Y'know that meme about "Stallman was right"? Given both some things that Stallman was definitely not right about and also Doctorow's considerable track record of warnings/predictions, I find...
Y'know that meme about "Stallman was right"? Given both some things that Stallman was definitely not right about and also Doctorow's considerable track record of warnings/predictions, I find myself thinking "Doctorow was right" more and more often.
It's cause Doctorow listened to Stallman. It is natural for the students to best their masters. Helps that he's also a damn fine storyteller, which helps bring better understanding to more people....
It's cause Doctorow listened to Stallman. It is natural for the students to best their masters. Helps that he's also a damn fine storyteller, which helps bring better understanding to more people.
Stallman's core arguement WRT source code being required for user empowerment is, best I can tell, a fundemental reality of computing.
For the past 30 years Stallman supported every single negative technological prediction while using the internet through a printer. Of course he'll be right whenever something about technology...
For the past 30 years Stallman supported every single negative technological prediction while using the internet through a printer. Of course he'll be right whenever something about technology goes wrong.
For decades I have pirated at least 90% of the movies and TV shows I watch. I used to keep various subscriptions through Netflix, HBO, Hulu, amazon, etc. to feel like I wasn't completely leeching...
For decades I have pirated at least 90% of the movies and TV shows I watch. I used to keep various subscriptions through Netflix, HBO, Hulu, amazon, etc. to feel like I wasn't completely leeching off the hard work and creativity that I know people put into the content. The streaming services themselves are such crap and so inconvenient compared to pirating that I rarely use them. Instead, I just download whatever movie I want to watch from one well-organized website that has every movie ever made in any format ever published. For TV shows, I go to a separate but similarly organized website with an all-encompassing collection of every TV show ever published. This year the strikes got me thinking, I'm giving my money to the wrong people, and I just started donating $20 a month to the Entertainment Community fund instead: https://entertainmentcommunity.org/
I know I'm playing fast and loose with morality here and this doesn't really absolve me of anything. I'm still stealing. But in the grand scheme of things, I feel pretty ok about it.
I had a naive but fun, pie-in-the-sky idea: What if the entertainment unions somehow negotiated a deal with the MPA etc. for a fund that went directly to union members with the lowest incomes. The consumers/pirate-philanthropists who paid a minimum amount into that fund (probably closer to a few hundred a month) would get some kind of waiver or soft agreement that the MPA at least would not actively prosecute them for piracy of union-made movies and TV shows.
It probably wouldn't be that popular and the MPA could still do all their DRM nonsense and go after the majority of pirates if they want. Not much would change from how it is now really, except some union entertainment people might get a little help. and movie production companies might get better-compensated employees without having to pay for it. the pirates wouldn't be exactly safe legally, but it would at least be a sanctioned way of paying into the entertainment industry without participating in all this DRM, fractured-streaming platforms, Intellectual property nonsense. Win-Win right?
It would never happen, but fun to think about. Imagine a kind of sandboxed entertainment industry socialism/basic income scheme. It seems to me distribution is no longer of any value for digital content. We just need to make sure the people who actually make things get paid. once a thing is made, present-day communication technology allows amateurs to distribute content much more efficiently and conveniently with low enough server costs that donations can easily cover them.
One of the distinctions I make in the moral side of things is about whose profits I am impacting. If there is a small time content creator or podcaster, and I pirate their content, that's a direct...
I know I'm playing fast and loose with morality here and this doesn't really absolve me of anything. I'm still stealing. But in the grand scheme of things, I feel pretty ok about it.
One of the distinctions I make in the moral side of things is about whose profits I am impacting. If there is a small time content creator or podcaster, and I pirate their content, that's a direct hit to their income. But actors and other film workers aren't underpaid because I pirate a Marvel movie, they are underpaid because rich studio owners abuse their market power. I avoid the former, but am starting to not care about the latter.
That's where I'm at. I don't want to hurt people. Corporations aren't people. Is stealing this apple going to hurt a ma and pa store? Yeah, the theft is going to have an emotional impact, they...
That's where I'm at. I don't want to hurt people. Corporations aren't people. Is stealing this apple going to hurt a ma and pa store? Yeah, the theft is going to have an emotional impact, they might have to spend more on security, it's just going to make them feel shitty, I don't want to hurt people. Who does pirating Lion King hurt? As far as I can tell, no one. A corporation might make a miniscule less amount of money. I don't care, since corporations don't have feelings.
Perhaps theft of physical goods, yes, but you're constructing a strawman here. This isn't about Theft, but piracy; just because a corporation called it theft, doesn't mean it's the same thing....
Perhaps theft of physical goods, yes, but you're constructing a strawman here. This isn't about Theft, but piracy; just because a corporation called it theft, doesn't mean it's the same thing.
Once corporations realize they have a captive market and no competition, they raise prices more and more to the breaking point. Piracy shows us that the prices are both too high and the ease of accessing what people want is to inconvenient.
Prices are high and go higher because Shareholders want increased profits, so companies find ways to milk their existing user base, either by increasing prices directly or by removing features and adding them back as pay for play. No one was pirating Heated Seats in a BMW or remote start in Toyota.
And if every salesman was honest, the price of goods wouldn't be artificially inflated on everything under the sun. It's almost impossible to have this argument because shady salesmen and thieves...
And if every salesman was honest, the price of goods wouldn't be artificially inflated on everything under the sun.
It's almost impossible to have this argument because shady salesmen and thieves have been a part of every society regardless of economic and political affiliation. We've always been trying to get one over on each other.
Yes, and in the case where theft hurts people in a demonstrable way, I am morally opposed. In a case where theft doesn't hurt people in a demonstrable way, I am not morally opposed, and am just...
Yes, and in the case where theft hurts people in a demonstrable way, I am morally opposed. In a case where theft doesn't hurt people in a demonstrable way, I am not morally opposed, and am just bound by law. And there's grey area between those two where deeper discussions would be necessary.
My point is that an action (any action) whose only impact is on corporate profits isn't immoral, because corporations can't feel pain. It might be illegal and unwise, but not immoral. This is not to defend any specific action. This is to say "it's theft" isn't a moral argument, it's an legal one. Stealing from a homeless person and stealing from the Microsoft corporate offices are not on the same level of morality (or lack thereof).
I'm not going to argue about goods, as I think others have below, but for piracy there is often no lost sale. People who pirate are often making a choice between not consuming some media or...
I'm not going to argue about goods, as I think others have below, but for piracy there is often no lost sale. People who pirate are often making a choice between not consuming some media or pirating it, there is no legal and affordable way to acquire it. So if someone has a choice between, for example, just not consuming the new Barbie film, or pirating it for free, the industry hasn't lost any money, and that person does not have to forgo cultural participation. You only have one life, and if you end up stuck in a system that refuses to give you enough money to comfortably live, why would you deprive yourself of entertainment when not doing so has no consequences for the industry in question?
The problem, as I see it, is that studios and labels just fundamentally cannot, and will not, abandon the thinking that it is their duty to charge as much as they can for providing as little as...
The problem, as I see it, is that studios and labels just fundamentally cannot, and will not, abandon the thinking that it is their duty to charge as much as they can for providing as little as they can at every single turn. If you make legitimate content fairly priced and easy to access, most people say "fair enough" and pony up. But it's just the endless, endless nickle and diming, trying to squeeze more revenue at every opportunity that just drives people to abandon morality because . . . well, are the corporations being moral? No. Well, then, fuck them.
This could clearly be seen in Australia, a country that had one of the highest piracy rates in the world due to ludicrous prices of physical media, or hamstrung by licensing deals that restricted content. When Netflix finally came up, the piracy rates fell off a cliff because it was EASY and FAIRLY PRICED. Of course, every studio now wants their own slice of the pie and Netflix jacked up the prices, so piracy is on the up again.
People aren't stupid and they know when they are being screwed, and they rightfully feel few qualms about trying to save a few bucks here, when they are being pressed on every side.
This is a capitalism problem, not an entertainment industry problem.
fundamentally cannot, and will not, abandon the thinking that it is their duty to charge as much as they can for providing as little as they can at every single turn
This is a capitalism problem, not an entertainment industry problem.
Of course. As has been noted by others though, it's not so easy to pirate a car. Digital products, by their nature, are more in danger of this and those sectors have to approach the problem...
Of course. As has been noted by others though, it's not so easy to pirate a car. Digital products, by their nature, are more in danger of this and those sectors have to approach the problem differently. For the most part, they have chosen not to.
I agree. Music used to be a big part of my piracy. from Napster to Oink, etc. Now there are reasonably priced music streaming services with almost everything I could want to listen to. I rarely...
I agree. Music used to be a big part of my piracy. from Napster to Oink, etc. Now there are reasonably priced music streaming services with almost everything I could want to listen to. I rarely bother pirating music anymore.
I appreciate the honest here at least. I think one thing that irks me a lot in online discussions of piracy is the pompous-ness of it all. People feel a need justify how they are fighting...
I know I'm playing fast and loose with morality here and this doesn't really absolve me of anything. I'm still stealing. But in the grand scheme of things, I feel pretty ok about it.
I appreciate the honest here at least. I think one thing that irks me a lot in online discussions of piracy is the pompous-ness of it all. People feel a need justify how they are fighting corruption or how piracy actually boosts media sales through word of mouth or resort to that old Gabe quote of "piracy is a service issue".
I feel a lot of it is just motte-and-bailey tactics. I don't make it that complicated. I pirated a lot back in middle/high school as a tech literate kid who couldn't afford most content they wanted, I pirate today when there is no way to properly support media in my native language. I recognize it is still technically stealing but I don't want to make some big show of it. It just happens in the privacy of my home at the end of the day.
What if the entertainment unions somehow negotiated a deal with the MPA etc. for a fund that went directly to union members with the lowest incomes.
