How are we all feeling about piracy these days?
So with the Paramount acquisition, all the new HP content, and the general state of both TV and Movie ownership are people returning to the high seas?
I was an eager participant of the first and second wave of piracy in the early and late 00s, and considering the re-consolidation of the entertainment industry and the seemingly nefarious acquisitions of late, I am considering hoisting the black flag once again. I guess this post has two objectives: 1. how are other people navigating our changing media landscape, and 2. for those who have stayed immersed in piracy or have returned to it how have things changed in the last decade or so. Obviously Megavideo and Putlocker are no more, so are there directions to point folks who are just getting back to it. This can be streaming, torrenting, anything really.
Caveat: Let's not even give the horrible human that is JK airtime. I mentioned HP because folks might want to indulge without supporting but if we can keep the discussion to piracy that would be awesome!
*cough*
Yeah that service seems to be pretty good for just streaming movies/shows if that's what you want. I've tried it and it's not terribly difficult to set up and it's got just about anything.
Personally, I already invested in storage and whatnot many years ago and I just prefer to download the content that I want, so I just go with Usenet and Sonarr/Radarr setup and supplement that with a semi-private torrent site. I mostly like to watch my go to media and perhaps some new stuff here or there, so it makes sense for me to just download and keep what I want. Does come in handy on occasion when I don't have internet access, or good internet access anyhow, as I still have access to the content I want.
I'd also strongly suggest if you're getting into any of this, for simplicity you may be better off getting a cheap Android TV box. The Walmart ONN 4k versions in the past were the best deal around, but they recently retired a lineup of those and are just beginning to replace them with new versions which I suspect will be slightly higher priced and verdict is out on the quality of the hardware itself compared to the past lineup. I believe the service mentioned in the linked post (not mentioning the name directly in my comment in case for whatever reason Deimos ends up deleting various posts/comments because this topic is iffy to discuss on here).
The reason for Android TV is that you can sideload on it, and Amazon is cracking down on sideloading some apps on Fire devices, and eventually they're moving the OS away from Android, or something along those lines. Naturally, piracy apps and such may lend towards being banned from official app stores, which is where Android TV boxes are more useful than others. It's also the case that if you're not a multi-billion dollar corporation building a streaming app, you probably don't want to invest resources into building apps for every single smart TV and platform out there, Android TV ends up being a decent baseline for app developers to target.
Hey, so I've been really looking into this lately. Even more now with streaming services raising their prices to be greedy more and more.
Do I need a dedicated PC? Would it make it easier? I have one sitting around that's not too old since I upgraded recently.
Nope, it's entirely cloud-based. Once you set up the back end, you can generally install the Stremio client on a desktop, tablet, phone, streaming stick, or smart TV, and everything will sync to your account. Some platforms/devices make this more difficult than others (you have to jailbreak Amazon Fire TV sticks for ex, which takes about 20 minutes), but apart from totally locked-down vendors like Roku, there's usually a way to install Stremio or another app that can plug into the Real Debrid backend.
one of the other benefits of the Android TV boxes like NVIDIA Shield TV Pro, Onn, and Homatics is that they take care of some of the UI / UX things you would have to figure out for a PC.
A lot of things would be pretty easy to figure out, but it's one less thing to worry about. Stuff like a TV like remote control, what do you see when you turn it on, what does it look like to find, navigate through, and play the stuff you want to see or listen to? How do you watch YT without ads?
It's not that difficult on PC, especially with cross platform software like Stremio and Kodi, and keyboard + mouse + TV remote will be fine.
But for me, even as someone who likes to tinker with stuff, I found the user experience and workflow much easier with an Android TV box.
Much much easier for anyone else that comes over that wants to use it - mostly just point and click.
For ebooks, it is literally a faster and better experience to pull them off of libgen (or worse case, zlibrary or Anna's Archive) than deal with buying them from Amazon, though that's half because I share an Amazon account, and for some bizzare reason, Amazon won't let you pick your payment method if what you are buying is an ebook. There are so many books I have read that I never, ever would have touched if I had needed to pay for them first. And many I paid for afterwards 🤷‍♀️.
With Audiobookshelf, hosting and obtaining the the media is a bit of a pain (I mostly torrent from audiobookbay), but in exchange, I get to have it organized, catalogued, tagged and exactly as I like it, using my preferred covers, whatever. If I ever have the time, I'm going to go through my whole library there and grab epubs for everything too.
I do a decent amount of scientific paper piracy. Of course, there is Sci-hub, but that only covers papers up to 2022-ish. Anything after that is a pain... There is this very weird forum-like website where you can request papers with a bounty of "points", and you get some points by clicking a button each day (enough for 3 or so papers) . I would have to dig through my bookmarks to remember the name. I only really need it for papers that are both paywalled and don't have a preprint available now. Thankfully, papers just straight up being open access is getting more common.
Turns out pirating the shit out of things turns the dial a good bit. Especially since, best I can tell, the actual researchers hate dealing with paygates.
Actual researchers often have to pay the publisher to make their papers open access.
No they don't. It comes from the grant money and the bureaucracy takes care of that. But getting bureaucracy purchase access to every single article you want to read (that the bulk subscription does not cover) is basically impossible. Hence piracy.
My comment was referencing a specific thing called Open Access publishing, in which research is made available to readers at no cost. So-called "gold" open access, in which the final article is immediately made available freely on publication, involves the author paying an article publishing charge. Elsevier's APCs range from $200 to $11,400. These costs are usually but not necessarily always covered by grants, and even when they are covered by grant money, grant money is reauired to cover a wide variety of things including often researchers' salaries, so the opportunity cost of expending grant money on it is real. It absolutely isn't the case that some abstract bureaucracy "takes care of" it, and there are absolutely cases in which researchers personally pay APCs because otherwise tbe article won't get published -- this is a particular risk for early career researchers in fields where APCs aren't optional, as they often don't control the grant money themselves and need the publication credits pretty badly.
