- cross-posted to:
- news@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- news@beehaw.org
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It is morally and ethically ok to pirate media that no longer legally accessible.
Plus all other media
Don’t pirate indie games and small projects though. They usually deserve the money.
Usually yeah. I still pirate them but use it as an extended demo. Still more than 80% of those I drop in less than a couple hours and never play again. Then I’m just happy I didn’t pay for them. Others though like Factorio and Stardew valley I had to buy after pirating. They were just to good not to own.
While there are legitimate reasons to pirate certain media, Steam and GoG have great refund policies that perfectly serve this use case.
I use Steam, and recently refunded Stray for my stated reason to them that it’s way too scripted and linear for my tastes, and refunded Street Fighter 6 because I’m still not a fan of the movement in the franchise - they refunded me within the same day for both times.
They still only refund back to your steam wallet though, right? So it’s less a refund and more store credit. Which is better than most digital products, for sure, but still not the same as a non-video game refund.
You have the option to return the money to your Steam wallter or the payment method you used.
and to add to this for anyone else reading this far, Steam wallet refund is much faster to refund than credit/debit; the latter is subject to whatever archaic processes the financial institute has to go through for it, and takes about 2-3 days iirc
I don’t, but I definitely don’t think it would be wrong to. IP is an illegitimate idea, and has just as much legitimacy imo as a stranger telling me I’m obligated to pay them to breathe near them. I pay for some games as a donation, not a purchase.
You wouldn’t download a car
I definitely would. Especially if it was no longer made or sold
This isn’t the reason piracy is coming back in my friend group. That reason would be the diversification of streaming sources. There’s no way I’m paying $100 a month for streaming from all the major players, especially if they include ads.
When Netflix was all you needed, streaming was great and reasonable. It quickly became more trouble than it was worth over the last decade.
As a consequence it’s also often far easier to pirate something than to find it legally – and even when you do find it, there’s still the DRM woes and having to play by the arbitrary rules of the service. Most of these streaming outlets have forgotten that their entire business model is actually based on being more convenient than piracy, which isn’t really the case anymore since it’s all fragmented to hell.
I’ve never had an easier time watching movies and shows then when I finally setup sonarr and radarr. Only bad thing about it is waiting for downloads, but it always finds the thing I want.
100%
I’ve always said, a single streaming service that had everything, from every single studio, for $50/month, I would never need to pirate again. Until this happens, I will continue to pirate.
Make it $20 and I’m game. $50 is basically what cable was when I cancelled it
Cable was always missing a great deal of programs. That alone kills it. You won’t see 20 for the entire catalog ever. I don’t think 50 to a 100 a month is it is the question for all content and is reasonable.
It seems like any movie you’d want to watch is now a 3.99 rental too.
I could afford a hundred a month but having to deal with multiple platforms is a no go for me. Then even when something is available, it might not be available in a certain region just makes the whole system crappy.
When you can do it on one UI and pretty much have the entire catalog available without complexity…
“Piracy can’t be stealing if paying for it isn’t owning”
Piracy never went anywhere, “baby”
For our generation, sure, but there’s an entire generation of internet users that have never known a world without streaming services, and never got in to physical media, archived media, or piracy. A lot of them grew up with mobile devices only and hardly ever used desktop or laptop computers.
I was talking to some of my younger coworkers about music the other day. I mentioned something about the hundreds of gigabytes of music, all in FLAC, ALAC, and high quality mp3, and the question I got was “why? Why not just use spotify/Apple Music?” Well what happens when music from your favorite artist gets taken down because it wasn’t profitable? What happens when your favorite show gets cancelled and pulled because it wasn’t profitable?
So much data would have been flat out gone without piracy.
Reminds me of the diagram Techdirt made a couple of years ago over available books on Amazon based on year written. There was giant dip at the point where copyright kicks in that only goes up again close to the current year.
Copyright on the scale of lifetime + 75 years only helps the publishers of the most popular creators. Everyone else get screwed over. Including the creators.
https://www.techdirt.com/2012/04/03/why-missing-20th-century-books-is-even-worse-than-it-seems/
That’s a great article, I strongly agree.
