Piracy is a service problem.
I can’t imagine any company every wanting to do it the way I would want. I want a single service/platform that houses all the content, that way the experience is the same. For example I don’t know if in one app I can double tap to the right to skip ahead and does it work on the other apps as well? probably not.
Valve is a terrible company and Steam is an awful platform but their stance on piracy is why they deserve a lot of the success they get. In a day and age where everyone was trying as hard as possible to punish their userbase as much as possible for their crappy distribution model, here came a company that actually understood why people pirate in the first place and made a vast majority of the gaming population willingly download DRM then go through it to spend billions on games they will never play.
Lol the valve fanboys found this, yikes. They downvote bombed this like a game which slightly annoyed them.
Care to explain why “Valve is a terrible company” and “Steam is an awful platform”? Surely, it has tons of porn games (that you can hide), or shitty games (that is hard to sort through), or CS:GO item gambling problems (don’t really care). But I kind of fail to see how the company or the client could be fundamentally bad.
The 30% cut Steam takes is quite a bit. Considering the near-monopoly it has on game distribution, that could easily mean the difference between turning a profit and not for an indie developer.
Personally their efforts towards things I support (PC handhelds, Linux gaming) and the convenience of the platform outweigh the things I dislike, but being frustrated by its problems is understandable when people don’t really have another choice.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9aCwCKgkLo
And here are some reason I personally don’t like them:
- They routinely profit off of crime which they allow on their platforms
- Rampant white supremacy goes completely unchallenged
- Fuck all quality control
- They did NFTs before it was cool
- Will not remove hateful media off their platform unless legally forced to
- Countless of their games have ties to real life neo-nazi movements (TF2 is especially bad for this)
- Their CEO was active on 4chan when they started the company
- Predatory FOMO sales tactics which has people buying games they don’t even play
- EVERYTHING about the steam marketplace
- This point was brought up in the video, but extreme institutional racism within the company which bleeds into their games/communities
It’s always fascinated me that companies who understand their core value proposition of their business can be so fucked up in so many other ways and still succeed.
I only pirate because it is more convenient than any alternative.
The best example I experienced was when I tried to watch an apple tv original show with my cousin (who has family access to the service). He wanted to log in to his account on my laptop and needed to verify his dad’s credit card to do so. No problem, but it took a while. After that we still couldn’t watch, because the player didn’t load the video for some reason. Cue my cousin fiddling about trying to fix the issue.
In the meantime I had started to download the first two episodes and copied it on a thumb drive.
The golden age of streaming was when you could get most good or popular shows and movies on Netflix. But then, as is tradition, everyone else got greedy and decided they had to have their own streaming services. Now streaming is basically just cable TV with extra steps and the value proposition for the consumer is getting to be just as bad as it was with cable, maybe worse. There were quite a few years where I stopped pirating. I didn’t really feel like I had to. Those days are long gone. It took me five minutes to download a movie my wife asked for yesterday, from the time I punched the title into qbittorrent to the time it was playing on our TV. For me this is mostly about convenience with cost as a close second. Film studios like to whine about pirating but as far as I’m concerned they are the main cause of pirating. They make mostly shitty, overpriced content anymore and then make it so inconvenient for the rest of us to get to what little good stuff they put out. Their repeated attempts to squash pirating have not only failed, they’ve indirectly made pirating more sophisticated and increased the quality of pirated content.
Netflix cracking down on the sharers has made Netflix difficult for us non-sharers. I don’t want to watch Netflix on my phone, but I do want to curate my watch list on it. But because now there’s a limit to the number of devices you can use, we have to reserve use for the devices we use most frequently. This means that, when we fly, getting media onto the devices we use infrequently is a PITA.
It’s easier just to grab them elsewhere.
(2 ppl x 3 devices ea) + 3 other household devices > Netflix’s limit. That’s just us, and I’m being conservative… it doesn’t count desktops AND laptops. If we had kids, it’d be worse.
Some of the best piracy options might cost you… Drebid, Usenet, Private Indexers, Seedboxes. They all cost money to varying degrees.