I agree that the difficulty in accessing scientific journal articles without spending an absurd amount of money incentivizes piracy. My initial comment was pointing out that the current academic publishing model is so fucked that even when a reader can access the article without a subscription or fee, journal publishers like Elsevier still ring money out of researchers themselves for it.
Not every researcher has a grant, especially these days, and not every grant will pay for every set of charges. Some big institutions have waivers now, but those also don't apply to every journal, so finding the right journal depends a lot on who you are, where you are, and how badly you want to navigate the morass of rules and exceptions...
Note too that unless you have the money, open access is much more expensive, always at least a few thousand dollars. And some journals are only open access now, meaning you either need good funding or a lot of disposable income.
Instead of that, you can usually just email one of the authors and they'll be more than happy to send you a copy. They don't get anything when you pay publishers to access their papers, so they don't care. They're usually just excited that someone's interested in their work.
I've actually tried two or three times, and never actually got a response. Maybe other people have better luck than me.
This has definitely been my experience. If I can't swing open access, I put all my papers on researchgate, and I definitely have sent copies of my papers to interested people. Having people interested in reading your papers in the first place is great! And if they read it, they may cite it, so I always take the time to make my work available. I would guess that later career researchers don't care as much, whereas early career researchers need the citations, and are more interested in having you read their work.
I generally prefer to avoid piracy (having previously worked in both the software and movie industries), but scientific papers are the case where I feel the least qualms about it. None of the payment for papers access makes it back to the authors or the peer reviewers. And in the case of conference papers, none of it makes it directly back to the conference committee, nor to the general conference funds itself. (And I'm serving on a conference committee this year - believe me, it would help make our budgeting situation easier if so.) It's rent-seeking, pure and simple.
At least when I worked for a movie studio, they made the link between box office performance and pay bonuses reasonably clear. There was still some voodoo involved, but the correlation was positive. So I avoided film piracy then based on the golden rule.
Jailbreaking my kindle, installing koreader and finally just reading epubs on it has been such a breath of fresh air. No more faffing around in Calibre (to its credit, it did it as quietly/seamlessly as possible) to convert and having duplicates in my library. Just download a book, stick it on the server, download it on the kindle. As for audiobookshelf, I run it too and really like it!
You can get an Anna's Archive plugin for KOReader and search/download right from your kindle if you're so inclined.
Lacks the good management of Calibre, but great on the go.
After operating my kindle like a good amazon customer for about a decade, I can't believe how much functionality is unlocked by koreader. Thanks!
For what it's worth I get most of my audiobooks through libro.fm as they're DRM free. They ARE however expensive that way, but if you want to be able to support everyone I've found it a reasonable option. Plus they keep all your stuff and make it easy to get it down to whatever you want.
Feels like more effort than it's worth. Usually, when I want to see something, I just find the streaming site it's on, subscribe for 1 month, immediately cancel - this means that it won't automatically renew, and I effectively just get one month. IMO it's pretty solid price for what you get - if you adjust Blockbuster prices for today, it was $9-$15 for just one rental.
Last time I looked, it seemed like a lot of the public torrent trackers have been decimated, and all the stuff is on private trackers, and I just could not possibly be arsed to actually go through the rigamorole to join a private tracker even if I wanted to.
For video games, there's just no question. I would never trust a blackbox binary from an untrusted vendor.
I'm not sure it's that much effort. I know people who use only public trackers, and unless they're looking for something very old or highly specific, it's basically never an issue to find it. Certainly no more difficult than finding things on streaming sites.
I'm not sure how much can be said on Tildes, but sonarr and radarr can be set up to subscribe to things you like so that stuff auto torrents when it's initially released. Generally the folks I know will just have their torrent client's Web interface on their phone - also not hard to set up. Theb they can trivially set things to download from anywhere, by remote, upon recommendation.
For a new TV show episode, in maybe 4GB size, things can usually be pulled down and ready to watch in maybe 10 minutes off a public tracker, so I'd not describe the delay as often bothersome, myself.
Honestly, it's almost as easy to pirate just about anything off public trackers nowadays as it is to acquire it legitimately AND own the files - if not easier.
I've been on the high seas since pre-2000s. It's much easier and safer now than it used to be, and for the (sometimes rightfully) paranoid, VMs or even running a whole separate box you can scorched earth if need be is ultimately cheaper than paying the frankly exhorbitant prices companies charge nowadays.
Personally, in terms of running games? It's basically never been safer, so long as you're pulling from more reliable places. Grab a Fitgirl repack from her .site page (that's the real one, there are fakes), or go make a cs.rin.ru account and find whatever game thread you're after, and see people actively troubleshooting and talking about the process in real time. Get as close to real confirmation about what you're downloading as you need to feel safe. The warez/scene communities have existed and been about as reliable as one could hope for as long as piracy has been a thing, and there are more people interested in producing actually accessible media than there are bad actors, so with some knowledge and precaution, even public trackers will get you everything you want.
It's been more than 20 years. A little precaution and knowledge, and I've never downloaded a single thing that has been compromised.
The worst thing I've ever downloaded has literally been someone uploading hue-shifted copies of HDR shows, EDIT: And that's literally because I didn't know what Dolby Vision HDR was, and how non Dolby HDR media players hue shifts the output to compensate for lacking the correct codec. So, even then, the worst things I've ever downloaded were... Simply media I couldn't play!