I feel like copyright hurts competition and creativity by letting publishers and studios put out a relatively small number of successful works, and then ride that success for years.
If copyright terms were much shorter with no provision for renewal, it would spur a lot of creativity and competition between studios and publishers because they would effectively be forced to keep coming out with new, high quality content in order to stay relevant.
Yes, I agree with you. A suggestion I’ve might have read on Techdirt is to limit copyright to 5 years with a one time option to extend it for 5 years. Most works lose profitability within 5 years so the only ones impacted would be the most successful and the companies. I’m totally ok with that.
Just imagine what public libraries and streaming sites like Netflix could/would look like if anything from ten years back would be free to share.
I reached a point in my late 20s where I had enough money coming in and there were only a few streaming services where I decided to minimise my piracy if I could conveniently access something legally to make up for all the piracy I did as a teen. Seven years later and inflations huge, my pay hasn’t kept pace and every tom, dick and Harry have their own service now. So it’s been back to the high seas for me.
This dilution of content is really the issue. If Netflix still had the movies I want to watch, I’d just use it. Netflix is easier than piracy.
But Netflix doesn’t ever have what I want to watch anymore. Now those movies are scattered across half a dozen other services that each cost $15/month. It’s a pain to figure out what’s streaming where and if it will cost me anything extra on top of my monthly dues. As Gabe Newell said, it’s a service problem.
Piracy gets you more centralized access to more content for free. If you’re behind a VPN or use a private tracker (or both) it’s safe. So why spend all my money on Netflix and Hulu and Prime and Disney and Max and whatever else just to have a fifty/fifty chance that one of them might be streaming the movie I want to watch?
For someone hasn’t pirated since Limewire was a thing can you walk me through the best way to do so?
Sucks about Willow my wife liked that movie and I had Carter queue to watch. Now can’t watch it.
So any help I have already gone back to physical dvds but I like to access and make copies of digital stuff as well.
Get a VPN and qBittorrent and visit 1337x.to. That should do for 85-90% of what you are looking for.
It never left
One can never resist the allure of the sea
I was gonna say, the article says that streaming ruined media preservation for an entire generation, but guess what, the pirates were preserving it anyway.
Sorry, I couldn’t hear you over my 56k modem downloading a car, can you say that again?
No shit, this was recommended in the side bar; I’m still laughing.
Ok, this is the funniest video i’ve seen in a long time.
Regardless of how we feel about these things, we can know two things form the heart and soul of the Internet:
- Piracy
- Adult content
The eternal Ps
Piracy has always offered a simpler and more user-friendly alternative to the official methods of consuming movies and series. And today, with tools like Jellyfin or Plex, everything is more accessible and at least centralized, so you don’t need 15 platforms (you just need to know where to look to get the content). In the case of games, the presence of anti-tampering solutions like Denuvo is a significant concern. These solutions not only consume a considerable amount of system resources but also ironically make pirated versions more playable on less powerful platforms. Unless companies adopt a new mindset and approach, piracy is likely to continue thriving and evolving.
Yup, this is the same fight the Music labels fought in the late 90’s and early 00’s. Piracy offers a far superior user experience and a lower price point. With the chances of facing punishment low enough that most people expect to get away with it. The content producers could solve the problem, but none of them want to, as that would mean lower profits per person. So, we’re stuck in a cycle of companies whining about piracy while not actually addressing the incentives which drive people to it.
It’s kinda funny that, what people want is a lot like the old cable TV model, without the bullshit of contracts and bundles. Imagine a single service, when you can get all the content from all the producers for one price. Ya, that’s cable TV. The problems were that cable TV had regional monopolies (in the US), consumers got locked into expensive contracts which discouraged free choice and it was largely impossible to say, “I want channels X, Y and C. But not Z, A or B.” Your choices were “Here’s every channel known to man for the low, well not that low, price of hundreds of dollars per month; or, you can get two of the channels you want, but not that other one you really want.” It’s no wonder that people jumped ship when streaming came along. Oh and as a bonus problem, time shifting content on cable was chock full of “fuck you”.