It would require some power to address piracy to begin with. As is, the only ones really in danger of being prosecuted are the ones hosting deluges of torrents or direct downloads.
Even if it could work, you know somehow that money will in fact not reach the people it's intended for. Especially in Hollywood. I do wish we could simply pay everyone a living wage (which is what a minimum wage is for).
I think that's because the most common argument against piracy is "this causes economic damage, which is equivalent to a moral wrong" ("piracy is theft"), and people know it's wrong but can't...
Exemplary
I think one thing that irks me a lot in online discussions of piracy is the pompous-ness of it all.
I think that's because the most common argument against piracy is "this causes economic damage, which is equivalent to a moral wrong" ("piracy is theft"), and people know it's wrong but can't explain why. So they try and fail, but post the failed explanation anyway.
And fuck it, I'm going to try:
The claim "legality is morality" is true in all cases only if the legal/economic system is just; the IP system is absurdly broken in a myriad of ways, and everyone knows it. There are plenty of companies doing shitty things to consumers and saying "their shitty actions are legal" is irrelevant to the fact that they're immoral.
Saying "piracy is theft" basically says that you can't tit-for-tat shitty sellers who are trying to screw you. Note that if you say "piracy is theft, if the developer/publisher is acting morally", I wouldn't necessarily disagree with that.
The standard response is "if you don't like it, you can just not buy it - which requires an assumption that the current videogame market is fair. There are several circumstances in which I disagree with this, such as:
any games that are over 20 years old. The purpose of copyright is to remove items from the public domain as a means of financially rewarding artists. Nobody in the games industry is thinking "how much money will this particular game make in 20 years" when they make their game. Thus, it's irrelevant to copyright and the extra duration should never have been granted. In fact, arguably the number should be 7-14 years, since that's what it was originally and the internet has only made distribution faster and easier. Therefore, pirating e.g. The Legend Of Zelda: The Wind Waker (released 2003) hurts nobody and is perfectly moral.
any media that's been gimped to only run on certain platforms. For instance, various ebooks require Adobe DRM, which doesn't run on Linux (not to be confused with Android), which causes a bunch of problems. For instance, the ReMarkable tablet runs Linux and thus can't read those ebooks, and DIY e-reader devices such as The Open Book would need to increase the chip's performance by orders of magnitude to run the DRM (without DRM, the chip only needs to render text, it's utterly trivial).
With games that are console-exclusive, there's an argument against my position that goes thusly: "without the expectation of exclusivity to this platform, publishers would never offer the money to develop this game in the first place. Thus, not supporting their platform-linkage is economic harm". Which is a whole rabbithole that I'd happily(?) detail, but not in this bulletpoint. But basically: that has nothing to do with the game itself (i.e. the game isn't intrinsically tied to that platform's tech, it's purely a commercial arrangement) and is anticompetitive behaviour that ought to be illegal - it is absolutely not a moral justification nowadays. It made some sense for consoles back when consoles needed to be purpose-built with the games also needing to be purpose-built for the console, and so making consoles a loss-leader made more sense.
any media in legal limbo. The 2002 game Mafia is not permitted to be distributed with its soundtrack. This is due to legal dispute over ownership, and realistically all that matters is where the profits from new sales of the game go. The obvious solution is to keep selling but put the profits in escrow. But they didn't, so as a game player, frankly: I don't care, not my problem, fuck em.
any manipulative antifeature bullshit: There are a bunch of games (mostly F2P games) that deliberately make a game boring and charge you money to remove that feature. Doing this in a $60 game is just greed, it's shitty and we all know it. People say "well just don't buy the game", which is just bootlicking the free market. Making this shit legal worsens the game, the entire point of copyright is to monetarily incentivise more and better games, it shouldn't even be legal. Although with F2P games this is a grey area (because that manipulative bullshit is their business, and they're kind of upfront about the fact).
I loved Shadow Of Mordor. The sequel, Shadow Of War was sadly mangled with manipulative BS that was embedded into the core design. They mostly removed the BS due to popular outcry, but some core design decisions still remain that only make sense as support for the manipulative BS - like the whole "you can't control an orc that's higher level than you" thing. If they hadn't removed it, then I'd say fuck em; as it still is, I'm not happy and I haven't bought the game (out of principle I generally haven't pirated stuff, I really ought to break that habit), the world would be a better place if Ubisoft hadn't prioritized microtransaction opportunities at the cost of the quality of the game.
So more generally, my principles here are:
Artists should have a means to compensation for their work, control over specific distribution was just a historical optimization that is long outdated. If you send them $X then they have no moral claim over anything further.
Copyright is a trade-off, not a right - it's an affront to the public that e.g. N64 games (the youngest of which was released in 2002) are legally restricted, not just because it suppresses creative works based off them, but also because the public loses their rights to enjoy those works. Again, copyright is an economic tool to encourage artists, not some moral principle carved into the fabric of the universe.
Piracy is a powerful consumer bludgeon that forces shitty publishers to not screw over the consumer - Uniquenameosaurus's You Should Pirate Anime and You Should Pirate Anime 2 cover this quite well. Or perhaps I should say "can force", since I'm not claiming piracy is always just or good.
The economy is an aggregate system, saying "two wrongs don't make a right" misses that there are five parties involved: you, the publisher, other customers (who may act like you but won't always, e.g. ebook users who won't boycott Kindle when they ship DRMed epubs), the legal system, and (possibly hypothetical) competing publishers (who may have acted differently but were crowded out of the finitely-sized market by the shitty publisher - Little Timmy is only receiving one videogame from grandma this christmas).
Speaking of the legal system: videogame patents should not exist. Not to be confused with videogame copyright (which should exist, albeit much shorter). Ubisoft patented Shadow Of War's Nemesis system, which means it's impossible for any competing game to create a "Shadow Of War, but better" game for the next ~20 years (without licensing the patent, which realistically won't happen). It was absurd when Atari patented minigames in the loading screen and it's absurd now. Having a great game idea already rewards you by giving you a leg up on the game you develop with it.
So in conclusion: the system is fucked, if they can fuck me then I can fuck them. If you say to stop fucking them when they're fucking me then fuck you. If I'm fucking them when they're not fucking me then that's fucked.
Personally, I think you could have stopped right there. These days, that is the entirety of my pro-piracy argument. I have long since given up trying to figure out who's at fault, how it could be...
the IP system is absurdly broken in a myriad of ways, and everyone knows it
Personally, I think you could have stopped right there. These days, that is the entirety of my pro-piracy argument.
I have long since given up trying to figure out who's at fault, how it could be fixed, what people/corps/govts should do about it ... because at the end of the day, no one is going to take my advice, even if I do figure out a good solution.
So, I just pirate stuff, and hope that someday, the system will get fixed. When the opportunity arises to contribute directly to an artistic creator, I usually do. But beyond that, I just quit worrying about it.
~ Quellcrist Falconer, "Things I Should Have Learnt by Now, Volume II", from Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan
The personal, as everyone's so fucking fond of saying, is political. So if some idiot politician, some power player, tries to execute policies that harm you or those you care about, take it personally. Get angry.
The Machinery of Justice will not serve you here – it is slow and cold, and it is theirs, hardware and soft-. Only the little people suffer at the hands of Justice; the creatures of power slide out from under with a wink and a grin. If you want justice, you will have to claw it from them.
Make it personal. Do as much damage as you can. Get your message across. That way you stand a far better chance of being taken seriously next time. Of being considered dangerous.
And make no mistake about this: being taken seriously, being considered dangerous, marks the difference – the only difference in their eyes – between players and little people. Players they will make deals with. Little people they liquidate.
And time and again they cream your liquidation, your displacement, your torture and brutal execution with the ultimate insult that it's just business, it's politics, it's the way of the world, it's a tough life, and that it's nothing personal. Well, fuck them. Make it personal.
~ Quellcrist Falconer, "Things I Should Have Learnt by Now, Volume II", from Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan
I'd say it's closer, but never fully true. There is no way to reach full concensus for justice. Only adequate compromise for a peaceful society. I, for example, would implement a law banning all...
The claim "legality is morality" is true in all cases only if the legal/economic system is just
I'd say it's closer, but never fully true. There is no way to reach full concensus for justice. Only adequate compromise for a peaceful society.
I, for example, would implement a law banning all circumcision for children under 13. I'd allow medical exemptions, but not religious ones. This would be perfectly just in my eyes, because a newborn cannot consent to surgery, and bodily autonomy trumps tradition and "because I want it to look like Dad's."
Others would consider this unjust persecution of their personal rights for religious freedom and/or control over their children.
Piracy is a powerful consumer bludgeon that forces shitty publishers to not screw over the consumer.
Piracy is the consumer equivalent of striking. It shows that demand is there, but for one reason or another, customers don't want to buy. Opposed to just artificially signaling "nobody wants this game, we shouldn't make others like it."
Music streaming wouldn't exist without the rampant, widespread piracy of the 90's and early 00's. I'd say the streaming model as currently widespread is unfair to artists...but that's a solvable problem...just not one publishers care about.
I really enjoy your perspective and complete comment here. You might enjoy the book Copyright's Paradox by Neil Weinstock Netanel (Oxford, 2008). In his words: Additionally:
Copyright is a trade-off, not a right
I really enjoy your perspective and complete comment here. You might enjoy the book Copyright's Paradox by Neil Weinstock Netanel (Oxford, 2008). In his words:
Copyright, I argue, should be delimited primarily by how it can truly serve as an "engine of free expression." Copyright’s scope, duration, and character should be shaped to best further the First Amendment goals of robust debate and expressive delivery.
Additionally:
Today’s "copyright industries"—publishers, motion picture studios, and record labels—are, for the most part, large business concerns . . . the power, ubiquity, and profit orientation of today’s commercial mass media undermine the democratic character of public discourse.
