The people who create these services will always be more clever and quick to implement workarounds than politicians. It’s a futile battle.
Want to avoid piracy? Make getting things easier and more convenient.
Back when Netflix was £5-10 depending on tier, had a load of content, and an account could be shared between a few trusted people, I practically gave up pirating. Now it’s £18 per month for 4K (and due to rise), and doesn’t have those other positives going for it, I’ve abandoned it in favour of Radarr+Sonarr+Plex, and am having a better experience.
For video games, I predominantly buy from Steam, because it’s a good service, and so far I have not seen any evidence that Valve are going to fuck me over. They’ve made gaming and all the things ancillary to it a lot more convenient. So I happily pay. If they embrace enshittification, guess what I’ll do?
The only games I do pirate are Nintendo/Sega games that haven’t been sold in decades. Why? Because there’s no feasible other way to buy them and keep them!
I don’t pirate music because Spotify. For all the issues I have with it (and boy do I have a few), it still has almost every song I search for, is fairly priced, and hasn’t clamped down on account sharing in the same way Netflix/Disney/etc have. I’m part of a family where we split the cost. All the music I could possibly want for £2.20 per month? Fine by me! If that goes away, I go away, yarr harr.
Not to mention Valve spearheaded major development for making Linux gaming like 200% better than it used to be, with development of Proton and everything, and giving all those work back to the entire gaming community as open source products entirely for free, bring in momentum for an entire industry.
That’s a company you support.
I’m so fucking glad Valve isn’t beholden to shareholders.
We only pirate TV because it’s easier and cheaper. If you actually had a catch all service (like old Netflix) for a low price, people would stop. Oh wait, we had that but greed got in the way again…
I used to be perfectly happy with Netflix and Google music + YouTube Red, but corporations were too greedy
I now use a mix of free Kodi TV, patched YouTube apps, rip music off tidal, and self host media on a lifetime premium Plex server.
As has often been reiterated: piracy is a service problem. If what you get by paying more is an inferior service, then people don’t want to pay for that service.
100% true, haven’t pirated a single game since I started using Steam and actually having a paycheck since about 10 years ago
They don’t care. They don’t want to innovate, they want to force you to pay them for nothing in return.
This falls under enshitification, no?
Yes
Why just pay one service a small fee for ad free streaming, when you can pay a lot of services a large fee for ad supported streaming?
Just you wait till you see the arr stack (radarr, sonarr, lidarr, etc.)
I tried Lidarr but I find that it is inconsistent enough that it is just a find-and-grab utility for me.
I much prefer ripping tidal tracks on my phone using a tidal-dl in termix and then just using a ftp to my Pi when I get home
… You know that feeling when you get nerd sniped. 😭
FWIW, Lidarr works the worst out of the arr stack for me too. I don’t know if there’s just not enough well indexed material in my sources or what, but yeah, not great.
If your entire experience with the arr stack has been Lidarr so far, give it another shot! Sonarr and Radarr work absolutely perfectly. It’s just such a nice feeling to open Jellyfin (or I guess Plex) on the TV and go “oh nice new episode is out!”
If you’re in a private tracker like RED or OPS it works very well, but I agree that public trackers are not well indexed enough
I don’t really watch TV much in the first place of my own choice. A few things my partner wants to watch but that’s about it. Music I get download with yt-dpl -x, I think that was it anyway as I set an alias for it
I miss my $8 a month google music + YouTube red… I wonder if people got to keep the legacy price for YouTube premium
If you actually had a catch all service
I believe this used to be called cable tv.
But before you reply, yeah, I know cable didn’t get everything. And you had to pay extra for Disney, HBO, etc. And on top of the exorbitant price there were always tons of commercials. That’s all true.
But I do remember a time right around 2005, when everyone was saying “if only there were a-la-carte options, for people who only want sports, or only want movies”. My point being, there’s no winning and the grass is always greener somewhere.
And for what it’s worth, I basically agree with you. I use Plex, I have a few friends who also run Plex servers and we all share content. That’s the best catch all I’ve ever found.
The problem with cable was it was not on demand and contained ads.
I would never, ever pay for cable even in today’s world if it was $10 a month because of the overwhelming amount of ads.
Make something people want to buy. That will help more.
EDIT On the anime and manga. Quite a few Japanese companies don’t or refuse to officially release stuff in the west. Most of the ones who do, get fucked with by bad localizers.
It’s crazy that Netflix originally knew this back in the 2010s. Somehow, over the years, they managed to forget this little nugget of wisdom.
They didn’t forget, they simply became big enough they can act like every other corporation.
