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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

#871

Post by ninetyninenine »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #835
ninetyninenine wrote: post #741

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. The entire games and movie industry exists because a segment of people don’t pirate. All the technology created to support those two industries mentioned above are supported by people who paid for their shit. Your view point twists reality because the financial realities don’t pan out. Who the fuck pays for a triple A video game if it’s morally right to pirate things? If you pirate you benefit off of millions of…

> Who the fuck pays for a triple A video game if it’s morally right to pirate things? Yours truly. I have been a proud Steam customer for over 20 years. I have licensed over 200 games on Steam alone. I own multiple video game consoles from multiple generations and have quite the collection of titles for them. Not a single person can accuse me of not supporting creators. > The fact of the matter is your “morality” her…

>Yours truly.

What is this? Did you drop the mic? Think about what you just admitted. It's morally right to pirate. So instead of doing the moral thing, you pay extra money for No fucking reason. Congratulations.

>Not a single person can accuse me of not supporting creators.

But people still can accuse you of being stupid. Not saying that you are stupid, but it's open season in this area. Make sure your arguments are legit.

>The fact of the matter is the industry shouldn't be sustained. It is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to create a product whose price trends toward zero due to infinite availability. When that obviously fails, they get upset and invoke copyright in order to distort reality until they're profitable.

So get rid of the entire movie industry and gaming industry? Makes sense. How many billions of dollars and jobs just went down the drain?

>The simple fact is creators need a new business model. And that business model is patronage. It's the labor of creation that's scarce and valuable, not the finished product. Therefore creators should be paid continuously for the act of creating itself, not the finished product.

Holy shit. This makes total sense. But then why stop at creators? Why not make the entire economy based off of patronage? Right? If it makes sense for "creators" well everyone in the economy creates shit, so let's do it for everything.

You work for a company? Why is that company paying you? Your work should be OPEN source and free! You program right? So all you're doing is creating ideas. The company shouldn't pay you fuck shit, and the only people who can pay you are people who sign up as patrons.

Here's a genius idea. If you stand by your ideas so much, why don't you start executing on them right now! Go tell your boss, "Hey my work is public domain! you don't need to pay me a dime! but if you want to support me here's my patreon link! Thanks bud!"

Look. Honestly if you don't see how what I suggested makes zero sense and how what I just said completely applies to ALL creators then you're out of touch with reality and human psychology.

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#872

Post by FireBeyond »

vgb2k18 wrote: post #226
jfghi wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also doesn’t track user and send a bunch of telemetry

Except for our ip address, timestamp and torrent metadata https://iknowwhatyoudownload.com

Yeah, according to my router, my IP address hasn't changed in 8 months. But this site has me torrenting a bunch of anime, porn and Russian audiobooks ... while I was sitting on a beach last week in Hawaii.

(And I know I'm not being used as an unwitting seeder).

What's actually happening, it looks like, is it's finding any hits on the same Class C subnet as mine.

This ends up more looking like a precursor for some "I know what you're downloading" bitcoin extortion.

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#873

Post by ninetyninenine »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #847
ninetyninenine wrote: post #777

Earlier 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…

>We don't recognize ownership of ideas as a legitimate concept.

Who is this "we" you're referring to? As far as I know it's you and your 2 or 3 online pen pals because the rest of the world recognizes it as a legitimate concept such that it's been encoded into law and billions and billions have been invested into said said ideas on the assumption that those laws will provide the idea creators with "ownership" of said ideas.

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#874

Post by lotsoweiners »

galleywest200 wrote: post #159
dilDDoS wrote: post #82

I actually think pirating encourages a healthier approach to watching TV/movies. I've fully made the switch to pirating instead of subscribing to any streaming services, and it's led to me thinking more critically about what I want to spend time downloading and watching rather than just flipping mindlessly through endless amounts of readily available garbage on a streaming service. I do still have Kanopy though, whic…

Why not purchase the discs and copy them yourself? At least artists can get paid that way.

Why not buy them used or better yet check them out at the library and save myself some money in the process? Piracy is more convenient.

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#875

Post by ninetyninenine »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #867
keeda wrote: post #855

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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, l…

That argument is completely unpersuasive. These are not the same things at all. In multiple ways. First, there is no way do duplicate bank account contents. Bank transfers are transactions : adding to your account subtracts from mine. The bitcoin ledger is infinitely copyable but doing that gives no one extra bitcoins. Contrast that with intellectual property which is the complete opposite: information can be lossles…

>The secrecy exists precisely because once information is out there there is no way to control what will be done with it. Contrast that with copyright: the monopolists want to distribute the information world wide and simultaneously fully control what people do with it. The tyranny necessary to enforce such corporate control is utterly unacceptable.

The idea wouldn't exist if such tyranny didn't exist in the first place. What causes a drug company to invest billions into creating life saving drugs? If all ideas are open source then there's NO incentive for ANYONE to invest billions into ideas.

That's why copyrights and patent laws exist. To function as incentive in the creation of new ideas.

Pick and choose: Either you can only interact with the idea under monopolist rules. Or the idea doesn't exist period. Overall, humanity (aka the actual "we") has picked the former over the later.

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#876

Post by kenjackson »

lotsoweiners wrote: post #869
kenjackson wrote: post #502

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s a worse analogy. The other guy doesn’t want to use a service because they don’t offer content he wants because people are offended by it. There’s a bunch of clothes not sold at most retailers because it is offensive but you can buy them online directly from the manufacturer. The analogy you gave would be better if they edited the content to be semantically equivalent but they aren’t. The content just isn’t ava…

The biggest problem IMO is that they are picking and choosing what is offensive. I can watch over 100 episodes of very offensive (to someone) episodes of Always Sunny episodes on Hulu. However, they decided 1 concept from 1 scene of a handful of episodes is more offensive than everything else and removed those. I think an analogy could be Home Depot sells a dimming light with 10 settings. Some group of people can’t d…

Is there anything offensive that Home Depot shouldn’t carry? Or should they carry everything?