I think that is a part of it. Sure, there are definitely some immoral studios out there that garner much less sympathy for pirating. But then there are some at best petty reasons and at worst...
Note that if you say "piracy is theft, if the developer/publisher is acting morally (and some other conditions I might detail later, like the work being legally possible to buy in the first place)". I wouldn't necessarily disagree with that.
I think that is a part of it. Sure, there are definitely some immoral studios out there that garner much less sympathy for pirating. But then there are some at best petty reasons and at worst outright misinformation reasons that people use to justify said Piracy.
I think the arguments over Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is a great example: it had performance issues (like, ever other Switch game ever) and there were accusations of it being a lazy upgrade to Breath of the Wild which took too long to come out (which is a borderline misinformed take). You hear reasons like this to emulate it on PC for "the true experience" and it makes it hard to sympathize for actual ethical quandries or outright criminal acts. The audience simply sounds entitled to do something and makes up some reason after the fact.
The standard response is "if you don't like it, you can just not buy it - which is why I added "economic" to the "legal/economic system" part above: this statement requires an assumption that the current videogame market is fair
You can argue about a lack of fairness, but I feel it's missing the forest for the trees. "don't like it don't buy it " shouldn't be used as a dismissal intended to shut down a conversation (although, yes. It very often is used that way. The woes of internet communication). It should be used to acknowledge two factors:
Most obviously, the first step to showing demand (or lack thereof) is to not reward a game not worth your money. And these days, those large service games care less and less about pirating what may or may not be a thin client of an exe into a game whose value is mostly on the studio's servers. It goes beyond "don't like it don't buy it". Engaging at all is part of the strategy these days.
supporting games that do do these practices shows demand for such practices. The best way to stick it to the bland AAA title is to rise up a demand for a good AAA title. Or maybe not even a AAA title at all.
In the worst case, there is now more success and choices in the industry and no one loses except some tribalists vying for [favorite game] to the point where they clash with [opposing game]. I know there's a feeling of schadenfreude from seeing a bad company get just desserts, but as you said: the video game market isn't fair. The most successful games in a financial standpoint won't be the fairest nor most high quality ones. BUT taking even 0.01% of such a player base to the "underpriveledged" games can be such a boon to smaller studios as to make.
personally my "piracy metrics" are very straightforward: If there is some way to officially support the release in my country, I will avoid pirating. To use your metrics as how my idea formed:
I agree the copyright period is way too long, but I don't know what's a "good number". Regardless, copyright is less for consumers and more for competitors. The idea of copyright is less about when a creator can't profit and more about when others can use that piece of media for themselves in however which way. We're coming at a point in gaming where some of the oldest Steam games are or will be 20 years old, but some have stood the test of time and are still selling. So I don't feel it's right to go around that just because "well it's old now".
a lot of my background comes from games, so I spent my entire life accepting that certain games are only on certain platforms. "Gimped" in that they literally can't run without dev work to port such stuff. But the thing is the most desirable games will get that port work done. FF7's original game is well over 20 years old, but it is also available on almost every single platform since the PS1. Skipped Gen 6, but pretty much ever device in the last 10 years has some port of it. This won't necessarily apply to every medium, though.
dubiously owned media is definitely a case where I just grab it. I don't know who or what the money is going to, it's usually off store for those legal reasons anyway. and for older games that may in fact be nobody, or nobody who is really using games as a business anyway. I wouldn't really feel bad that the State of Rhode Island did not benefit from the purchase of Kingdoms of Alamar in 2013. I'm sure they taxed every citizen who bought the game more than $60 anyway.
f2p games are something I alluded to above, but also where a lot of this breaks down. Like, you can't "pirate" them per se. most don't assign value to the executable on your computer. Those that are premium don't care because they want to sell you skins or lootboxes or battlepasses to get more than the base cost ever was; they only make it premium for psychological marketing effects. The only way to win is not to play; not just "don't like it don't buy it", "don't like it, don't engage".*
It's mostly trivial in the grand scheme of things, but the general spirit I want to spread is "don't spend your time hating and wrecking when you can help others you do support rise up". Going into piracy as a way to punish is futile and simply bad for the soul.
*But at the same time, it does feel like the ultimate way to defeat piracy; put as much of the game on the server and you minimize any attack vectors. Those that get through are easy to identify and easier to punish. It limits your game design and completely flips the way you develop games, but from a business standpoint it seems like the inevitable endgame for the cat and mouse of piracy.)
Stealing is open to definition, but by long jurisprudence stealing requires that you intend to permanently deprive the “rightful owner” of their use of the thing. Unauthorized copying is a crime...
Stealing is open to definition, but by long jurisprudence stealing requires that you intend to permanently deprive the “rightful owner” of their use of the thing.
Unauthorized copying is a crime now thanks to dumb statutes, but it’s not stealing.
If I write a book, my “use of it” involves being able to sell copies of it to make a living. If you start distributing photocopies of it for free, you are depriving me of that use.
If I write a book, my “use of it” involves being able to sell copies of it to make a living. If you start distributing photocopies of it for free, you are depriving me of that use.
Are they, though? Most things I pirate are things I wouldn't have bought anyway. Even though publishers will defend this argument tooth and nail, 1000 illegal copies are not equal to 1000 lost sales.
Are they, though? Most things I pirate are things I wouldn't have bought anyway.
Even though publishers will defend this argument tooth and nail, 1000 illegal copies are not equal to 1000 lost sales.
I have acquired a lot of copyrighted material I didn't have license to. Just getting that out there to frame my position on this before what I state next. I find the "I wouldn't have bought...
I have acquired a lot of copyrighted material I didn't have license to. Just getting that out there to frame my position on this before what I state next.
I find the "I wouldn't have bought anyway" framing to be a bit disingenuous. I used to think along those lines too, but I also recognize that by occupying a significant amount of my time with things I didn't purchase, it gives me the freedom to look at any one thing and feel that I could have done something else with my time and not felt the need to purchase it otherwise. It's easy for me to say I wouldn't have purchased X movie that I pirated, because I can go play Y game that I pirated to occupy my time if I pretend like I never bought X movie. Now if I didn't have X movie or Y game, and then the new Z tv show comes out on some streaming service that I don't have, I might have a lot of free time that I don't know what to spend it on and feel more compelled to spend it accessing streaming service to watch Z tv show.
Of course there's other factors too, I'm not saying it's guaranteed that someone would purchase either, I just find it a weak way to argue because it's inherently unprovable, not just to everyone else but also to yourself. There are situations where it's potentially sort of provable like if you actually have no money at all to even buy it, but for people making this argument that seems to be pretty rare. It also makes it so the only way it can be even remotely provable to others is to have to give an excessive amount of detail of your life. Otherwise it just sounds like you're making excuses that you can't even prove to yourself.
I don't think speaking generally about purchasing behaviors is flawed in the same way, just when speaking about a specific individual and specific circumstances. I can't know for sure that I wouldn't buy something, but I can know that when you look at how the MPAA/RIAA etc. claim their losses from copyright infringement, it essentially proves that every infringement isn't theft because ultimately the numbers that come from those calculations exceed the actual money that is circulating. So broadly that proves that not every infringing download is something someone would have otherwise purchased, but identifying specific cases is more difficult.
Yes, but the thing of which I might deprive you of using does not exist until I create it. More technically, the thing must exist before I can take it.
Yes, but the thing of which I might deprive you of using does not exist until I create it.
More technically, the thing must exist before I can take it.
It seems you are being pedantic, but for clarity: In order for a theft to occur, a thing must be removed by the bad actor in such a way as the original holder may no longer use it. Making a copy...
It seems you are being pedantic, but for clarity:
In order for a theft to occur, a thing must be removed by the bad actor in such a way as the original holder may no longer use it. Making a copy is creating a new thing which never existed for the original
Holder.
I’m not being pedantic. Your insistence that making unauthorized copies of a creative work doesn’t harm its author is absurd. It’s entirely irrelevant that no physical object is taken from the author.
I’m not being pedantic. Your insistence that making unauthorized copies of a creative work doesn’t harm its author is absurd. It’s entirely irrelevant that no physical object is taken from the author.
The difference between selling copies of a creative work and selling a physical object is that a copy of creative work exists solely for the purpose of being sold. So if you refuse to sell it, for...
Your insistence that making unauthorized copies of a creative work doesn’t harm its author is absurd. It’s entirely irrelevant that no physical object is taken from the author.
The difference between selling copies of a creative work and selling a physical object is that a copy of creative work exists solely for the purpose of being sold. So if you refuse to sell it, for some reason, then no actual value is lost by people making unauthorized copies.
For instance, any videogame sold in India for the standard US-market price of $60US will be widely pirated, and rightly so, because basically the median income there is $300 per month (which mostly goes to food and rent). It's a stupid price that nobody can actually pay, so it's effectively not being sold.
In other words, at that cost there is no opportunity, so the opportunity cost is squat. At which point, there's substantial benefit in pirating it and no real reason not to.
Another example might be Japanese doujin (basically: indie comics). Japan is historically very inward-focused, they don't care about selling overseas so it makes no difference if english fan-translations are published and distributed freely.
Both of these cases would be radically different if piracy actually stole physical objects, as that would interfere with the authors' operations.
Well, now you are assigning statements to me that I have not made. I have said nothing about harm or even morality. I am working for truth and clarity, and pointing out that making a copy is not...
Well, now you are assigning statements to me that I have not made. I have said nothing about harm or even morality. I am working for truth and clarity, and pointing out that making a copy is not theft.
Honestly I don’t even know if DMs are a thing on Tildes, never tried, but my go-to places such as those of which you are speaking are fading fast, so if you’d be willing to share your sources…
Honestly I don’t even know if DMs are a thing on Tildes, never tried, but my go-to places such as those of which you are speaking are fading fast, so if you’d be willing to share your sources…
I'll DM the names of the sites to you. But they are private torrent sites. and unfortunately, I don't have any invites at the moment. If you are unfamiliar with private torrent trackers. They are...