Sure, you might have to find a different public tracker when the previous 'good' ones go down - jumping from RARBG to EXT.to took a while to find, and there's always some sketchy looking stuff, but hundreds of thousands of people do it every day, and don't get fucked over, so there's a safe(ish) way to do it all, you've just gotta get out and learn, really.
Stuff not in English is way harder to find in good quality, I gather. If you're generally looking in English, you're probably in quite a convenience bubble. Portuguese/Spanish content is often in quite low quality (720 at most).
Even ignoring the money part, this is already way more work than it's ever taken me to pirate a movie, and I'm not even on any private trackers or anything. I'm sure there's some stuff that would be hard to find with just public trackers but so far the selection has been better than searching streaming services for sure.
I agree about pirating videogames though. The risk is way less worth the reward there, especially when there's so little friction involved in buying PC games these days (wow it's almost like Gabe was right about piracy...)
It’s the only way for some retro experiences though. If that’s the only way I can play a game, I’ll VM it.
My take is pretty simple. Do what you gotta, don't BS yourself and everybody by justifying it beyond "I just don't want to pay." You don't want to pay Paramount? Still don't wanna pay. Don't want to pay a problematic author? Don't wanna pay.
I try not to pirate independent artists (movies, games), try to support where I can, but I stream so much music anyway it's basically piracy.
I use ultracc for a seedbox so I don't have to worry about securing my home connection, but I can't upload so I'm pretty sure nobody wants me in their private trackers for that. I'm cool with finding random torrents as I have a buffer. Not going to go into actual content sites publicly, and the ones I used to use for anime and cartoons are shut down.
Piracy is the ultimate voting with your wallet. If you don't consume the content, producers just assume you didn't like the content. And not 'fuck audible.'
I want DRM-free audiobooks. I buy from here, but I pirate if it's audible exclusive.
I want DRM-free music, I buy from Bandcamp. If it's not there...fuck it.
I want to make a 3-episode tv playlist without having to switch apps three times. I can do that easily pirating, so I pirate even if I pay for the service.
I stopped pirating games with the debut of Steam's store. I even went back and bought a bunch I did before.
Piracy is solving a service problem. I won't lie and say that I'd be willing to pay $15 to watch Fast Times in Ridgmont High one time, or to track down the app of the week it can be played on. I'll click three buttons, watch it,and move on with my life.
And the big thing is, is once you've entered the piracy rabbithole, that convienience is as hard to give up as switching from watching live TV to streaming was.
Truly this is the crux. I happily paid for Netflix when it was frictionless to see what you wanted. I turned back to piracy when the streaming environment fractured into... gestures broadly this mess.
Games have been solved. Even if Steam would disappear tomorrow, the market has plenty of alternatives that have the same or similar frictionless experiences. I can buy nearly all games in any online storefront, not just a select few that happen to hold the rights for that week.
That's exactly my biggest issue. If I stopping pirating things, I would be paying for a less convenient experience. Isn't that mental??
For anime (but this goes for western series as well), one would often need subscriptions to 3-4 or more streaming sites to watch the shows. Even completely disregarding the financial aspect, I simply cannot be bothered to keep a list of "where does show X air? Is it Netflix? Oh no, it doesn't seem to be here. Was it maybe Crunchyroll? Or Amazon Video?". And then you're sat there spending 5+ minutes navigating the awkward UI of multiple different platforms to find the show you wanted, to watch it for 20 minutes.
Meanwhile the alternartive is to set up a torrent client with an RSS feed reader and all my shows appear in the exact directory I want them on my computer. The difference in convenience is truly jarring.
And this is precisely why piracy must exist. It's the only thing that's keeping service quality from falling off a cliff. There was a time, when Netflix first started, when you could find almost everything on it. 1 service, 1 subscription, 1 app, most things you wanted to watch. That was excellent, and people, including me, pirated way less. That is no longer the case, unfortunately.
Another tangentially related issue is the price. A Disney+ subscription that lets you watch more than 1080p costs CHF 23.40 / month. That's almost exactly 30 USD currently. I'm sorry, but that is ridiculous.
Licensing can be such a annoying issue for companies I imagine too. Like what do you mean I can only watch the Japanese or French dub of Fullmetal on Netflix? It makes it all such a complicated mess.
Nowadays even this is more effort than needed. Stremio gives a Netflix-like UI with literally everything available for $2-4 a month. They even have supported apps on smart TVs.
iTunes and Amazon both have DRM-free music and a far wider selection.
I Googled the movie, looked at the providers, saw Google and Apple as options to rent the movie for $3.99. It doesn't seem that much slower than piracy. This doesn't seem like a service problem at this point. Piracy is just so easy today and it has the price benefit that if someone knows how to pirate, I think it's quite hard for a legitimate business to compete.
I pay for most things, but attempts to avoid contributing to the profits of certain horrifying companies might lead me to choose a different way sometimes.
(I don't seem to be able to avoid them when it comes to book purchases, but that industry is uniquely fucked.)
Just want to chime in, you absolutely can avoid them for books! I was a full-time kindle user until a year and a few months ago, but despite what Amazon would like you to believe there's tons of other options. My go-to is Kobo, has almost as big of a selection as Amazon, and while it has DRM on most of its books it's almost always AdobeDRM (which is trivial to work around with Calibre). You can still even use your kindle (for now...), but there's also a big market of e-readers which are much more open (I love my Boox).
Happy to give you more details if you want, but even without pirating it is so easy to avoid Amazon!
I'm already slated to purchase a Kobo, don't worry! The timing hasn't worked out yet (my kindle is >10 years old at this point so it's not like I bought a new one).