I started using pirated software in 1990, back when my first PC was gifted to me. All software I had was copied because I could not afford jack shit on my own. It is thanks to pirated (and open source) software that I have the career I have, and can afford to spend thousands of dollars on legitimate software, music, movies, books, etc.
Provide product people want and prices they can afford, and they’ll buy them rather than pirate them. Don’t persecute consumers of pirated products and most of them will eventually purchase legally.
It’s like Gabe said (paraphrased): “Piracy is a service problem, not a pricing problem.”
Make it easy to buy stuff and people will. But the more barriers you put up, the more people will pirate. Granted, there are persons like you (and I counted among those at one point) who cannot afford things from time-to-time, but we’re a minority. Every game I’ve ever pirated from those days I have made sure to purchase once I was able to.
Make it available for easy purchase and people will buy it.
I still usually pirate when buying requires jumping through too many hoops. Being in a sanctioned country, ahem, adds some just impractical to go through.
Make it easy to buy stuff and people will.
In case you haven’t worked it out by now, the following advice may be of help:
They’re not gonna do that
Sure they are, one they figure out it how.
Don’t copy that floppy!
I got my first computer, an Apple II, back in the 1980s as a hand-me-down from my (much older) brother when he left for college and I was just 6.
All but one disk was pirated.
Good luck, especially if they try to ban people from ripping their CDs to FLAC as well, like, how would you even find out if someone is doing that, for instance?
Unless you somehow force a backdoor into rippers like Exact Audio Copy, CUERipper, or Whipper, the latter two being OSS, you can’t.
Even SCMS never phoned home to anyone simply because the capability to do that didn’t exist yet when that copy protection scheme was first implemented, and it only applied to dubbing a CD over to DAT, MD, or DCC over S/PDIF on consumer gear.
Sony decided to put rootkits on their CDs to stop people from ripping them. They got sued for that.
And you still can’t stop someone just playing it and recording the audio from outside of the VM.
fre:ac is an open source alternative to EAC and is actually way better, in my opinion.
Whipper is pretty much a text-based clone of EAC.
That sounds cool as hell. I might try it out but I don’t see myself switching software. I love cli tools.
It’s only on Linux though, for Windows, CUETools and CUERipper are some of the most powerful OSS tools for ripping CDs you can get.
I haven’t used Windows in a couple of years. I use Arch btw.
“Effectively kill piracy” - Sure guys, this time it’ll work.
It is impossible to ban piracy. The whole concept is that it’s not legal to begin with.
I bet Lars Ulrich is so proud that he killed music piracy back when he killed napster.
Except wait…no he didn’t he killed A service. Meaning singular. The concept of piracy moved on. We got limewire and torrents.
The ONLY thing that has slowed (if not stopped) music piracy is making the content readily and easily available in a convienent consumption method at a reasonable price.
Shocking, I know.
The invention of iTunes CHARGING money for music in a (at the time) new more convienent method of music consumption at a reasonable price did leaps and bounds more to destroy piracy than Napsters downfall ever could.
Now if only video services would learn this lession. Because it’s the same lession. I don’t know how they missed the memo on this.
Put your video in one centralized place. Make it hassle free to watch. Charge a reasonable price. Piracy dies overnight.
And just to prove it, show of hands. Who here would go through the effort and risk of pirating, if Netflix had everything you wanted to watch, for $5 a month? Who here would say no, and still pirate? Reply below and tell me if you would still pirate with those conditions?
But instead, netflix is pushing $20 a month, and the video hosting is fractured among multiple hosts, all of which overcharge, AND want to serve ads.
Oh hey, right on cue. It’s a skull and bones flag approaching.
I would still pirate. I like to have the files instead of proprietary apps
What if they gave you the files, with an easy download button ( with rate limits on downloads per user to avoid mass abuse )? Then, Netflix is basically providing a debrid service, which many people who pirate already pay more than 5$ for. Your VPN for torrenting is likely more than 5$. It’s already trivially easy to rip a movie off a website ( even with DRM ), so this is not a real content control loss for them.
If they offered a service like GOG for movies I think it would be worth it. I don’t have much time for movies though so I actually will buy several films a year on UHD Blu-ray. I only really pirate films that are either out of print or not available in my country on disc.
Funilly enough as somebody who has been using the Internet since being a working class teen in a poor European nation in the early 90s and thus knowing all about pirating, GoG is what made me stop pirating games (and even after they came up with GoG Galaxy I still kept downloading offline installers, plus my purchases in Steam have always been pretty limited in comparison to those in GoG exactly because in Steam my access to install a game can be removed at any time) whilst things like Netflix never stopped my pirating of Movies and TV-Series exactly because it was a streaming service which I would have to pay forever to maintain access to the Films and Series I liked rather than a Film and Series store were I could buy to keep (and, adding to this, during the peak period of VHS tapes and DVDs I actually did buy a lot of physical media).