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#877

Post by keeda »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #867
keeda wrote: post #855

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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, l…

That argument is completely unpersuasive. These are not the same things at all. In multiple ways. First, there is no way do duplicate bank account contents. Bank transfers are transactions : adding to your account subtracts from mine. The bitcoin ledger is infinitely copyable but doing that gives no one extra bitcoins. Contrast that with intellectual property which is the complete opposite: information can be lossles…

So now we have established that not all numbers are "just numbers" that can be copied victimlessly.

Consider that maybe it is because some numbers represent something more than just numeric values. Maybe they represent economic value.

Said economic value having been generated by your hard work.

Now maybe you can see how that line of thought leads to the concept of intellectual property.

Information covered by IP is "public" simply because there is no effective way to keep it secret, precisely because it is so easy to copy. However, as the bank account example shows, ease of copying "just numbers" has nothing to do with the effort invested into creating the value represented by those numbers. And IP laws exist precisely to account for that.

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#878

Post by matheusmoreira »

ninetyninenine wrote: post #875
matheusmoreira wrote: post #867

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That argument is completely unpersuasive. These are not the same things at all. In multiple ways. First, there is no way do duplicate bank account contents. Bank transfers are transactions : adding to your account subtracts from mine. The bitcoin ledger is infinitely copyable but doing that gives no one extra bitcoins. Contrast that with intellectual property which is the complete opposite: information can be lossles…

>The secrecy exists precisely because once information is out there there is no way to control what will be done with it. Contrast that with copyright: the monopolists want to distribute the information world wide and simultaneously fully control what people do with it. The tyranny necessary to enforce such corporate control is utterly unacceptable. The idea wouldn't exist if such tyranny didn't exist in the first pl…

> Overall, humanity (aka the actual "we") has picked the former over the later.

Did humanity really pick that? I doubt it. Copyright infringement happens too often and too normally for me to believe people care about copyrights. Politicians bought and paid for by lobbyists picked that.

Anyway, I'll go ahead and expicitly pick the latter over the former. I would rather have the nonexistence of ideas over infinite monopolist control. Let the entire copyright industry go bankrupt if necessary.

Mercifully, it will not actually be necessary. Platforms like Patreon and GitHub Sponsors are the future. They work independently of copyrights. They are how creators should be funded for their valuable work. As a society, we need to figure out how to normalize and increase their use as much as possible.

Also, nonexistence of ideas is incompatible with human nature. People will create, profit or not. They must. The creative output will significantly decrease but it will not be wiped out. As a free software developer, I am living proof.

> What causes a drug company to invest billions into creating life saving drugs?

Patents.

I am not as strongly opposed to patents as I am to copyright. Unlike copyrights, patents actually expire in reasonable timeframes. Patents have none of this lifetime plus a trillion years nonsense. They also typically apply to physical goods and inventions.

So even though I believe all intellectual property is fundamentally absurd, I would compromise at patents. They are absurd monopolies, but they are tolerable. Their absurdity will end well within my lifetime. The ideas will be freed. Generic versions of the drugs will be made.

Copyright in its current form has none of the above properties.

Nintendo selling people the exact same Mario ROMs half a century after the fact is nothing but pure unadulterated rent seeking. They have already made their fortunes several times over. Let the works enter the public domain. They should have to continuously create new works if they want to keep making money, not strike gold once and live off the rent for all eternity.

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#879

Post by frollogaston »

skeaker wrote: post #831
frollogaston wrote: post #521

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gabe Newell, founder of the largest video game DRM company. Find a way for anyone to download video games for free without risking malware or compromising online play, and see how many people still pay $60 for a new game on Steam.

People can and do download games for free all the time and Steam is still there. People pay for Spotify when music has been openly free since Napster was the zeitgeist.

It's not really possible for MP games, and it's increasingly hard and also dangerous to pirate an SP game. Idk who still does this.

And Spotify is way cheaper than iTunes, which is cheaper than CDs. Neither of them created piracy, but they did have it as leverage.

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#880

Post by keeda »

the_af wrote: post #860
keeda wrote: post #854

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> As I said, we already had this conversation ages ago and your side lost.

Repeating that does not make it true.

> A lot of the rest use an informal (not legal, and highly subjective) definition of the word "theft" -- but you knew this.

Yes, all the examples I gave are exactly of that. I think we are in violent agreement here.

> It's exhausting to keep repeating this.

I do agree it's exhausting, because neither you nor the decades of arguments (where I have repeatedly brought it up, but well, the Internet is a big place) have addressed this point. Let me lay it out in more detail:

1. All society and trade is based on exchange of value. This is true since the oldest days of barter.

2. When somebody provides something of value and gets something they value in return, that is a fair trade. The exact amounts of value are negotiable (including zero, cf. creative commons, but again this is based on the provider's consent.) This is the fundamental basis of trade.

3. So when someone takes something of value -- physical goods or abstract things like services or TV shows -- without giving its provider something of acceptable value in return, it is considered unfair and morally wrong. Which is why society has decided to make it legally wrong as well.

So whether it's stealing a car or pirating a TV show, it is essentially taking something of value without giving any in exchange, for which the word "theft" is perfectly fine.

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