It’s sad that these people got taken down. Maybe the next people to do it will do it from a country that does not have extradition with the United States, so they would be safe.
Edit: As for payment providers attempting to take such a service down, Monero would be the answer to this.
“The group used “sophisticated computer scripts” and software to scour piracy services”
They used the basic tools that most(?) pirates use today like sonarr and radar??
I don’t mind people pirating…i do mind people pirating and profiting from redistribution.
redistribution = service?
Why would they work for free?
Not gonna pretend like this aint illegal but i don’t cry over some IP owners losing money… EVER, fuck 'em
Oh I don’t care that the IP owner don’t get money.
IDK, I just don’t like the ethics of pirating media for profit, the entire idea is that it should be accessible to everyone, not just those with money. Cover your operational cost? Sure…Making millions in subscriptions? That is an asshole move IMO. If you’re paying, you might as well pay the people who are making the media in the first place instead of some rando that had nothing to do with it.
This doesn’t seem that different from paying for usenet. It’s not like they’re making DVDs of pirated movies and selling them on the street corner; they were basically just aggregating content and the service they were providing was making it easily searchable and accessible, not doing the actual pirating, from the sound of it, unless I’m misunderstanding the situation.
Guessing they used Sonarr, Radarr, qBittorrent, maybe an NZB client…
Would you look at that, I’m sophisticated now.
My guess is because they did all the pirating for you so you didn’t have to worry about dealing with the technical hurdles of doing so.
If a service like this came around that allowed me to pay with Monero and did not require any personally identifiable information, I would totally fucking use it.
Because all the legal services are incredibly anti-consumer and are offering less services, with (more) ads, for more money every year.
The entire system exists for the benefit of business, not customers.
Just look at what happens with accused theft in a store. You get accused of theft? Cops are there in no time, take you to the ground, throw you in the back of the cop car. only after they’ve gotten the humiliation and brutalization in might someone come and take your proof that you didnt steal anything.
You accuse the store of stealing from you? Due to not following their own policy on returns, or overcharging and an item and not fixing it Police won’t even show. just tell you its a civil matter and to suck it up.
I dont subscribe to any streaming service (except the occasional free prime trial, to be full disclosure), not even the one in the news story… but I can still answer your question…
Because I want to pay a single service to watch everything. Like Netflix used to be. Watch everything I want, for one monthly price that was reasonable.
But its not like that anymore. Every company looked at how well Netflix used to do, went “Fuck them! I want all that money for my self!” and took their content off Netflix, and made their own streaming services.
Now if you want to consume any media, You have to subscribe to 50 different subscription services, for hundreds of dollars a month, Which is just Cable 2.0 but with worse service and options.
Pirating implies some knowledge and effort some people may not have or want to get into
Paid Legal services are so enshitified some people may think they are getting ripped up
Paid illegal services are often HUGE bang for buck value (no enshitification, no limits, no nonsense and often better customer service)
Because the legal options are garbage.
The pirates provide a better service with more content for cheaper than the legal options; and pirating yourself takes effort as well as cost (hardware, trackers, usenet, etc).
Some people are happy to just pay for decent service; others like to learn about the process, then setup and run their own servers.
To each their own.
In addition to other things people responded with, piracy services tend to not collect users data or prevent us from watching with a VPN enabled.
or prevent us from watching with a VPN enabled.
Man this one chaff’s me the most. I way a paying Netflix customer like 8 years ago. I had IPv6 setup as a 6rd tunnel through HE (Hurricane Electric) because my ISP didn’t offer IPv6. Netflix treated that as a VPN and blocked me as a paying customer… Even though I lived/payed from the same fucking locale. It’s not like I was using a VPN to bypass a Geoblock. I was just making IPv6 available to myself. I cancelled because of that. You do not get to tell me how I access the internet at large, especially when I’m not even being shady about it.
183,200 TV episodes is pretty modest compared to alternative “non-approved” sources.
One datapoint is one source (that has a rule against any TV/show content released in the last 5 years) has a total number of 19.5K shows and TV movies/specials, with ~80 K releases. For many shows a single release can be a full season.