But here it's been impossible to avoid Amazon for physical books.
I have yet to pirate a book, ever. I'm vaguely aware of some places where that might be accomplished though.
I think it's a little more complex. I mean, there's at least a little bit of a preservation angle with pirating. Whoever holds the license to your favorite show can edit, censor, or remove it from their service entirely. A random guy with a VPN and qBittorrent can't edit it, and once other people get to seeding, there's no removing it from the internet.
Sorry in advance if you view my comment as offtopic.
I pirated in my younger years. Eaither for.me or people around me (having CD burner, you know...). I grew up, started working, having money and nowadays I don't pirate anymore. There is no need to.
I don't pay for any subscriptions of the big media domes. I pay for Nebula and LTT on Floatplane (their own platform) as I believe that my money go right to the creators (after paying for the platforms to run, of course). I like supporting the authors directly like that.
I may be lacking on new hot TV series and whatnots, but I'm kinda old school, maybe conservative. I love movies from my childhood starring Louis de Funes, Al Pacino, Terence Hill & Bud Spencer, 80's and 90's action movies, Police Academy... Even heavy weight movies like Godfather.
Given my favorites, I tend to buy DVDs and Blu rays of those.movies and rip them to my Jellyfin media server. This way I legally own the movie and I just don't watch it from the media it was delivered on. This may not be legally right but it is in my mind. I also still own the discs, have them stashed in the closet, I don't rip and resell them.
If something new and great comes along, I gladly buy Blu ray. From the latest movies, this is probably Dune part 2. If the movie or series I'm interested in doesn't come out on physical media, I'm not paying for it (and obviously I will not watch it). Either the studio makes it in physical or I'm not interested at all. I know I'm in absolute minority here, but these are my principles.
Back to piracy - I don't pirate anymore. And even though some lawyer somewhere might look at my usage of the copyrighted content from other angle, my mind is clear on that. And if somebody around me.pirates things? Well, that's their "problem", I'm not judging. And with current state of subscriprions and mergers, I can even understand why they do it...
In the words of Gabe Newell, "piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem". I pay for convenience and a good user experience, and if I'm not getting that then I don't pay.
I don't pirate ANY games anymore because Steam is just incredibly convenient (plus I like multiplayer co-op stuff and that just doesn't work with pirated copies). It also helps that I know the publisher/devs get a sizeable cut of my purchase there so I'm actually supporting them.
For shows and movies, the only streaming service I use is Prime Video but that's only because it comes with Prime, and even then I still need to put up with ads. Anything on any other streaming platform that I really want to see can usually be found on a free streaming site within a few minutes (though you have to be careful not to click on ads with those).
For anime, the only major anime streaming platform for the West is Crunchyroll, but their selection's limited and the streaming quality's mid and the subtitles aren't always good and very little if any of the money they make goes back to the anime studios. Plus, they've been working with Japanese publishers to very aggressively crack down on unaffiliated anime streaming sites, which is understandable from a business perspective but still rankles the Western anime community. After the last streaming site I was using went down last month I've just decided to torrent all the things I want to watch, and I've set it up so that I automatically download the latest episodes as they're uploaded so it's still pretty convenient. I'll support anime studios more directly by buying merch for shows I'm really into, but Crunchyroll isn't getting shit from me.
One key evidence for your viewpoint is the timing of rise and decline in piracy, and how it matches with the enshittiffication timeline.
When Netflix got started, they were in the User Acquisition phase. The service was great, the price low, and the service exploded. Piracy declined because everyone saw the convenience. Again, most people do not fundamentally want to steal content, people want easy access.
When Netflix got big and popular, they were in the Business Optimization phase. Prices steadily rose beyond inflation, there was a crackdown on account sharing, etc. Normies start to complain, and piracy sees a slow and steady rise.
Then, at the end of the lifecycle, Exploitation (You are here). Exorbitant prices. Ads in a paid service. Selling your data to third parties (no evidence for this, no doubt either). Content fragmented and scattered. Editing of historical movies and shows to fit current morality. Push the narrative du jour instead of letting shows sink and float based on viewer choice. If you want to make a movie or show, you need to cater to Netflix execs. Sell 4K, provide 1080i. Have bean counters matter more than engineers in technical decisions.
The service becomes shitty, the prices become unbearable. The value to the customer is gone. Normies start to move away. Piracy explodes. Stock price is still through the roof, so when the company goes under every MBA is like "surprised pikachu face".
Mark my words, if a non-shitty streaming service is made, piracy will decline again. Until then, sailing the seven seas is the more logical option for reasonable people.
I'm in 100% agreement with your post but this. It's just not possible with all media companies hoarding their IPs like dragon gold. Netflix has plenty of things they did themselves that made it a shitty service, but losing access to certain licenses isn't entirely their fault. Disney pretty much pulled their entire library from Netflix overnight because they wanted their own slice of the pie.
No new, good service will have the chance to get a library that rivals the early days of Netflix. So this fractured mess is what we're stuck with for the foreseeable future.
I'm loving physical media and have been curating my music and movie collection again. The library has tons of stuff and of course it's all high bit rate.
When Spotify came out it was so affordable and convenient that I basically threw away my music library. But the price hikes and subpar Linux experience left me happily sailing the high seas.
Being told by Netflix that I can't stream 4k because I'm on Linux also makes this an easy decision.
Fwiw I'm not really into bleeding edge stuff, like HP, and can't speak to ease of acquisition. Nicotine+ is fine for most of my needs.
For music, I highly recommend Soulseek.
Nicotine plus is soulseek, isn't it? I looked into this years ago but ended up not getting into it.