I was a reasonably early cord cutter. Went with an OTA antenna for a few years, followed by YouTube TV and finally just axing live TV all together. I’ve done the math a few times and even with costs creeping up, and subscribing to half a dozen services, the costs for streaming still beat the stuffing out of what I was paying for cable. Back when I cut the cord, I was up around $200/month for all the channels I wanted (and a shit-ton I didn’t). With the services I have now, I’m closer to $100/month. And I had to pay an “early termination” fee back then to break my contract. Given that history, anyone asking for a return to that type of model can go get fucked. Ya, it’s a PITA when content is pulled or I have to fumble between several different services to find something to watch. But, I’d rather have the freedom to trim and adjust services at a whim, than be locked back into that bullshit.
And all this is why rising piracy doesn’t surprise me either. The current system is broke. The system which came before it was broke even worse. And it’s been pretty well established that piracy on the internet is a low risk action with an end result that puts the official way to shame. Piracy isn’t a price problem, its a service delivery problem. You can never compete with piracy on price, just on service. And the content companies aren’t doing that. Video content needs a Steam like service to create a service offering which is, at least, as good as the service piracy is offering. And while some people won’t use an official service at any price, it’s still early enough that many potential pirates could be swayed to pay a reasonable cost for a good service. But, that might mean lower costs and companies not having exclusive access to viewership data. And they won’t allow that until market forces make their refusal untenable.
This is the way. Plex user here, wouldn’t ever go back to anything else.
My NAS with docker and Softwarr and my Shield TV with Stremio and Kodi with a Real Debrid account never left.
Real Debrid the mvp
This website reminded me to turn my mobile adblocker back on.
While I’m not a fan of nostalgia-mining or the constant remastering and remaking of games
… but in the same sentence has nothing but good things to say about constant tinkering and overhauling:
companies are still keeping some popular older games accessible by relaunching them with better graphics, fine-tuned gameplay, and even added scenes
Dude sounds like he’s just speaking out of two sides of his mouth.
By the way, this is also why they are against game preservation. Artificially making the $thing unavailable is a sure fire way to sell it again ‘remade’.
It’s weird that they mention games getting rereleased over and over. But that’s really the popular games. The less popular games, like the unpopular shows and movies, just get abandoned. Hell, with companies closing or splitting, they might not even know who owns a lot of them.
Or don’t remake it and instead release it together with a subpar emulator. Nintendo style
Holy fuck, I just wanted to read this article and the website nearly gave me an aneurysm! Who the fuck ever thought an uncloseable animated border ad would be a good idea?
Someone pirate the article for the rest of us. Jesus
You could always step into the 21st century and run an adblocker like the rest of us smart web users.
Just disable JavaScript on that page, it’s perfectly readable this way.
I used firefox’ reader mode
I had this realization about 5 years ago and just started building out my Plex server. Today I have over 10 TB of movies and shows on there and we love it. Being able to watch any show from any platform is a breeze, and with my file server I can download torrents anywhere and they instantly move to my seedbox and start downloading, so it’s super easy to add new content. Fuck streaming services.
Yesterday I finished automating my seedbox and oh my, it’s so so good. I gave my family their Plex accounts and they’re so happy getting any movie or tv show they want in two clicks in any device they have. Plex->Overseerr->Radarr/Sonarr->Download, it was so satisfying to set up, a lot of fun too haha. I even set up a Telegram bot so they know when their requests are available.
That’s cool! My setup isn’t quite so automated, but I do like to really curate the content that’s on there. IE ensuring it has the proper codecs for audio and video, has subs, is good quality, etc. But I can download the torrent files from any device, they get sent to my seedbox via a VPN no matter where I am, then the torrent program starts downloading. Then I can just drag and drop into my plex folder, which scans every 6 hours for new stuff.
You can set up quality profiles in Radarr/Sonarr and they can get very specific through Regex. You can also set up the root folder to your Plex folder for them to get downloaded there automatically.
Piracy as a protest should be a legitimate strategy and not be illegal. There has to be some counter-measure to prevent the centralisation of ownership, the predatory and unethical practices like abuse of labour, selling shoddy or even broken products, not to mention conditioning children to become cash cows - or “whales”.
I include reverse engineering servers in that equation.
I like how they advocate piracy but show me a popup asking me to turn off my ad blocker.