I'll DM the names of the sites to you. But they are private torrent sites. and unfortunately, I don't have any invites at the moment.
If you are unfamiliar with private torrent trackers. They are a bit of a pain to get into by design. I think the idea is to have some kind of token barrier to entry to keep out anti-piracy authorities as well trolls/people with bad intentions who might vandalize the user-supported collection.
The barriers are basically social networking rather than technical in nature. if someone is interested my best advice would be to go to r/trackers or whatever other private tracker communities you can find. There are probably some good discords and stuff too, but I've been content with my memberships so long I've grown out of touch with the wider community. You can ask around these communities for invites or often private tackers will have official threads where they will give out invites for short periods when they want to grow the site.
Once you are on a private tracker each one has different minimum requirements to be able to keep your membership. But I've always found that part very easy to maintain. Basically, if you have a PC that you can leave on 24/7 and keep everything you download seeding for at least a few weeks then you are golden.
The best private sites are very hard to get invites to and have higher standards. So you may have to join a smaller lesser-known site that won't be quite as nice, maintain good stats there for a while, and then use connections there and show off your stats to get into a nicer site, and so on, climbing the ladder.
It sounds like a pain and it is, I think mainly because it is illegal and not because of any practical limitations. But once you are on one of the major sites it is like a utopia. My movie site is like a cleaner version of IMDB except you can download every movie in whatever format you like. The community is obsessive about quality, there are no cam recordings or anything like that. If a movie is theatre only and no high-quality version has been released or leaked then it is just not available on the site. Any kind of audio artifacts, sync issues, burned-in subtitles or anything like that is unacceptable and the torrent will be flagged and removed within an hour or 2. I don't even remember seeing anything like that in years, most of the quality flags I see are about weird codec/frame rate complaints that I barely understand and would have never noticed, but people still argue about them and compete to upload "fixed" versions of the movie. The site has a linked database of cast and crew for every movie so you can quickly browse everything an actor/director has done and quickly download whatever you are interested in. There are curated collections of movies like AFIs top 100 etc. Each movie has its ratings based on internal site user ratings as well as meta critic and IMDB ratings with links. There are top 10 active lists for day/week/month/year so you can see what is popular. It feels like a peek at how great the internet could be if it wasn't profit-driven. Kind of like Wikipedia (or Tildes ;) ).
Wow—I've never really gotten too far into private trackers, I had no idea what I was up against. I guess it's not 2009 anymore... sigh. Guess I'm probably stuck with my own lowly sources at this...
Wow—I've never really gotten too far into private trackers, I had no idea what I was up against. I guess it's not 2009 anymore... sigh. Guess I'm probably stuck with my own lowly sources at this point, dang. Thanks for the info!
Yeah private trackers are more like a serious hobby has always been my perception, especially early on to get into them, and maybe later on a little less is required but still some ongoing effort...
Yeah private trackers are more like a serious hobby has always been my perception, especially early on to get into them, and maybe later on a little less is required but still some ongoing effort is required. That's why I use Usenet instead, which has it's own initial learning curve but it's actually a lot more open (more straightforward, it's more technical hurdles to overcome in setup than the type of hurdles you have to deal with in private trackers) and costs a small amount of money up front for some of the services (like $40-60 or so per year combined across various services).
I’ve looked into Usenet before, and I’ve used IRC and whatnot way back so I think I could swing it, but I haven’t made it all the way in yet—maybe I’ll give it another shot.
I’ve looked into Usenet before, and I’ve used IRC and whatnot way back so I think I could swing it, but I haven’t made it all the way in yet—maybe I’ll give it another shot.
I mostly relied on r/usenet for various guides and recommendations for services to sign up to. I also looked up various black friday deals, even after black friday, and many of them still work...
I mostly relied on r/usenet for various guides and recommendations for services to sign up to. I also looked up various black friday deals, even after black friday, and many of them still work long after black friday, and those deals are generally the best pricing (without these deals, it would likely be hard to hit the $40-60 a year mark).
The part that was confusing to me initially was just the structure of how it worked. The provider is the server that actually hold the content, which is where you spend the most money gaining access to those networks. The indexers are the services that actually go out and find the content on those networks and make it easy to discover and download for the user. You pay for a few indexers at a nominal price to cover most things. Then you can setup automation software to make your life easier in the long run like Sonarr, Radarr etc. and you plug in API keys into these so they can access the providers and indexers on your behalf.
One thing I experienced is that not all of the providers are like big orgs or whatever. Like I paid for one and had to wait awhile for the guy to seemingly manually set up my account. That didn't seem to be an unusual occurrence based on other posts, just mentioning that because I could see how some might panic and think someone is scamming them if their account isn't automatically created upon payment.
I also used privacy.com to generate virtual cards to sign up for most of those services and set strict limits just because I felt safer that way. They could only charge the amount that I set, and I could throw away virtual card once the transaction was complete. Last I knew this service only worked if you're in the US, but you might be able to find similar things for other countries.
But I was right. The ability to change features, prices, and availability of things you've already paid for is a powerful temptation to corporations. Inkjet printers were always a sleazy business, but once these printers got directly connected to the internet, companies like HP started pushing out "security updates" that modified your printer to make it reject the third-party ink you'd paid for:
Now, this scam wouldn't work if you could just put things back the way they were before the "update," which is where the DRM comes in. A thicket of IP laws make reverse-engineering DRM-encumbered products into a felony. Combine always-on network access with indiscriminate criminalization of user modification, and the enshittification will follow, as surely as night follows day.
There are some HP printers that are sold with a strict internet connectivity requirement. They do not print offline. Ever. Not sure if you can trick them or whatnot.
There are some HP printers that are sold with a strict internet connectivity requirement. They do not print offline. Ever. Not sure if you can trick them or whatnot.
Personally, I refuse to buy them. They offend my sensibilities. However, the offline capable versions (exact same hw but allow offline printing) are sold at higher prices. So I can see why some...
Personally, I refuse to buy them. They offend my sensibilities. However, the offline capable versions (exact same hw but allow offline printing) are sold at higher prices. So I can see why some people support this business model
To be frank, it’s the demand for cheap products that create these kinds of behaviors. Every shitty thing that has happened with printers is because of this. It’s why printers are sold with a razor...
To be frank, it’s the demand for cheap products that create these kinds of behaviors. Every shitty thing that has happened with printers is because of this. It’s why printers are sold with a razor and blade model resulting in extremely overpriced ink cartridges. It’s also why most printers are effectively unserviceable, and why they fail so frequently. People don’t understand why businesses spend so much money on Xerox machines that require service contracts, but it’s entirely because they are reliable, serviceable, and aren’t likely to cause problems in their workflows.
Of course this doesn’t just affect printers, it affects everything. It’s part of why there are so many garbage products, and why work keeps getting offshored to countries with lower standards of living and local wages are being depressed. For a system that is supposed to create optimum economic efficiency, it sure does create a lot of real-world entropy and waste.
Just to be clear, I am not blaming people for asking for less expensive goods. My wording is coming from the frustration of dealing with so many people who buy the cheapest printers and then complain about the problems they have with them. I mean to blame the system rather than the people who have no choice but to participate in it.
Part of it is just wealth inequality. If everyone had to save up to buy a high-quality good, I think it would lower both a bit of the "keeping up with the Jonses" and the demand for ever-cheaper...
Part of it is just wealth inequality. If everyone had to save up to buy a high-quality good, I think it would lower both a bit of the "keeping up with the Jonses" and the demand for ever-cheaper goods.
Even then, I think a simple law that mandated 10 repair-or-replace warantees for everything would eliminate the ability to cut quality to lower price below a reasonable threshold. It would also make manufacturers really think about if changing the form factor of their battery will be worth it to shave off 0.05 mm off their latest phone.
I understand where you're coming from, and I advocate for those kinds of laws being put in place, but at the same time the cynic in me is saying that simple laws are the ones with the most loopholes.
I understand where you're coming from, and I advocate for those kinds of laws being put in place, but at the same time the cynic in me is saying that simple laws are the ones with the most loopholes.
When I say "simple law," I mean in the sense that it's a relatively simple implementation compared to trying to regulate consumer goods quality through any other mechanism. Namely, because we...
When I say "simple law," I mean in the sense that it's a relatively simple implementation compared to trying to regulate consumer goods quality through any other mechanism.
Namely, because we already have a pretty good layperson understanding of how it should work.
Businesses are always going to structure incentives trying to get the outcomes they want, but the fact that they care so much about my machine phoning home reinforces my belief that cooperating is...
Businesses are always going to structure incentives trying to get the outcomes they want, but the fact that they care so much about my machine phoning home reinforces my belief that cooperating is not in my best interest.
15-20 years ago, I refused to buy cell phones that A) did not have a user-accessible/replaceable battery in them, or that B) had a camera. The industry will force it's preferences down your throat.
15-20 years ago, I refused to buy cell phones that A) did not have a user-accessible/replaceable battery in them, or that B) had a camera.
The industry will force it's preferences down your throat.
I mean, to some extent your preference is overruled by others. It's become very clear that people simply won't consider a phone without a camera; it's as important to them as wifi antennas. That...
I mean, to some extent your preference is overruled by others. It's become very clear that people simply won't consider a phone without a camera; it's as important to them as wifi antennas.
That said, while some things become ubiquitous, others become niches that you can still look for. That's part of what the Fairphone is trying to tap into. But after a brief lookup, it seems even Samsung has a modern-ish (2022) phone with a replaceable battery.
But it doesn't help that there are simply less companies making phones these days. HTC and LG are big and recent exits from the scene. Sony has never had much worldwide headway and still falls behind competition. Motorola and Nokia aren't really trying to compete with flagships right now at all (though, they are trying to enter with their own flavors of flip phones). It's a rough market and no one is really challenging Samsung, so they become a de facto pseudo-monopoly for Android.