Anecdotal, I know, but it’s funny that my behaviour over the years almost perfect matches what you describe.
I want to like GoG but their Linux support can be pretty awful at times. It took over a week for X4 to update the Linux version on GoG compared to steam that in the end I refunded it and bought on steam. Also proton is pretty nice to have.
Yeah, GoGo need to improve their Linux support since at the moment they seem to just “go along with it” without putting any effort into it
That said, with stuff like Lutris (can only speak of that since I never used Heroic) which can use GoG’s API to access your account and download games and has GoG-specific install scripts, it’s also a reasonably seamless experience to game in Linux from GoG and none of it is tied to a proprietary vendor solution like Steam + Proton, so it’s a lot more flexible and friendly for those who want to do their own tweaking - for example all my games in Lutris run sandboxed using firejail for extra security and blocking network access, but I can’t do that for Steam.
GoG is pretty much a totally open solution (you need not use their API and can just download an offline installer and install it however you see fit) whilst Steam is tracking and controlling your installs, game launching and in some cases game playing, so that means gaming with Steam is much more tightly coupled to both their code and their servers and thus Steam is always going to be more ill-fitted to the traditional hacker ethos in Linux than GoG.
Finally, keep in mind that Steam’s enhanced Linux support is just a natural consequence of their strategy of trying to protect themselves from any Microsoft funny business with Windows by creating their own Windows-independent ecosystem, with Linux being a natural shortcut to do so cheaply.
Oh I would prefer to use GoG, the problem is that it up just isnt so good. But been playing FOSS games a bit lately so haven’t been using either.
Same tbh. I like having a hard data copy of the things I enjoy, and have pride in my offline music library, which has been neatly filed with all the proper metadata tagged on. Now I can boot up Audacious (Linux) or MusicBee (Windows) and pick the genre I’m feeling that day. Or I can go out for a walk with one of the iPods I’ve restored and leave my phone at home.
Yep exactly.
They’ve pushed 6+ services now so it cost that cable used to so people are unsubbing and “cutting the cord” again
About 10 years ago, I signed up for a seedbox for torrenting purposes. USD 15/month, which was roughly the same as Netflix at the time. Since then, Netflix has repeatedly raised prices, dropped content, and added ads. On the other hand, I’m still paying $15/month for that seedbox, and they’ve upgraded my storage capacity and bandwidth allotment multiple times.
Just a subscription that had most of the things and wasn’t a straight up abusive experience would be worth a hell of a lot more than $5. Too bad it will never happen.
You mean it won’t happen again. Netflix’s goal was never to be good. It was to disrupt the industry. And they’ve succeeded; which is why everything sucks and piracy is a better option once again.
I would pay for the sub, but still seed for my friends in poorer countries where $5 USD is a hell of a lot of money.
I gind it kind of ironic that if the streaming services were federated and your subscription applied proportionally to the services where you watched different shows this problem would solve itself
I remember as kids we shared music by Bluetooth or copying files on a memory stick. You are not stopping that.
I would still pirate — but most normie pirates wouldn’t.
…but why?
Why would I spend money on proprietary software that tracks me and sells my data when it’s trivially easy for me to set up a FOSS alternative and actually own the video files myself.
I’m not rich, in fact I’m under the poverty line, even 5$ a month adds up for me. I see no reason to pay to be tracked.
Word… this is why I used spotify for a long time, when it used to be a good service… pirating wasn’t worth the hassle.
now almost everything is worth the hassle
Video services involve bigger files, subtitles availability, streaming load less evenly spread over hours.
But I personally think there are ways involving chunk encryption (one key for many users for the same chunk, but not the same key for everyone ; obviously in the end it’s decrypted and decoded at user’s machine, so opportunity for piracy is not avoidable) and something like bittorrent to make commercial video streaming both convenient for users and not such a technical challenge for distributors.
Yeah because pirates are notorious for giving up immediately when you make their jobs a little harder.
Oh. Making something illegal illegal again? That’ll be effective.
If you read the bill, heavily sponsored by the MPA, part of it is about forcing ISPs (and presumably US based VPNs) to block the DNS/URLs of “foreign criminal” sites.
It’s laying the groundwork for a Great American Firewall.
Freedomwall
Wouldn’t be the first wall he put up in the name of freedom
If you use a US-based VPN, you fucked up yourself.