It is, yes.
Nicotine is a mac only (i think) client for Soulseek. I personally use Nicotine instead, but functionally they are more or less identical!
I was playing around on Soulseek chats as a teen nearly 15 years ago. I cant believe it's still around!
When it comes to piracy, I like to ask myself this. Should only the wealthy have unlimited access to paid media/entertainment - art, literature, film, music, etc.? Should the poor be deprived of these things because they lack money?
We exist in a largely capitalistic world intent on extracting the most amount of value from each and every person. Corporations aren't people. If buying isn't owning, then theft isn't stealing.
Our household has Netflix, Apple TV and HBO Max subscriptions. I still download the shows elsewhere since those won't let me play it inside my custom mpv-based player on Linux, running on a NUC by my (untuned) TV.
All those companies know the shows are widely available on torrents without DRM, in 4K, but they still insist on 720p for Linux because otherwise I might share them. I mean... as opposed to sending a magnet link?
I am not a saint, but I have barely pirated anything in many years. General media access is on all accounts pretty great and substantially cheaper than 20-30 years ago. I paid around €25 for new movies on VHS and DVD 25 years ago, and that is about the same a 4K UHD disc costs today - not even considering inflation. And despite price increases in streaming, it is still comparatively cheap - depending on your usage of course.
Not to say I am still annoyed at the general unpredictability of availability of stuff, where things move around all the time. And I don't understand why regional agreements is still a thing in this day and age. Why isn't a streaming catalogue by default global.
I don't mind paying for what I consume. I also mostly read and watch niche stuff, so if I want the stuff I like to exist in the future, I need to actually pay for it. It is one thing to say that Disney or Tom Cruise has enough money, but on every production there is hundreds if not thousands of working class people living paycheck to paycheck like everyone else.
What annoys me most is the length of copyright. I like to watch older movies, and it really shouldn't be this difficult to find movies from the 30s, 40s or 50s. Everyone involved in those things are long dead and things should be in public domain a lot sooner. With one caveat though that older movies also need restorations and it is valuable work to have old films newly scanned from the original negative and getting a proper quality release. I would argue that part of that should to some extent be down to government funding to preserve cultural significant works.
Back when I didn't have a source of income (so mostly when I was a kid) I pirated a whole bunch of stuff since there was no way I could afford all the things I wanted. Now I pay for stuff where possible, but I avoid all subscription based services. Rather than pirating stuff from them though I'm simply fine not getting that content. There's so many things I want to be doing that there's not enough time anyway, I'm not going to run out of things to play or watch.
Occasionally I still pirate some retro games though, or just content that's not available for purchase at all. I also very much agree with what Gabe Newell said in an interview many years ago (that piracy is a customer service problem).
I mostly don’t pirate. The one big exception is textbooks. Fuck textbook publishers so much.
Right now my university is supposed to offer only freely accessible educational sources, but they kind of cheat by offering access to a database service which has the full texts of books. It’s the worst experience I can imagine. You can only log in with a cookie that you have to spend a hundred different clicks to get into, and the cookie has an extremely short TTL; if I leave to poop, by the time I am back I will have been logged out. The reader doesn’t keep track of what page you are on, either. And then there are a ton of tiny annoyances. We have to find the book by searching for the titles (because of course direct linking doesn’t work! MORE STEPS!), and if you search the books will have all the terms highlighted. Can you imagine how shitty it is to read a book where every instance of the word “the”, “and” and “a” are highlighted?
Every time you open a book you will be assaulted by a sidebar that gives you a single paragraph AI summary of the entire book - something that is not only useless in general, but redundant because the curriculum already describes the reading. You can’t close it until the page fully loads, which can take a while sometimes. For a while it was defaulting to displaying the book reflowed, which was always bad because it got rid of the page numbers I needed for the reading assignment and also because it often mangled the formatting in fun interesting ways. At least that seems to have been rolled back.
Their reader actively taught me to never directly quote sources because if I attempted to copy text it would automatically insert a reference immediately after what it was I was copying, which of course is incompatible not only with my assignment requirements, but every assignment requirement I can imagine getting from any institution. But it wouldn’t matter anyways because of course I would be logged out automatically before I had the chance to write the lead-in for it.
There’s a million papercuts that are pushing me towards giving up my degree and honestly this reader is one of the major ones.
When I was in university I had a teacher who wrote and published the required text book for the class that was bundled with an online component. It was mandatory that you purchased the textbook with the online access code to complete the assignments with some specific information for the homework contained in the text book, and she would make adjustments to the text book each term so that you were not able to purchase a used text book and just use the online portion (honestly reminded me of early DRM attempts where you would have to pull information from the game manual). $350 down the drain for her awful book.
Can't remember what the class was now, but I do remember it was a prerequisite class for many majors and each lecture she did would have a solid ~150-200 students in it, and she taught 3-4 lectures each term.
On the low end, if we assumed 150 students in each of 3 lectures, that is a total of $157,500 spent on just her text book by these students each term, and since my university had 3 main terms (fall, winter, and spring) that is total of $472,500 each year, on the upper end assuming full classes and 4 lectures that would have been $840,0000 spent my students.
I swear to christ it should be illegal for a professor to charge their own students for a book they write beyond printing cost.
I honestly think that for many schools, they do these textbook deals as a way of outsourcing their curriculum development. You need to buy the overpriced book with the code because it means that they don't have to pay their professors to stay on the bleeding edge or to spend the time it would take to develop their courses properly. My community college was basically in bed with Cengage, to the point where they offered a subscription package so you wouldn't have to buy books at all except a few outliers.
