout until you're blue in the face, and you'll be just as wrong.
I've already stated my position, and "because you can get away with it" is no part of it. You must be confusing me with someone else in this conversation.
Half your examples fail to make the point you intend, and are not at all analogous to watching a pirated TV show. A lot of the rest use an informal (not legal, and highly subjective) definition of the word "theft" -- but you knew this.
It's exhausting to keep repeating this. Please read what's been said (hint: these are decades old arguments, we're not going to rehash them here for your benefit).
All of this harkens back to even before the days of the silly "you wouldn't steal a car" (2004) antipiracy campaign. I hope I don't need to explain that stealing a car and pirating a TV show are nothing alike, neither legally nor morally.