I haven’t observed this behavior myself but it wouldn’t surprise me. I’ve been decrying the lack of “dumb TV” options on the market for years. I just want a high-quality screen that displays what...
I haven’t observed this behavior myself but it wouldn’t surprise me. I’ve been decrying the lack of “dumb TV” options on the market for years. I just want a high-quality screen that displays what I tell it to. No ads, no “content ID” surveillance, no built-in streaming app crapware. I ended up getting a Vizio TV (a known offender, like all the brands frankly) with the deliberate plan that we would never connect it to the internet. It has been sufficient, I’m able to use HDMI in for all the content I want and haven’t had any really trouble except for the TV’s clock which can’t be set manually for some stupid reason.
Then my mother-in-law housesat for us while we were out for a week and couldn’t figure out how to work Netflix on the Playstation so she connected the TV to our wifi network. I was flabbergasted. No idea what it did while it was online but as soon as I got home I blocked it at the network level. Haven’t seen any unwanted behavior since.
Which leaves me wondering a bit if I’ve been too paranoid about this whole thing. I’m still annoyed about the business model these TV manufacturers have all bought into, and will keep doing my part to keep my devices in line. But I was actually surprised it didn’t start showing me ads or nagging me to restore the connection. It was less user-hostile than I expected it to be.
No, you're not too paranoid. Just because they're not showing you ads doesn't mean the TV isn't content IDing everything on the screen and phoning home with that information to sell as part of...
Which leaves me wondering a bit if I’ve been too paranoid about this whole thing.
No, you're not too paranoid. Just because they're not showing you ads doesn't mean the TV isn't content IDing everything on the screen and phoning home with that information to sell as part of your advertising profile.
Vizio isn't just one of the bad ones, they may be one of the worst ones. But that's an old article. Perhaps everyone is as bad as they were now. Sadly these days with the advanced features the...
But that's an old article. Perhaps everyone is as bad as they were now.
Sadly these days with the advanced features the nicer TVs give you, disabling internet access also removes the ability to get incremental updates. Some TVs actually get increased capabilities from software updates (i.e. higher refresh rates, more accurate colors, etc).
This is amusing, if only because the exact same thing has happened at my house. SmartTV connected as just a screen, mother in law couldn't figure out that it's just a Windows computer with...
This is amusing, if only because the exact same thing has happened at my house. SmartTV connected as just a screen, mother in law couldn't figure out that it's just a Windows computer with keyboard and mouse, so connected it to Guest Wifi to get at Netflix.
Solid problem solving, but just get over the hurdle of being scared of it and you'll see it's like the computer you use at home all day. There's not a dozen remotes or anything, just power on the screen, use keyboard and mouse.
I'm definitely mixing urban legends and two specific user-reported issues. In one case a user claimed their network connected smart TV was constantly acting as an unsecured hotspot their neighbors...
I'm definitely mixing urban legends and two specific user-reported issues. In one case a user claimed their network connected smart TV was constantly acting as an unsecured hotspot their neighbors were using.
The other was someone claiming their samsung smart tv connected to an unsecured network autonomously. I saw a link to it on this Hacker News thread a few years ago, and now the original post on reddit is locked behind a private subreddit. The post to samsung's forums is also a missing page. In any case with just one self reported event I think we can safely put this in the "doesn't happen, but technically feasible" bin.
Related question. I have a smart tv that I only want for dumb features. I didn't give it any network passwords. BUT. If I were to use it as a monitor for my computer, do you know it would try to...
Related question. I have a smart tv that I only want for dumb features. I didn't give it any network passwords. BUT. If I were to use it as a monitor for my computer, do you know it would try to read my key strokes? Get my Network password that way and call home with my computer's data? I sound stupidly paranoid but I guess I am.
Some (most?) modern smart TVs do have ACR (Automatic Content Recognition) that try to determine what you're watching. So they do have the capability of capturing the screen. But as long as you...
Exemplary
Some (most?) modern smart TVs do have ACR (Automatic Content Recognition) that try to determine what you're watching. So they do have the capability of capturing the screen. But as long as you have password masking turned on, it would be impossible to read passwords as the HDMI and DisplayPort standards don't support HID data like keystrokes/mouse movement. Since both do support back channel data (like HDMI CEC), it could be possible to send this data, but your graphics card would have to support it and I can't say I've ever heard of anybody doing this.
So in short, presently if you were to display a password on an Internet connected smart tv, it's possible that it could be captured. You of course, can disable ACR and the simplest solution is to just not connect the TV to the Internet at all.
In the future, it's possible that GPU manufacturers could coordinate with TV manufacturers to pass through keyboard data. I could see somebody trying this at some point, but the backlash would be devastating when caught.
If any GPU manufacturer starts making TVs or any TV manufacturer starts making GPUs, I would stay far far away lol
This is not a realistic threat. On the technical side, automated content recognition is (sadly) a thing, but it works like Shazam. That is to say, it compares snapshots to known content - if...
If I were to use it as a monitor for my computer, do you know it would try to read my key strokes? Get my Network password that way and call home with my computer's data?
This is not a realistic threat. On the technical side, automated content recognition is (sadly) a thing, but it works like Shazam. That is to say, it compares snapshots to known content - if you're watching a show, it can figure out what you're watching, much like Shazam can identify a song for you. But just like Shazam would be lost if you hummed it an original melody, ACR can't just recognize anything. Almost everything you'd do on a computer would not be contained in the comparison library and thus would not be comprehensible to the smart TV.
Figuring out your wifi password and then connecting to the right network, based just on image processing, would likely be quite challenging. And all for a very minimal gain, since the expectation is that everyone will choose to connect the TV to the internet regardless.
I believe you are asking a technical question about activity on your computer available for surveillance by your smart tv (or really, any connected device). The answer depends on how you connect,...
I believe you are asking a technical question about activity on your computer available for surveillance by your smart tv (or really, any connected device).
The answer depends on how you connect, and the settings on your computer. I know there is a fair amount of back and forth along both hdmi and displayport. Of course any kind of wireless connection means your tv is on the network with all that entails.
I’m hoping someone has more detailed information about what data is available to hdmi and displayport devices.
There is a reason I keep buying CDs, DVDs and Blu rays instead of paying for various subscription services... Maybe I should set up new firewall rule for my printer though. But it is 5 years old...
There is a reason I keep buying CDs, DVDs and Blu rays instead of paying for various subscription services...
Maybe I should set up new firewall rule for my printer though. But it is 5 years old Brother, I'm not that afraid of problems with it.
I've honestly been blown away in the last year by how advanced piracy has gotten. Netflix/et. al. haven't really done anything but compete over which shows they're currently licensing for a...
I've honestly been blown away in the last year by how advanced piracy has gotten. Netflix/et. al. haven't really done anything but compete over which shows they're currently licensing for a decade.
With a few youtube tutorials you can have an old PC setup to automagically grab everything from shows the day they air to movies that are too old/obscure to be on any steaming service and play them on your TV/computer/phone.
This was more of a "how to set up a download farm 101" type of instruction set that I don't think fits within the Tildes rules. I'm of course happy to share, but I just figured I'd be respectful...
This was more of a "how to set up a download farm 101" type of instruction set that I don't think fits within the Tildes rules.
I'm of course happy to share, but I just figured I'd be respectful of the piracy stance that Tildes holds.
The archiving topic is iffy, but that's because there's no stopping archiving so Tildes won't try. They do want to note that copying entire articles is a good way to flag a website for infringement, so archive links are condoned to at least allow some leeway. Piracy fits that bill. Not being outright supportive means you won't be held liable for hosting pirated content. I don't want to force Deimos' hands with piracy content.
Precisely. I do hope it was useful though as I didn't check the content to see if it applied to your situation. Nevertheless, reading up on Sonarr, Radarr, and Prowlarr is a good starting point.
Precisely.
I do hope it was useful though as I didn't check the content to see if it applied to your situation. Nevertheless, reading up on Sonarr, Radarr, and Prowlarr is a good starting point.
No worries, I'll send it right away. I do want to note that it points mostly towards the stellar documentation of the creators of these tools, as I can't do it justice in a Tildes DM. It'll point...
No worries, I'll send it right away.
I do want to note that it points mostly towards the stellar documentation of the creators of these tools, as I can't do it justice in a Tildes DM.
It'll point you in the right direction though. When I sent it over the first time, that user was up and running in a very short timeframe because it really is very simple.
Good tip! I went back to see what happened with the thread as it became more popular than I expected (I received more than quite a few DMs! If anyone else is interested, don't hesitate) and saw...
Good tip! I went back to see what happened with the thread as it became more popular than I expected (I received more than quite a few DMs! If anyone else is interested, don't hesitate) and saw this by chance. I probably would've missed it otherwise.
This is precisely what I mentioned - by pirating your, uh, friend basically create need for such content. It doesn't make them any money by pirating it, but the word about it gets in between...
This is precisely what I mentioned - by pirating your, uh, friend basically create need for such content. It doesn't make them any money by pirating it, but the word about it gets in between people and some of them will actualy spend money on it.
It really comes poorly across the language barrier :-( I'm not crazy enough to suggest this. I believe I'm realist :-) I'm just taking such stance myself. Even thoigh there is content that I would...
It really comes poorly across the language barrier :-(
I'm not crazy enough to suggest this. I believe I'm realist :-) I'm just taking such stance myself. Even thoigh there is content that I would like to watch (upcoming Fallout series, for example), I'm not payng subscription for it and I won't be pirating it. The idea behind this stance is kinda "If you don't do it user-friendly way then I don't care about you doing it at all".