That being said, with a professor-written textbook, it still feels unethical to charge students for that. That should be part of tuition.
That would have been great. I know some professors I had would co author books and mention what had changed between versions if you used an older version. One went so far as to offer a pdf with changes/new chapters.
This particular professor spent a solid 5 minutes of the lecture saying how you had to go out and buy this copy or you wouldn't be able to pass the class. Glad I never had any other classes she taught.
My first year at uni I got burned by the profs assuring us all from afar (as naive still-teenagers) that getting the latest editions was important. We all bought in to that and spent horribly on books, only to find, once we could access the faculty library, that editions were changing very little (my field wasn't a cutting edge thing where findings were being made obsolete with new discoveries or anything). The following years, we'd all buy an edition or two behind the newest one, and literally had email chains (dating myself here) to establish the set reading page numbers in X edition or Y edition. We saved a ton of money. Thankfully none of our profs had jumped on board the "codes in the back of the book to new material available once per buyer online" thing that I saw creeping in too.
I used to be against piracy except in very specific situations like a product/service/show being outright unavailable in your region. But that stance has become increasingly untenable.
First it was the heavy pivot towards subscription models, streaming platforms and games/software as a service. When big corporate executives tell us that we should start getting comfortable with not owning anything, it begs the question of why piracy is compared to stealing in the first place.
The second dilemma is with artificial intelligence. Should big tech firms be allowed to use copyrighted works to train AI models without compensating the rightsholder nor obtaining their permission? The fact that politicians are defending companies like OpenAI and Meta, and aren't subjecting them to the same heavy-handed criminal responses as pirates who, say... redistribute retro game ROMs or rebroadcast football matches for free via their website, or sell DRM circumvention and jailbreaking tools is basically eroding any and all moral arguments against piracy.
Your AI point is a really good one.
I'm very much someone who tries to buy things rather than pirate them, as I figure somebody has to put money towards this stuff, and taking it for free always had a veneer of wrongness to it. It didn't necessarily stop me a lot, but it did add some guilt.
But watching AI just wholesale slurp up EVERYTHING and seeing the people doing it get massively rich and be seen as more valuable to society than all the people who created the "training data" that gives their programs their power in the first place really put things in perspective for me with regards to who was abusing whom.
If I download a book or a movie, I'm doing comparatively little harm versus a company that uses that same book or movie to train its AI. I'm also not profiting off of it.
It hasn't changed my personal calculus much (I still prefer to monetarily support what I can), but it has significantly reduced the "this is wrong" moral reflex I used to have about my own piracy habits (which are genuinely quite modest). I do hate looking at the world that way, but I can't deny that AI and some other large-scale issues have recently reframed a lot of my perception of the world and have pushed me in a direction of increasing pessimism and nihilism.
I have a dream of starting a political party that has three goals:
One big - one might call it beautiful - bill which will effectively undo most of the negative changes in law since Trump took office. Especially the stupid shit the Supreme Court has been doing.
Another bill - hopefully as a constitutional amendment - that will limit the power of the executive office dramatically. If I could figure out how to prevent presidents from unilaterally starting wars I would do that too.
Extreme progressive taxation to kill the current concept of the billionaire and make the lower classes more stable.
Sadly it isn’t going to happen. Even more sadly I have many more demands of government.
Yea yours sounds like a good day 1 baseline for the next president. Failure to do so is just proving the (possibly intentional) incompetance of the opposition party.
If you're a huge nerd with insomnia like me, setting up the stack to automate trackers or usenet can be a lot of fun.
And if you're a hardcore fan of some type of media, getting into a private tracker can be a unique process. Once in, you'll find a community of very like-minded fans and a social network that's very much of the vein of the old internet; IRC channels and forums.
I stream from Netflix and Hulu. If it’s not there, I torrent it. I’ve got invites to iptorrents if anyone wants into a pretty good private tracker.
To join the bandwagon, I've got countless invites to FNP if anyone wants any.
Ooh, really? I would love an invite!
Invite gets sent to an email. You got an email you’re willing to share?
I'll take one, please, could come in handy.
I guess I should reciprocate by offering invites to bakabt, a really good private tracker for all things anime and manga, usually focusing on best quality fansubs. But I must insist that any takers are well behaved seeders.
EDIT: 1/3 invites have been given out.
@Sunbutt23 any particular reason you ignored me?
Marked as read before responding :x
If any invites are left, I’d love to join.
Invite gets sent to an email. You got an email you’re willing to share?
Thanks. Odd thing is, I hadn’t considered this would be a requirement and for some reason it makes me hesitant. I think that I would’ve jumped on it 25 years ago, but for some reason it makes me realize I’ve got a lot more to lose now. Even though it’s probably still nonsense to worry about, because who really cares about this small stuff.
Anyway, thanks for offering! Still think it’s nice to share this in the community.
Fwiw, Fastmail does email masking and natively integrates with 1Password. Both are paid solutions though and I get a pretty “self-hosted” vibe from tildes.
Hi, any invites left?
Invite gets sent to an email. You got an email you’re willing to share?
Yes, of course, I'll DM you the address.
Thanks!
If there's any invites left, I would love to have one. Thank you!
Waiting on response from others. If there’s an opening I’ll hit you back.
Thanks!
Also, jumping in for an iptorrents invite if you still have some! Thanks so much!
Waiting on response from others. If there’s an opening I’ll hit you back.
I always buy whenever I can buy the product in a way that:
The first goal applies mostly to music: Spotify (and most streaming services) pay artists so little that even if I buy a single album a year from an artist on Bandcamp; they're probably coming out ahead.
