The Pirates Are Back

Not a single word about the proliferation of official services recently that makes it harder to access content because unless you&#x27;re signed on with all of them (which gets expensive fast) you&#x27;re missing out on _something_ while still paying dearly for the privilege.<p>DVDs don&#x27;t require a monthly payment to remain accessible, and there&#x27;s no executive who can decide on a whim to deny access even when paying. Nobody cares that the season 1 DVDs come from studio A, while season 2-4 DVDs are from studio B. They can be shared or swapped with friends. Some DVDs are even available to loan at the public library for a modest annual membership fee (and we&#x27;re members anyway because they also have <i>gasp</i> books!)

&gt; There are two main problems with digital piracy. First, it robs the creator of their income. It’s not just big companies who suffer – the people working behind the scenes lose out too.<p>Whilst this is true, we&#x27;ve spent the last decade hearing how the intermediaries (streaming services) and media companies continually screw over artists.<p>It is more true to say any drop in revenue due to any alternative way to consume media (of which piracy is just one way) results in the _intermediaries_ seeing the biggest drop in revenue as they were the ones who took the most from the artists.<p>Perhaps if labels and studios paid artists more their argument would resonate more with the fans who consume the art.<p>The internet never did fully deliver on the dream to disintermediate the studios and labels, but there&#x27;s always a hope that there&#x27;s still time.

&gt; What is the problem?<p>&gt; There are two main problems with digital piracy. First, it robs the creator of their income. It’s not just big companies who suffer – the people working behind the scenes lose out too.<p>How risible! Over the decades we have come to learn that those who pirate are those who are willing to expend their time and use their technical competence to consume media that they otherwise wouldn&#x27;t pay for or cannot afford to begin with. Like younger folk. And the economically disadvantaged (George Carlin vocetto). A small % of the media corps&#x27; &quot;attention base.&quot;<p>It&#x27;s just a rhetorical talking point in the service of effecting leverage for the incumbents, but does the average Joe know that? And what would change if they did?<p>Now I&#x27;m falling into cynicism, albeit well founded ... Oh, let&#x27;s go devil&#x27;s advocate:<p>And what of the societal consequences of the copyrighting of what is effectively a very large number (encoded media file IP). As though ideas can be owned.

Piracy and media hoarding are also about control or at least the lack of control of streaming services.<p>So, here in the UK, we more or less have to pay the BBC license fee if we want to use a TV service, and so we pay for the BBC&#x27;s programming and they put some of their stuff onto iPlayer (their streaming service). However, iPlayer often time limits programmes (30 days is common) and there&#x27;s a lot of older stuff that isn&#x27;t available on there, but is available on torrents or sometimes people upload old obscure stuff to YouTube.<p>Once I&#x27;ve downloaded something away from the official BBC iPlayer service, I can keep it for as long as I like and it doesn&#x27;t matter if it&#x27;s obscure.<p>With other streaming services, there&#x27;s a focus on popularity and so less popular products either never get added or get removed. I worry that this is going to lead to the cultural disappearance of many older films and TV.<p>That article is very poorly written or at least it just regurgitates the fallacies from the big media companies. Piracy is most definitely not &quot;stealing&quot; as copying doesn&#x27;t deprive the owner of their copy. They just wish to impose artificial scarcity to increase their profits and to wield control over their customers e.g. region locking

The article seems out of touch when it comes to the causation...<p>&gt; The EUIPO speculates that financial pressures, like inflation, means that people have less money to spend on entertainment.<p>I cancelled Netflix because of the drop in quality of the content over the years. It just isn&#x27;t worth it to keep it around for the few shows which are decent. I don&#x27;t pirate, I have other hobbies, but I could imagine many people in the same circumstance would pirate content to catch a good show. This is doubly true of movie geeks that would subscribe to multiple streaming services at once to get their content.<p>This feels akin to Chrystia Freeland saying families should cut a $8 streaming subscription to balance their budgets... during a COL crisis where people are spending &gt;$3000 a month for basics.

&gt;The EUIPO speculates that financial pressures, like inflation, means that people have less money to spend on entertainment. This can be seen in the way that fewer people are signing up for Netflix or Amazon Prime – and some are even cancelling their subscriptions altogether.<p>This does play a part, but I&#x27;d wager that a larger part of piracy becoming more attractive is these services becoming more expensive (I really doubt that in this case its inflation...), while they have less to offer. And that you now need accounts with multiple streaming services to watch all the popular shows. And then also a crack-down on account sharing started happening. It shouldn&#x27;t come as a surprise that piracy is becoming popular again.