For example - GTA5 can't beplayed offline on Steam Deck. Because of this I din't and will not buy Red Dead Redemption 2 because Rockstar can at any time include "online-only" and I don't wat to support such behavior.
Staying within games territory - I haven't bought AC4: Black flag for PC because I haveto have Ubisoft launcher which is troublesome (on Linux, my OS of choice) but not actually needed by the game to run - it is artificially needed which is how Ubisoft wanted it. And because of this I won't buy any of their games.
I know that I, as a single person, mean nothing to them. Yet it is how I have chosen to fight suc anti-user shit. Beit aubscription-only content, artificial rewuirement of shit software or online-only even for singleplayer mode of the game.
And beieve me - I'm not missing out. There is so much good content out there without such hurdles... I.may not be able to talk with friends about newest series on that streaming service or another, but I can always talk about Home Alone, Alien or from some more modern ones Rush, Le Mans '66 etc. I will always pick older great movie over yet anoher average one. Woth games it is even easier - there are studios that encourage players to record and stream their games, publisers that don't include any un-needed crap. And indie games... And older games. I have 5000 hours of great games to play even if I stopped buying new ones right now. I don't have to pay for their bad choices...
And yes, we can kinda see that bigger companies are much farther from their customers and actually care about them less. I just take the same stance towards them.
I hope I have somehow described what I meant and answered your question.
EDIT: Had to uncensor s**t due to formatting troubles. Sorry for the word.
It's Czech. Smetimes there is perfect way of saying something in Czech but there are a few English words that can be used for that. Sometimes more of them are great in sense they actually mean...
It's Czech. Smetimes there is perfect way of saying something in Czech but there are a few English words that can be used for that. Sometimes more of them are great in sense they actually mean what I want to say, other times I fail to pick even one that would describe it well.
With piracy... Making GTA5 run offline is softwareengineering, not piracy in my eyes :-) That is based on owning (licensing) the game in the first place though. In this case I would consider this type of piracy to be user-experience enhancement.
Now if you actually pirae the game, don't pay for it, tha is what I meant. If you get the game by non-legal means, you created that "need to have it". Even though you didn't pay for it, you became part of the game (let's say) ecosystem. You are going to tak abou it, share your experience, maybe write a review somewhere, the IP is going to get free marketing. They didn't get the money from you, they will get it from some people that you had influence on.
To be clear - I absolutely do not have anything against you personally! I'm not saying you shouldn't be doing it that way. I'm saying that by getting the game by any means and playng it, people show publishers they want the game. And publishers knowing this will make another one and very likely bodge in some other s**t features (that will get removed by some cracking party) and there we go round and round.
I decided to step out of this merry-go-around. I'd rather enjoy something that wasn't made unusable in he first place.
This just popped into my mind - microtransactions! People hate them, yet they pour huge money into them anyway. Whose fault is it that we have them then?
EDIT: Sorry for typos. I know how the words should be written, I write from my phoe whoch is why there are missing characters or spaces etc.
To be honest, I won't even bother. It's not worth my time and will kinda defeat my stance, which is "don't support them" which is done even by not actually caring about their content. Pirating it...
To be honest, I won't even bother. It's not worth my time and will kinda defeat my stance, which is "don't support them" which is done even by not actually caring about their content. Pirating it means there is aneed for the content, but on my side, there actually isn't.
tech's been there for well over a decade. The hardware's just gotten to a point where it's fast and nigh seemless. and of course, the software makes it so even a layman can set it up as long as...
tech's been there for well over a decade. The hardware's just gotten to a point where it's fast and nigh seemless. and of course, the software makes it so even a layman can set it up as long as they do a bit of research.
Of course, that's a high bar for a layman and people do just want to turn on a tv/phone and have that content update itself. Nor do any troubleshooting if something breaks. So I think streaming services are less worried than ever these days. They will still try, but pirates aren't a make or break for them.
Fair enough. I only bring it up because I was recently startled by that revelation. I purchased what I thought was an actual print of a TV series season on eBay and was kind of alarmed when it...
Fair enough. I only bring it up because I was recently startled by that revelation.
I purchased what I thought was an actual print of a TV series season on eBay and was kind of alarmed when it came in and was clearly just a recording burned onto a disc. After doing some research I found out that the show was never available on disk and the hundreds of eBay listings were all of recordings that someone put together.
That sounds like pirated films on "VCDs" circa 1990s Hong Kong. There were entire malls where you could buy copied disks: go in, look at posters, point to it and show the shop keep, pay him, and...
That sounds like pirated films on "VCDs" circa 1990s Hong Kong. There were entire malls where you could buy copied disks: go in, look at posters, point to it and show the shop keep, pay him, and leave the store empty handed and go around to the back in an hour for the newly burned disk.
Worked for PS1 games, Dreamcast games, movies, showes, audio CDs.
In Vancouver there were normal looking stores selling normal looking boxes of media as well. But they're pirated. To this day I don't know where one would go to purchase actual HK movies.
With media owners holding on to their stuff for stream and purposely not printing media, north america might be headed to that model soon.
It’s been a while since I was at a flea market aka swap meet, but that’s where I’d look as in the past there were many vendors with unknown credentials.
It’s been a while since I was at a flea market aka swap meet, but that’s where I’d look as in the past there were many vendors with unknown credentials.
Kicking my nostalgia, HK VCDs used to be one of the limited ways to get subtitled anime in America. Was how I could watch Yu Yu Hakusho back in the day. Not that the subtitles really made any...
Kicking my nostalgia, HK VCDs used to be one of the limited ways to get subtitled anime in America. Was how I could watch Yu Yu Hakusho back in the day.
Not that the subtitles really made any sense though haha
Do you read traditional Chinese? Or did you have to try to buy the rare English subs? Yea the quality was really bad wasn't it, but most of the time there just weren't any other ways :) bad old days
Do you read traditional Chinese? Or did you have to try to buy the rare English subs? Yea the quality was really bad wasn't it, but most of the time there just weren't any other ways :) bad old days
English subs, but they didn't really make sense lol. I'm sad I don't have a direct reference for the Hakusho ones anymore, but someone uploaded screen caps from the One Piece ones and is similar...
English subs, but they didn't really make sense lol. I'm sad I don't have a direct reference for the Hakusho ones anymore, but someone uploaded screen caps from the One Piece ones and is similar (complete with characters having a variety of names lol): https://imgur.com/a/45Qjs
I know that shows don't come up on discs, but there's plenty of content out there even without subscriptions. I'm not really missing out that much. I'd rather watch good movie on physical.media...
I know that shows don't come up on discs, but there's plenty of content out there even without subscriptions. I'm not really missing out that much. I'd rather watch good movie on physical.media that I own then be at will of someone else.
I am.subscribed to something though - LMG content (Linus tech tips and other channels) on Floatplane. The difference is huge though - I can actually download all of their videos and watch them again even if I unsubscribe. This is the service I can actually pay for. Not Netflix that can't even stream 1080p on my Linux desktop...
Technically, you don’t own the physical media any differently than you own an incoming stream. The rights vary a little, but they are still revocable rights mostly granted by some private party....
Technically, you don’t own the physical media any differently than you own an incoming stream. The rights vary a little, but they are still revocable rights mostly granted by some private party. It’s just harder for them ti enforce the limitations and revocations with physical media.
That's the thing. I own it, I have it in myhouse, they can't come and take it away. Maybe they could do that through law(ful ways), but are they really going to go from one house to another backed...
That's the thing. I own it, I have it in myhouse, they can't come and take it away. Maybe they could do that through law(ful ways), but are they really going to go from one house to another backed with police and search houses for physical media?
When you buy physical media, you're buying the disc but still only getting a license to watch what's on it. As @NoblePath and yourself point out, it's harder to revoke that liscense for the media...
When you buy physical media, you're buying the disc but still only getting a license to watch what's on it. As @NoblePath and yourself point out, it's harder to revoke that liscense for the media on the disc itself. But this is why stuff like DRM online requirements being baked into HDMI and players and such are so onerous, because the nebulous/nefarious "They™" can potentially send a software update that can tell the device this media isn't allowed to be played anymore.
They probably can. What they can not is chage the discs that people have at home. If you have the right key (say the right verson of some PC player), you could still play the content. It doesn't...
They probably can. What they can not is chage the discs that people have at home. If you have the right key (say the right verson of some PC player), you could still play the content. It doesn't matter to me, as my new Blu rays go straight into the PC drive and get ripped aka de-DRM'd.
Fun fact! You actually cannot legally play any 4K blu-ray discs on new PCs anymore because it used a DRM scheme from Intel that they stopped putting in their chips. You also cannot legally play it...
Fun fact! You actually cannot legally play any 4K blu-ray discs on new PCs anymore because it used a DRM scheme from Intel that they stopped putting in their chips. You also cannot legally play it on any PC with an AMD CPU for the same reason.
There was also a big hulabaloo because there are still manufacturers making 4K blu-ray drives for PCs, and one major manufacturer was making new drives with firmware that MakeMKV could use without modification to rip those 4K blu-ray discs - which is technically illegal, but the only way to watch your movies on your computer. Apparently the newer versions have been patched to stop it again.
They can say the device it can't play the discs anymore. But they can't do that with the rips that I made from my discs. I know that licence agreements probably don't allow ripping, but my mind is...
They can say the device it can't play the discs anymore. But they can't do that with the rips that I made from my discs. I know that licence agreements probably don't allow ripping, but my mind is at ease - I paid for the content. The same goes with playing games through emulators - I bought your game, so, please, f** off and don't dictate me on what device I will play it.
I’ve read that it is well established that it’s permissible to duplicate copyrighted material for personal use. Record companies couldn’t stop people from taping LPs they had purchased in order to...
I’ve read that it is well established that it’s permissible to duplicate copyrighted material for personal use. Record companies couldn’t stop people from taping LPs they had purchased in order to listen to them in the car, for example.