Unfortunately, surveillance capitalism and enshittification are directly at odds with the second goal, constantly shoving shit in my face when I'm just trying to watch a favorite show on a streaming service. If Spotify allowed users to remove podcasts and audiobooks and opt out of their payola recommendation system, it might be tempting. But their offline experience is also trash, as is most of their UX, and you can tell their goal is not to make a good music player. But of course you basically have no choice but to use their crappy, nonperformant app, especially on mobile, and exclusively if you want any level of offline playback support (inferior as it may be).
The third goal mostly has issues in older TV shows: when shows lose the rights to their original music, the replacement is... not correct. When you have your own copy, it can't change out from under you. The same logic applies to scenes: while I don't approve of the use of blackface in certain sketches in Scrubs, it doesn't feel right to me to just... erase those things. Sometimes whole episodes disappear! I think a disclaimer on the episode description, or maybe a footnote subtitle on problematic scenes, would be a better way to say "we don't approve of this; learn from it" while not disrespecting the original artist.
Used blurays and CDs are remarkably cheap these days. bandcamp provides a way to pay artists with minimal carveouts right from your home. Streaming services have garbage UIs that disrespect you no matter how much you pay for the Ultra Premium 4K Family Plus tier. Jellyfin is so superior it's laughable.
I've pretty much always been a pirate. As a kid, I'd game files over to another floppy disk and keep xeroxed versions of the manuals handy to enter the third word on the fifth line on page 23 to "confirm" that I indeed owned the game.
I've never thought of it as stealing. Stealing is taking something away from someone else. Piracy is simply sharing something that can be infinitely duplicated with no loss to anyone. If I end up developing some cultivar of a peach tree or something and someone comes to my house asking to duplicate it, I'd say, "Sure--I have these seedlings for sale for $15 each, but it's fruiting right now... Here, take a bag of fruit and grow them yourself if you want. Then pass that along." I get that this attitude doesn't quite scale or put food on my table, but it's pretty much the way unselfish people operate. Abundance should be shared.
I do still try to support small artists at least, though. For music I'm kind of half and half; buy stuff I know for sure I want to support or download as trials, after which I sometimes remember to buy it later. Luckily Bandcamp provides a good option for real ownership of files.
I hardly ever pirate games anymore. Steam is so convenient and sales are plentiful. And Nintendo prices are ridiculous, but the Switch is so convenient to use, and the games I buy are generally worth the price, so I don't bother with piracy.
For movies I'm almost completely a filthy pirate. I do sometimes want to pay, but the options are so horribly unappealing. For example, I'm pretty excited about Wake Up, Dead Man and hope that Netflix keeps making movies in that series, so I figured I'd just pay for a month of Netflix to show my support. But the subscription is now double what I used to pay. I don't want to indicate that I'm okay with ads in any way, so I don't want to pay for the cheaper version, and there's no "Pay $10 to watch this one movie" option. I'll probably end up paying the $20, because that price to own a movie isn't bad, but I had to step back and mull it over a bit first.
There's no real option to own movies other than pirating them or buying the physical media. Since I have no use for more pieces of plastic cluttering my house, pirating is pretty obvious. And since movies almost all go through ridiculously wealthy companies that really have little use for my money, I don't feel bad at all about it.
I've been into it in one sense or another since the warez days of yore. Though lately as public trackers have been getting harder and harder to access and automate, I've been considering usenet but I honestly have no idea where to start. Last I remember of usenet, it was for newsgroups like alt.2600 and I had no idea there were organized repositories of data available through it.
I don't use Usenet myself, but it's fairly straightforward and streamlined nowadays. You need a provider, that you pay a few bucks a month to (I'm sure there are reviews and spreadsheets comparing many of them), they support SSL, too. Some of them also support anonymous payments. After that, you need a so-called indexer. There are public and private ones, and they're the places where you find your nzb files (which contain a list of download links for usenet basically). It's a bit similar to torrents, where private indexers are a tad better organized and I guess you can file requests, etc.
Once that is done, you just need a nzb downloader which eats the nzb file and starts downloading, done. You can automate most of this with the *darr stack in combination with good indexers.
I’ve been pirating movies since the early 2010s. I was a teenager without any money and without any of the streaming services that were then available. Now I have all streaming services but that doesn’t mean every movie is available there so when there’s something I have to rent to watch I try to pirate it first. I only rent it if i really want to watch it and there’s no good torrents for it.
I still use PB and YIFY and qBitTorrent which might be considered outdated but at least it still works.
To call back to my youth....
Do what you want cause a pirate is free, you are a pirate!
this took WAY too long to find
My decision tree is essentially:
More and more lately the answer to "is a non-bootleg physical release available" is no. eBay has already been a no-fly zone for physical media for a long time, since my track record there is 100% bootlegs, and now even Walmart has started sending me bootlegs since (I guess) they allow 3rd party merchants to fulfill orders (they even list box sets for shows that never had an official physical release, where there is zero chance the thing is not a bootleg).
What is HP? Googling doesn't help because of obvious reasons.
I'm assuming Harry Potter
Assumption is correct.
Thank you! I assumed it was HP (the computer/printer company).
Thank you!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVXCr6upWUo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dU8VPQsTqFU
The way I feel about media piracy (here Netflix stands for any and all media companies) is similar to how i feel about performers in the street. Both need to be somewhat present in the public space to be culturally relevant/make you want to see it, and so neither can legitimately paywall you.
It wouldn't make sense for a street performer to ask for a fee when I cann't help but see them when passing by. Just as it doesn't make sense for Netflix to ask for a fee for viewing the series they made me want to watch through extensive ad campaign.
Netflix had to pay to provide the show? well the street performer too!