My biggest beef with streaming services—-and I have a few—-is privacy. I know I’m in the minority here, but I just can’t accept someone keeping a record of everything I’ve ever watched, read, or listened to.

&quot;The emergence of streaming services like Netflix, Apple Music and Spotify make it easy to access unlimited content – and ensure that artists are paid for their creations.&quot;<p>That&#x27;s laughable.

While the article suggests the increase is due to external pressures (e.g. inflation meaning that people have less to spend on entertainment), something that I&#x27;ve noticed over the past couple of years in my neck of the woods is an increase in the cost of streaming services. When you throw in the proliferation of streaming services with exclusive content, which has been happening for several years, I&#x27;m not terribly surprised that people would be trying to cut costs.

The UX of a single torrent tracker is better than needing umpteen streaming services. No brainer.

Not terribly surprising, given that you now need to subscribe to like 5-10 streaming services with regularly increasing prices, as opposed to maybe 2 a few years ago, to get the same content.

With streaming prices increasing and also fragmenting it&#x27;s not suprising.

This is an &quot;antivirus software&quot; company article, thus using language to spread fear, the infamous FUD. There&#x27;s many issues in the article so I flagged it, to name few:<p>&gt; &quot;stealing digital content&quot;<p>Most of the definitions for &quot;steal&quot; involve the word &quot;property&quot; in the way that you deprive the owner of their property. When someone steals something, the owner loses that exact thing. This is not true when <i>copying</i> digital content. Some studies have found that in some cases, piracy can even enhance legit sales, which makes this even fall apart further &quot;he stole $10 from me so I ended up $50 richer&quot; doesn&#x27;t make any sense, does it?<p>&gt; &quot;content that should be paid for.&quot;<p>Who decides what content should be paid for? &quot;Okay guys, you should all pay me for all my tweets. Oh and since you are technically &#x27;downloading&#x27; them by reading them, pay up a fine&quot; would def not fly, so this definition holds water.<p>And even if we go to a more practical approach where we imagine copyright holders, international licensing deals, etc. are <i>no problem at all</i> (which they are), copyright law still varies greatly from country to country for different reasons, for example in most countries you can copy a small part of whatever content you want for educational purposes (not-profit), or e.g. critique, even if the author or copyright owner vehemently oppose it.

EUIPO concluded that there is an inverse correlation between the consumption of legal and pirated content. During the COVID-19 pandemic, legal content consumption increased and pirated content consumption decreased. This suggests that people who feel that the price is too high for a service they do not use for a long time are consuming TV shows and other content through illegal streaming or torrents.

Piracy is almost always a service problem.

Funny how they recognize a cause of decrese (easy and affordable licensed access) but don&#x27;t recognize it&#x27;s becoming less easy and less affordable.<p>They also recognize a cause of increase (less disposable income due to inflation) but don&#x27;t recognize the solution (reduce prices, increase value) instead threaten with increasing prices which will just cause a negative feedback loop.<p>But I&#x27;m sure they&#x27;ll soon demand the &quot;big government&quot; to &quot;meddle in the free market&quot; by implementing freedom and privacy distroying monitoring and evforcement in order to protect their government enforced monopoly.<p>Or, you know, they could just do what the music and game industries have done (offer convinient, affordable access) and stop being assholes.

They say:<p>&gt; New subscription services make it easier for people to access whatever digital content they want, when they want it. And because these services are relatively affordable, more people are choosing to pay for content.<p>And then they say:<p>&gt; hopefully this is just a ‘blip’ and rates of theft begin to fall again as the economy recovers. &gt; &gt; If not, we can expect to see legal channels raising their prices again to cover the losses caused by piracy.<p>I don&#x27;t know what to tell you, content providers. Maybe you&#x27;ll figure it out someday.

I don’t see what the problem is.<p>well actually I do. The problem lies within ourselves. If you cannot access the media, why not just not watch it? I know it’s hard because of our addictions and boredom, but that is an option.<p>The reason why these companies can keep charging higher and higher prices and keep giving less and less quality service is because of our addiction.

The top 10 countries for inflation and piracy have only a few outliers.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dataprot.net&#x2F;statistics&#x2F;piracy-statistics&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dataprot.net&#x2F;statistics&#x2F;piracy-statistics&#x2F;</a>

Yeah, my 32TB Plex library that I can stream native blu-ray quality in my home is gonna win out every time. When I travel I just take my AppleTV and VPN back to watch &#x2F; download literally any piece of media I want.<p>On a related note, I&#x27;ve also been building an offline cache of the internet, basically any web resources that I bookmark (blog &#x2F; youtube &#x2F; a few others) will automatically get indexed and stored locally.

We never left.

Boys are back in town