I don't know if it is true, but it is said that you can make your personal copy. Personally I don't care - as I said, my mind is at easy. I have paid for it, that's what matters for me and my...
I don't know if it is true, but it is said that you can make your personal copy. Personally I don't care - as I said, my mind is at easy. I have paid for it, that's what matters for me and my concience.
In some places the law disallows format shifting, and if format shifting is allowed there are normally "circumvention of technical measures" laws in place. I like that people often just ignore the...
I know that licence agreements probably don't allow ripping,
In some places the law disallows format shifting, and if format shifting is allowed there are normally "circumvention of technical measures" laws in place.
I like that people often just ignore the law, but I feel like we need to understand just how powerful copyright lobbying has been, and how many laws were created to serve them, and then fight back against those laws.
The thing is what is format shifting. Is it copying CD to cassette? Is it copying MKV file.frm disc to harddrive? Is it streaming Blu ray over wifi to you phone? I still believe that I'm working...
The thing is what is format shifting. Is it copying CD to cassette? Is it copying MKV file.frm disc to harddrive? Is it streaming Blu ray over wifi to you phone?
I still believe that I'm working on data that I bought on the disc. It may not be legal somewhere, yet I believe it to be ethical to do so. It is kinda like right to repair stuff. Did you buy your phone or have you paid for borrowing it indefinitely? I know it's not apples to apples, but I believe you understand what I mean.
You do own the movie. But the bullshit law that is the DMCA makes it illegal to circumvent DRM. So I guess in some respects you don’t actually own the movie; you own a jumbled stream of data that...
You do own the movie. But the bullshit law that is the DMCA makes it illegal to circumvent DRM. So I guess in some respects you don’t actually own the movie; you own a jumbled stream of data that could be reassembled to form the movie via proprietary cryptographic methods.
IIRC BD+, the DRM scheme on Blu-ray, does actually have the ability to revoke keys, making any movie produced with it unwatchable unless you find a player that didn’t get that update.
In the US, there's a legal concept called "first-sale doctrine" that means we do effectively own the right to use and dispose of physical media, and the IP incorporated in it, in a way that we do...
In the US, there's a legal concept called "first-sale doctrine" that means we do effectively own the right to use and dispose of physical media, and the IP incorporated in it, in a way that we do not have with streaming.
We can sell those discs, legally. We can share them, rent them out, give them away, hand them down to our children.
I don't want to sound paranoid, but what actually is money? Does it matter if I own printed paper in my hand or if I have some number on my bank account? Both can lose their values overnight. Now,...
I don't want to sound paranoid, but what actually is money? Does it matter if I own printed paper in my hand or if I have some number on my bank account? Both can lose their values overnight. Now, on the contrary, if we speak about gold for example...
Yeah, gold can lise its value. Still, it's physical goods that that is needed in the industry as we know it nowadays. It won't lose major part of its value overnight. The same goes for other...
Yeah, gold can lise its value. Still, it's physical goods that that is needed in the industry as we know it nowadays. It won't lose major part of its value overnight. The same goes for other stuff, of course, gold was just an example.
The answer to that question depends on when, who, and where you ask. Gold, or even useful commodities like grain, are still dependent for most of their value on a transactional environment (aka...
The answer to that question depends on when, who, and where you ask.
Gold, or even useful commodities like grain, are still dependent for most of their value on a transactional environment (aka trade and commerce).
If you distill it you're right, it's nothing really but an agreement it's worth something. However, unlike digital money, physical money has no dependency and works even if society collapses...
If you distill it you're right, it's nothing really but an agreement it's worth something.
However, unlike digital money, physical money has no dependency and works even if society collapses (provided we still trust that it's valuable). We've been able to trust currency values printed on paper for a while, that probably won't disappear overnight.
The value of currency really doesn't have anything to do with public perception or a number printed on paper. Fiat money, when it comes down to it, has value due to a government's ability to levy...
The value of currency really doesn't have anything to do with public perception or a number printed on paper. Fiat money, when it comes down to it, has value due to a government's ability to levy and collect taxes, and an international consensus of how much one is worth compared to another currency.
Another way of looking at it is currency is debt owed by a government. That's why inflation is inextricably linked to the total amount of dollars issued and the established interest rates. (The bond issuance and maturation cycle, which usually involves increasing the money supply, thus proportionally devaluing the dollar and all debts.) It's a fractional value of what a government is worth, which is in turn how much debt it can issue (bonds) to accomplish its goals, and pay back over time through taxation.
You could probably use shares in a company as an analogy. They're fractions of the value of a company, and if that value is zero, the company is very definitely defunct. I'm paid a sizable portion of my salary in shares, which lose fractional value as more are issued (currency)...but the overall value of the shares goes up as the company demonstrates its ability to generate value (GDP). A share in a company that no longer has income (taxation, for a government) is worthless.
So...if you don't have a functioning society, your currency will be worthless overnight. But you'll have far worse things to worry about than money, and then one of the countries with a currency that has value (due to a functioning taxation apparatus) would likely perform an annexation...
Admittedly I was being a bit flippant and curt with my comment. I realise there's more to it than just trust in a currency, but at its core, trust in paper currency is stronger when there's no...
Admittedly I was being a bit flippant and curt with my comment. I realise there's more to it than just trust in a currency, but at its core, trust in paper currency is stronger when there's no internet.
Don't say that before any Czech(oslovak). In 1953 due to currency reform (or whatever it would translate to) money was de-valued at up to 50:1 overnight. You had 50 thousand crowns? The next...
Don't say that before any Czech(oslovak). In 1953 due to currency reform (or whatever it would translate to) money was de-valued at up to 50:1 overnight. You had 50 thousand crowns? The next morning you had only 1 thousand... More can he found here, albeit in Czech, maybe Google translate can help: https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C4%8Ceskoslovensk%C3%A1_m%C4%9Bnov%C3%A1_reforma_(1953) (due to special characters making short link didn't work for me).
EDIT: This simply put meant making everyone from whatever they were before (either rich/middle/poor class) just poor overnight. You can try and find some inflation calculator and put 50 000 kčs (Czechoslovak crowns) in 1952 and see what it would be worth today to see what it meant for people.
EDIT2: You even don't need to as the Wikipedia oage contains information about how much sme goods cost before and after that reform which is not on par with how the money was de-valued. Goods was just more expensive after, even a few times more.
Interestingly, even paper currency can effectively be "deleted" if a government desires. It is fiat currency. I have no idea if the US federal government has this power constitutionally, but...
Interestingly, even paper currency can effectively be "deleted" if a government desires. It is fiat currency. I have no idea if the US federal government has this power constitutionally, but governments can simply decree that previously issued currency no longer has any value. In fact, India recently did this.
If a government has the power to do such a thing, it is actually mechanically quite easy. While we often say government-issued currency is "backed by nothing," that isn't actually true. US Currency has value because it is the only thing the US government will accept as payment for taxes.
Every person living in the US owes taxes on any income they make. And this applies regardless of what form you are paid for your labor in. If you want to contract with a farmer to help harvest a blueberry field, and you for some reason would prefer to be paid in bulk blueberries, you're free to set up such a contract. You can get paid however you want. However, even if you collect a season's wages in the form of a truck full of blueberries, you still owe Uncle Sam US dollars. You'll need to sell some of your blueberry wages to get US dollars to pay what you owe the federal government. And states and municipalities also insist on being paid in dollars.
This is ultimately what gives US currency, or any fiat currency, any value. Everyone has to pay taxes on their income, and those taxes have to be paid in dollars. We could do all our trade in barter, Euros, or Yuan if we wanted to. But since everyone in the US already needs to deal with large numbers of dollars to pay their annual tax bill, we all just agree to do all of our business in dollars.
Through this, however, is a means for a government to simply delete money, even paper money. A government can issue a decree saying, "after X date, we will no longer accept bills of Y denomination or bills printed before year Z for payment of taxes owed, deposit at the federal reserve, or payment for any federal service." If they wanted to do away with cash transactions all together, they could state, "after this date, the government will no longer accept physical currency for tax and other payments."
When they do this, the currency that they choose to stop accepting becomes worthless. It's no longer legal tender. It has no more legal backing than Confederate dollars. The currency loses its connection to the one thing that gave it value in the first place, and its worth disappears in a puff of smoke.
If they wish to, governments can delete paper currency just as effectively as they can digital currency.
We are stepping into territory where I don't hae much to add to discussion. I just agree that if government wanted, your money is worth nothing. In past money was backed by the stae owning gold....
We are stepping into territory where I don't hae much to add to discussion.
I just agree that if government wanted, your money is worth nothing. In past money was backed by the stae owning gold. Nowadays money is kinda construct. It is a bit like bitcoin in that it is worth what people make it worth to some degree. I'm not going deeper in his hole, sorry :-)
I'm not US, so I can't even comment on that side of things.
Piracy means different things to different people. Sometimes it's simply "copyright infringement", but to the English Criminal Prosecution Service piracy requires a profit motive:...
Piracy means different things to different people. Sometimes it's simply "copyright infringement", but to the English Criminal Prosecution Service piracy requires a profit motive:
Piracy is the unauthorised copying of an original recording for profit. Pirated products will often have different packaging to the genuine product and may often take the form of newly created compilations.
This is because English law says that mere copyright infringement is not a criminal offence. It becomes a criminal offence if there's an attempt at profit:
07 Criminal liability for making or dealing with infringing articles, &c.
(1)A person commits an offence who, without the licence of the copyright owner—
(a)makes for sale or hire, or
(b)imports into the United Kingdom otherwise than for his private and domestic use, or
(c)possesses in the course of a business with a view to committing any act infringing the copyright, or
(d)in the course of a business —
(i)sells or lets for hire, or
(ii)offers or exposes for sale or hire, or
(iii)exhibits in public, or
(iv)distributes, or
(e)distributes otherwise than in the course of a business to such an extent as to affect prejudicially the owner of the copyright,
an article which is, and which he knows or has reason to believe is, an infringing copy of a copyright work.
