Technology

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.

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.

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.

"Effectively kill piracy" - Sure guys, this time it'll work.

Oh no!

Anyway.

Yeah because pirates are notorious for giving up immediately when you make their jobs a little harder.

They already banned pornhub and pornographers. Fascists are going to fash.

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.

This is dumb considering that these types of streaming sites are how I actually discover anime and become a fan enough that i want to purchase merch. I pay for Crunchy Roll, but sometimes I want to check out stuff from other services. If I had to rely sheerly on legal services I wouldn't watch or discover half of what I did.

Legal services are also pretty inferior. I wanted to watch A certain Scientific Railgun.. Season 1 was dubbed, but season 2 on the service wasn't... I literally had to track it down on some streaming site to get access to what I'm paying for.

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

This is why you run servers outside of five eye countries

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.

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.

But wouldn't that go against freedom of expression and the internet?

This is a huge deal.

More people should be fighting this.

Giving this much power to corporations isn't right.

If all else, copyright owners of any media should have the same power so they can effective end AI from stealing their content.

Aren't most torrent sites not based in the US to begin with?

I am quite fond of Nyaa :3

There's a part of me that has become annoyed that i'm forced to pay for a vpn to now access the entirety of the internet. I don't blame the vpn provider, though. --Nope, they are not the ones I blame...