The headline they want you to read: “zomg these master criminals were causing billions in damages!!!1!1”
The headline everyone else reads: “lmao piracy run by a couple random schmucks has an infinitely better service AND content selection than any corporate streaming service”
Maybe those services could take a hint and create a unified platform where each partner gets a cut depending on % of their content watched.
Like early Netflix before they all decided they would make their own shitty streaming services and didn’t renew contracts.
Let me take this opportunity to get on my soapbox to sat this:
Peacock Sucks Ass
NBC / Universal were one of the first movers in streaming with Seeso. Did they learn lessons from Seeso about how to run a good streaming service? No they abandoned it almost immediately basically saying “this whole streaming thing is just a fad, anyway”
The results? Now its hard to watch those old (genuinely excellent) Seeso shows, and NBC / Universal has managed to make itself late to the streaming party when they were a first actor. And the service itself? Ass. Total cheeks. Major butt. Absolute balloon knot. It always has technical issues AND scanning within an episode is hard because it doesn’t do it in chunks, it acts like a slider in constant motion.
Conclusion: don’t look at Peacock as the idiot child of the streaming landscape. View it as the logical conclusion to media companies’ corporate greed. They want you to pay money for a service that sucks, that’s chock full of ads (oh! That’s another thing. Where do you get off showing me three minutes of ads, Peacock, who do you think you are?), and doesn’t even work decently right while a lot of these UX problems have been solved for over two decades (DVD scanning is easy and fine).
There’s a very functional middle ground between all in one cable, and a hundred different services.
Yeah. We were there! Or close enough… It was a glorious week where everything lined up perfectly… Then we overshot and we are in this clusterfuck of nonsense.
No there isn’t. Companies are incentivised to extract as much money as possible from any given buyer. There is never a “this is enough money, I won’t charge you more” situation. Inevitably every buyer will become a non-buyer, because they were outpriced.
Competition should solve this issue, but it doesn’t work in media because there’s no two rights holders for star wars content, or marvel content, or whatever. So services cannot compete on the same content, because the rights holders simply won’t let them.
Copyright is a pest.
That was the original idea behind Hulu.
But Netflix had a much better UX and ate their lunch.
That and Disney decided they wanted to break (sorry. Let me use the business terms. “Disrupt”) the market by having a vertical integration of streaming platform and production company. The thing is, it did great for the in the short term, but may have harmed them long term. Meanwhile everyone else is now chasing the model that may actually be losing Disney money because short term greed is the only driver in our economy
Wow, it’s really hard to imagine the deep societal harm done by these five people. And you do have to imagine it because it doesn’t exist.
Mentally translating this as: Competition from the free market unfairly prosecuted by a tyrannical state that enforces the monopoly of “intellectual property” of corporations
This is insane. This does not warrant a 48 year sentence; some actual rapists and murderers get off for less time. The “justice” system is a joke and doesn’t prosecute criminals. It prosecutes those that threaten the system.
Sentencing hasn’t happened yet; 48 years is the maximum, according to the article.
Whatever the sentence is will be ridiculous since it’s just copyright infringement, but hopefully the sentencing goes to a small fraction of the maximum.
The group used “sophisticated computer scripts” and software to scour piracy services
that’s way too fancy talk for these programs LOL