Hell if I’m being honest with myself, I’ve sunk way more into piracy than I probably would have spent just paying for a streaming service. What with building my server and buying extra hard drives, buying blocks of data, paying for API access. That stuff can add up. I know I could do free alternatives, but I really like how I have things set up now, and I love building my media collection and sharing it with my friends and family.
I pirate movie, tv and music and pay for seedbox and spotify.
Whats your point?
This is actually a huge joke on the film and television industry. Back when Napster blew up the music industry was in a full panic that their industry would die while film and TV were cozy because the media was too large to mass-pirate compared to music.
The music guys figured it out. Cheap subscriptions with massive catalogues that don’t disappear.
Movie and TV still hasn’t figured this out.
I don’t think this lends enough credit to how centralized the music industry is and the role that plays. If you want the world’s music catalogue, you need contracts with like three companies. That level of centralization makes it straightforward to get a music catalogue going with basically everything someone might want to listen to, but it also severely hampers your ability to do anything those three companies don’t want. If anyone’s wondering why Spotify is pushing podcasts so hard, it’s because that’s the only way for them to get out from under the thumb of the few music megacorps that they have to license from to stay relevant. Spotify needs a revenue stream less dependent on the big three and it sees podcasts as its way out.
I’m sure music files being smaller and easier to pirate helped light a fire under the ass of the music industry to modernize, but that isn’t the only factor at play here and I don’t even think it’s one of the main ones. If I recall correctly, Spotify is the company who went to the music labels asking for a contract. In order to show that the tech works, they had to pirate the initial catalogue until they had deals with music labels to license the music. Spotify brought their streaming vision to the music industry, not the other way around.
I believe Netflix had a good catalogue at first because every other company was sleeping on the streaming boom that Netflix was ahead of the curve on. Netflix could get good streaming license deals because nobody really cared about this little company they’d never heard of. As soon as everyone realized what was up, they scrambled to copy Netflix and pulled their libraries to fracture the streaming space.
From the start, the music industry knew what Spotify was and could be and knew how to use their leverage to keep themselves on top (Spotify isn’t functionally allowed to be their own license for music creators, for example). I don’t think the movie streaming space realized what Netflix was until it blew up.
I don’t think the problem is that movie/tv hasn’t “figured it out.” The music space would be just as fractured if it wasn’t as centrally organized. I think the problem is that the industries are just structured really differently, so they played out really differently.
To be clear, I’m not defending the music or movie/tv industry. I just think the situations are more nuanced than “music freaked out and got their shit together and movie/tv hasn’t yet.”
idk, a debrid service is so cheap, it costs less to pay than to buy the hard drives and server + power. And it has pretty much everything already, so it’s more convenient, too.
It’s hard to justify dropping a pile of cash on 3 drives for a RAID when it will take about a decade to pay for itself vs. debrid, by which point I’ll need to replace the drives. Plus, it takes more time to set up, maintain, and load the desired media.
Isn’t that just asking for trouble? From the Real-Debrid TOS:
The User acknowledges not to use our service to download copyright infringement digital files punishable by a suspension of his account and reporting to competent organizations and authorities
Logging policy is not great:
Files links that Users download are stored in a database for legal concerns and our internal use. All saved links are erased within 1 month for security reasons and service needs. However all requests made on our site are stored for 1 year, the legal retention period.
Doesn’t look like you can sign up anonymously (unless you consider bitcoin and email anonymous, which they’re generally not).
How long until they get raided?
I suppose it depends on your jurisdiction. Uploading is what’s (potentially) illegal in Canada. Downloading is (probably) legal.
And neither have been tried by courts because mass John Doe suits have been shut down by our courts.
Regardless, the legal risk of downloading here is basically zero, so there’s effectively no risk to using a debrid service.
Doesn’t look like you can sign up anonymously (unless you consider bitcoin and email anonymous, which they’re generally not).
You can. Paysafecard bought with cash. Only issue is you have to use your normal IP to sign up with (not behind a VPN), though you could use a mobile one or a public one somewhere probably.
You could do the free wifi defense and set a super poor password and spend a month or so downloading legal stuff without a VPN before going arr using a VPN. And if someone comes knocking just say you don’t recall having a debrid account and claim you must’ve been hacked.