This would lower the quality/amount of media being produced? I don't mind slightly less quantity but more intentional media. Also, I'm sure there would be way more street performer if they could extract a mandatory fee from any passerby...
Netflix worked to make it's IP culturally unavoidable, so now the price is they can only monetize merch and physical copies, not sorry.
I don't really have an issue with piracy, I do it myself, but I think this is a bad parallel. It's like saying you saw a commercial on TV for the circus and got excited to see it, and therefore you are entitled to sneak in. The street performer cannot make you pay because they are literally doing the performance, that's not the same as advertising.
I very profondly dislike ads.
I hate that we as a society tolerate ads in shared public space (side of the road, bus stop, sponsored videos).
I would rather all the thing they make possible to finance just not exist at all (but really, they would still exist in some other, better way).
Most circus ads are the most obnoxious as well, with a loud speaker on a car bothering everyone in the street.
I do think making a circus commercial should entitle us to sneak in.
I may be wrong, but I am internally consistent.
I started pirating a year ago. Everything started as an independent.exe but I've been playing around with putting everything into one container on windows docker.
Radarr- manages all movies I'm interested in
Sonarr - same but for TV shows
--> both send indexers out, return with a torrent file that gets sent to:
Qbittorrent
--> downloads the torrent file to my system. Once it finishes...
Radarr/Sonarr know where I want the files to be placed, cause I have a TV folder and a Movies folder and I tell it where to sort them. It uses hardlinks and removes the file from its download folder when it's finished and from Qbittorrent when it's finished seeding.
With everything in its place...
--> is my new forever front end for media.
It constantly scans my TV/movie folders when they update and immediately presents them to be watched, with options for CC, playlisting, episode and movie info--pretty much anything you might wanna know for the episode.
I have a lifetime pass purchased to have access from outside my home network (data, friends Wi-Fi's, etc). I waited until the holidays when it was 40% off
One day I will get a raspberry pi or something to host my media server without needing my PC to stay running, but it's pretty cool, and I've enjoyed learning how it works.
Radarr and Sonarr track new releases. You can configure it to watch for certain qualities or file sizes. You can set it up to automatically watch for new releases or you can make it one-press to scan for the shows and movies you're monitoring and it will search for the parameters, refer the torrent file to qbit, qbit will download it, and together they will put the file in its own file folder where it needs to go.
It's so simple now, I'll boot up Plex on my ps5 and the new episode of The Boys will be available, and it all automated from me clicking "scan" once earlier in the week.
Seconding the *arr stack. Sonarr and Radarr track your TV shows and Movies. Jellyseer takes your requests and sends them to the above. Prowlarr looks at what’s missing in your collection and searches your choice of public/private teachers, then sends located torrents to Qbittorrent for downloading.
I use Jellyfin to stream the media instead of plex since it is free and open source. It also seems to work just as well. Haven’t been a fan of the direction Plex is moving as a company.
Up until a few years ago, I never pirated. Growing up, I had the attitude that I was going to be a good, moral (Christian) boy and get all my media legally. Didn't touch any torrent clients, so any media I wanted to own I bought as discs and ripped, and I used streaming for everything else.
Now? I've got a lot less disposable income and even less tolerance for corporate bullshit. So, I get my media legally when it's convenient to me or its an indie creator. Otherwise, I'm now perfectly happy going sailing.
I swap between paying and pirating pretty fluidly and randomly. I have a Youtube TV subscription that's pricey but I like it, gets me TCM (hell yes) and most major sporting events, but not all of them.
I tend to pirate movies to my Plex since I have a diverse range of tastes for what movies I want to see at what time, and a lot of them aren't available on common streamers, so I find it easier to download them and come back to the curated collection on my Plex than have to track which ones I wanted to see.
On the other hand, sometimes my gf and I will browse through and watch something on Tubi (with ads), which is nice since it's free and has a real weird ass collection of movies.
Most sports stuff, if it's not on national TV (i.e. my Youtube TV) then I tend to just pirate it since it's just as easy as going to one specific site and they have all the games I want to see from a single click. I would much rather continue pirating sports things than have to pay $30 a month to watch just to the friggin Knicks (who I do want to watch, but I don't want to pay James Dolan that much money for it).
But on the other hand I paid like $7 for a month of Prime to watch the NBA play-ins this week, and I didn't really hesitate on that much.
So it's a real mixed bag for me, I pirate when the pirating is easier and better than doing the thing, but also pay for things semi-often, especially when I feel like the money is going to something better (such as independent podcasters I listen to, instead of paying $30 to a billionaire to watch a single team play, did I mention that's more than the NBA League Pass itself? That's fucked up and fuck james dolan).
I mostly stopped pirating in 2010s when Netflix was a hub for movies and TV shows fair priced and Spotify only played songs and its CEO wasn't financing drone weapons in injustice wars.
I went back to pirating all the things and fuck those fuckers.
I pirate out of convenience usually. I'd love to just be someone who gets a streaming service for a month to watch what I want but by the time I actually sit down and click on something I want to watch, I'm bombarded with a million ads and I then lose interest.
As companies have started consolidating, I've actually began increasing my own piracy. I built a dedicated media server a few years ago with 4TB of usable space assuming that I'd take many years to fill it up. However, I've filled up that space quicker than I expected so I'm looking at expanding.
Can't really speak on how things have changed since I myself have only really been doing things since the COVID days but I have had decent luck finding information on Reddit to be honest. I personally just use public trackers to find the torrents I usually want. I do think about joining private trackers to find torrents for harder to find content like Korean dramas and movies but if I badly want to watch something, I'll just find a website to watch it on.