Viva la Mullvad. I was sick of being bullied into buying more to get a deal. It may not be the cheapest, but I love that it’s the same price across the board.
Plus, the only way you’re going to get anything cheaper is by locking into a 1-3 year plan when you may not even need it every month.
I’m locked into ExpressVPN for a year but I was thinking about switching to Mullvad shortly. ExpessVPN isn’t bad but being in the British Virgin Islands does give me a bit of anxiety.
So many long games are being played now, it’s like everything is laying groundwork for something else. Would be nice for laws to just do what they do.
DoH!
It’s a slippery slope. Soon they will make doing illegal things a crime.
But not if they’re the ones doing the illegal stuff, apparently.
Brb connecting to a Chinese VPN so I can access content outside of the US Firewall.
They could take it a step further and threaten penalties for doing illegal things.
It’ll be super duper illegal
You can’t legislate piracy away…
But they can make up excuses for their arsenal for whenever they want to ban a site they don’t like from common eyes.
“It was banned because it was pornography”
“It was banned because it was displaying pirated content”
“It was banned because it harmed the public good”
They want control over what the common people can see, hear, say, and think.
Yeah, but for every dictator there’s countless intelligent revolutionaries. Especially when it comes to the internet.
They’re really shooting themselves in the foot trying to deny us/force overcharge the very thing they use to make us complacent in the first place: media.
If they were smart they’d ignore this bill. It would just bring attention to their attempt to essentially seize the internet and for what? For us just to get around it again anyway?
Not to mention if they enforce US VPNs to conform it’ll just result in more currency leaving the country. No wonder this fucking floundering economy is all our fault.
Governing is like holding a marble to the table with your thumb. The more you press down, the more likely that marble is to shoot out and break your shit.
Sounds like their strategy is to force US companies to block access to piracy sites.
I already run my torrent client through a non-US VPN so this can literally be bypassed by adding this to my prowlarr docker compose:
network_mode: service:gluetun
What VPN do you recommend?
I don’t really have a recommendation atm, I used to use mullvad but for torrenting I feel like the lack of port forwarding (once they removed that feature) was hurting my ability to seed so I switched to proton. I also recently added Usenet into my mix and since many providers bundle a VPN subscription - and mine in particular supposedly also supports port forwarding (usenetdirect bundles a ghost path VPN subscription), I’m gonna try to get it to work with that so I don’t have to pay for a VPN separately but I haven’t tried it yet.
gluetun works with any openvpn provider. i prefer proton as ive already got a ton of mail services through them… the vpn is basically a freebie.
I have had pretty good luck with airvpn, but the ultimate is mullvad as I understand it, though relatively speaking it is much more expensive than airvpn.
Thank you, I’ve been using my own docker image that adds in the PIA scripts and creates a Dante SOCKS5 server which works decently but I’d like something a bit more provider agnostic in case I want to change.
Do they not know the concept of piracy? That’s like Walmart and Target backing a new bill to stop shoplifting.
They could just make a better service. Between the password sharing, and everything being scattered everywhere, what did they expect? I’m going to pay for half a dozen services and still not get to watch what I want? Or I may be able to watch it and pay for the privilege to see ubskippable ads? You can only beat us with so many sticks before we stop feeling it. Come back with a carrot.
It’s much harder when all your ISPs and the world’s largest DNS resolvers block the IPs or resolving the DNS, which is what this dystopian bill proposes. Make no mistake, this is Orwellian censorship masquerading as piracy protection.
Been sailing the seas since 98. No intention of stopping. One thing I can promise is that you can’t stop it.
Pirates always…uh…find a way.
In fact, when streaming services came out and were super affordable, it actually became a bit harder to find pirated movies/shows because people actually opted for the legal option. If the government wants to pull this garbage, it’ll just bring many back into the fold and make it easier for me to sail the seas.
But wouldn’t that go against freedom of expression and the internet?
Freedom of expression for the corporations you know the “people” who matter?
It might. If it causes undue burden on ISPs or services like Cloudflare, for example, the law will probably be scrapped by some part of Congress or a judge.
And even if it somehow survives all of that, a VPN with a server in another country will make this bill pointless.
The current administration is seemingly trying to kill the very concept of free speech and expression.
They already banned pornhub and pornographers. Fascists are going to fash.
I’m curious how effective those bans have been. Is free porn difficult to access in states that have added verification laws or has it only affected the larger players that get attention while the ones that most people don’t usually think immediately of fly under the radar?
You hit the nail on the head, it’s just the biggest sites
Someone I know told me their usual site is no verification, but sometimes finding content through Google on the big sites triggers an ID verification.