So, in England the argument is that i) theft is defined and piracy doesn't meet that definition and ii) theft is a criminal offence, and copyright infringement usually isn't a criminal offence.
You wouldn't steal a car - but feel free to duplicate one for yourself. So, there I was, in England, sailing the high seas, because I was sick of paying for Amazon, Netflix, Disney and a BBC TV...
You wouldn't steal a car - but feel free to duplicate one for yourself.
So, there I was, in England, sailing the high seas, because I was sick of paying for Amazon, Netflix, Disney and a BBC TV license and having movies and shows randomly move networks, and I couldn't watch them any longer, even after paying for a long time.
I work in the TV industry. Show licensing is a massive deal and keeping track of regions and end dates to keep the shows moving around and making money is a major part. I understand it, but as a consumer it's a bloody nightmare.
Y'know that meme about "Stallman was right"? Given both some things that Stallman was definitely not right about and also Doctorow's considerable track record of warnings/predictions, I find myself thinking "Doctorow was right" more and more often.
It's cause Doctorow listened to Stallman. It is natural for the students to best their masters. Helps that he's also a damn fine storyteller, which helps bring better understanding to more people.
Stallman's core arguement WRT source code being required for user empowerment is, best I can tell, a fundemental reality of computing.
For the past 30 years Stallman supported every single negative technological prediction while using the internet through a printer. Of course he'll be right whenever something about technology goes wrong.
For decades I have pirated at least 90% of the movies and TV shows I watch. I used to keep various subscriptions through Netflix, HBO, Hulu, amazon, etc. to feel like I wasn't completely leeching off the hard work and creativity that I know people put into the content. The streaming services themselves are such crap and so inconvenient compared to pirating that I rarely use them. Instead, I just download whatever movie I want to watch from one well-organized website that has every movie ever made in any format ever published. For TV shows, I go to a separate but similarly organized website with an all-encompassing collection of every TV show ever published. This year the strikes got me thinking, I'm giving my money to the wrong people, and I just started donating $20 a month to the Entertainment Community fund instead: https://entertainmentcommunity.org/
I know I'm playing fast and loose with morality here and this doesn't really absolve me of anything. I'm still stealing. But in the grand scheme of things, I feel pretty ok about it.
I had a naive but fun, pie-in-the-sky idea: What if the entertainment unions somehow negotiated a deal with the MPA etc. for a fund that went directly to union members with the lowest incomes. The consumers/pirate-philanthropists who paid a minimum amount into that fund (probably closer to a few hundred a month) would get some kind of waiver or soft agreement that the MPA at least would not actively prosecute them for piracy of union-made movies and TV shows.
It probably wouldn't be that popular and the MPA could still do all their DRM nonsense and go after the majority of pirates if they want. Not much would change from how it is now really, except some union entertainment people might get a little help. and movie production companies might get better-compensated employees without having to pay for it. the pirates wouldn't be exactly safe legally, but it would at least be a sanctioned way of paying into the entertainment industry without participating in all this DRM, fractured-streaming platforms, Intellectual property nonsense. Win-Win right?
It would never happen, but fun to think about. Imagine a kind of sandboxed entertainment industry socialism/basic income scheme. It seems to me distribution is no longer of any value for digital content. We just need to make sure the people who actually make things get paid. once a thing is made, present-day communication technology allows amateurs to distribute content much more efficiently and conveniently with low enough server costs that donations can easily cover them.
One of the distinctions I make in the moral side of things is about whose profits I am impacting. If there is a small time content creator or podcaster, and I pirate their content, that's a direct hit to their income. But actors and other film workers aren't underpaid because I pirate a Marvel movie, they are underpaid because rich studio owners abuse their market power. I avoid the former, but am starting to not care about the latter.
I would rather give 3 creators on Patreon $5 a month than pay Google anything.
Exactly!
That's where I'm at. I don't want to hurt people. Corporations aren't people. Is stealing this apple going to hurt a ma and pa store? Yeah, the theft is going to have an emotional impact, they might have to spend more on security, it's just going to make them feel shitty, I don't want to hurt people. Who does pirating Lion King hurt? As far as I can tell, no one. A corporation might make a miniscule less amount of money. I don't care, since corporations don't have feelings.
Perhaps theft of physical goods, yes, but you're constructing a strawman here. This isn't about Theft, but piracy; just because a corporation called it theft, doesn't mean it's the same thing.
Once corporations realize they have a captive market and no competition, they raise prices more and more to the breaking point. Piracy shows us that the prices are both too high and the ease of accessing what people want is to inconvenient.
Prices are high and go higher because Shareholders want increased profits, so companies find ways to milk their existing user base, either by increasing prices directly or by removing features and adding them back as pay for play. No one was pirating Heated Seats in a BMW or remote start in Toyota.
I mean, the prices are also brought up regardless and the impact of theft is overstated, so ymmv, but I'd consider it likely negligible.
And if every salesman was honest, the price of goods wouldn't be artificially inflated on everything under the sun.
It's almost impossible to have this argument because shady salesmen and thieves have been a part of every society regardless of economic and political affiliation. We've always been trying to get one over on each other.
Yes, and in the case where theft hurts people in a demonstrable way, I am morally opposed. In a case where theft doesn't hurt people in a demonstrable way, I am not morally opposed, and am just bound by law. And there's grey area between those two where deeper discussions would be necessary.
My point is that an action (any action) whose only impact is on corporate profits isn't immoral, because corporations can't feel pain. It might be illegal and unwise, but not immoral. This is not to defend any specific action. This is to say "it's theft" isn't a moral argument, it's an legal one. Stealing from a homeless person and stealing from the Microsoft corporate offices are not on the same level of morality (or lack thereof).
I'm not going to argue about goods, as I think others have below, but for piracy there is often no lost sale. People who pirate are often making a choice between not consuming some media or pirating it, there is no legal and affordable way to acquire it. So if someone has a choice between, for example, just not consuming the new Barbie film, or pirating it for free, the industry hasn't lost any money, and that person does not have to forgo cultural participation. You only have one life, and if you end up stuck in a system that refuses to give you enough money to comfortably live, why would you deprive yourself of entertainment when not doing so has no consequences for the industry in question?
The problem, as I see it, is that studios and labels just fundamentally cannot, and will not, abandon the thinking that it is their duty to charge as much as they can for providing as little as they can at every single turn. If you make legitimate content fairly priced and easy to access, most people say "fair enough" and pony up. But it's just the endless, endless nickle and diming, trying to squeeze more revenue at every opportunity that just drives people to abandon morality because . . . well, are the corporations being moral? No. Well, then, fuck them.
This could clearly be seen in Australia, a country that had one of the highest piracy rates in the world due to ludicrous prices of physical media, or hamstrung by licensing deals that restricted content. When Netflix finally came up, the piracy rates fell off a cliff because it was EASY and FAIRLY PRICED. Of course, every studio now wants their own slice of the pie and Netflix jacked up the prices, so piracy is on the up again.
People aren't stupid and they know when they are being screwed, and they rightfully feel few qualms about trying to save a few bucks here, when they are being pressed on every side.
This is a capitalism problem, not an entertainment industry problem.
Of course. As has been noted by others though, it's not so easy to pirate a car. Digital products, by their nature, are more in danger of this and those sectors have to approach the problem differently. For the most part, they have chosen not to.
I agree. Music used to be a big part of my piracy. from Napster to Oink, etc. Now there are reasonably priced music streaming services with almost everything I could want to listen to. I rarely bother pirating music anymore.
I appreciate the honest here at least. I think one thing that irks me a lot in online discussions of piracy is the pompous-ness of it all. People feel a need justify how they are fighting corruption or how piracy actually boosts media sales through word of mouth or resort to that old Gabe quote of "piracy is a service issue".
I feel a lot of it is just motte-and-bailey tactics. I don't make it that complicated. I pirated a lot back in middle/high school as a tech literate kid who couldn't afford most content they wanted, I pirate today when there is no way to properly support media in my native language. I recognize it is still technically stealing but I don't want to make some big show of it. It just happens in the privacy of my home at the end of the day.
It would require some power to address piracy to begin with. As is, the only ones really in danger of being prosecuted are the ones hosting deluges of torrents or direct downloads.
Even if it could work, you know somehow that money will in fact not reach the people it's intended for. Especially in Hollywood. I do wish we could simply pay everyone a living wage (which is what a minimum wage is for).
I think that's because the most common argument against piracy is "this causes economic damage, which is equivalent to a moral wrong" ("piracy is theft"), and people know it's wrong but can't explain why. So they try and fail, but post the failed explanation anyway.
And fuck it, I'm going to try:
The claim "legality is morality" is true in all cases only if the legal/economic system is just; the IP system is absurdly broken in a myriad of ways, and everyone knows it. There are plenty of companies doing shitty things to consumers and saying "their shitty actions are legal" is irrelevant to the fact that they're immoral.
Saying "piracy is theft" basically says that you can't tit-for-tat shitty sellers who are trying to screw you. Note that if you say "piracy is theft, if the developer/publisher is acting morally", I wouldn't necessarily disagree with that.
The standard response is "if you don't like it, you can just not buy it - which requires an assumption that the current videogame market is fair. There are several circumstances in which I disagree with this, such as:
any games that are over 20 years old. The purpose of copyright is to remove items from the public domain as a means of financially rewarding artists. Nobody in the games industry is thinking "how much money will this particular game make in 20 years" when they make their game. Thus, it's irrelevant to copyright and the extra duration should never have been granted. In fact, arguably the number should be 7-14 years, since that's what it was originally and the internet has only made distribution faster and easier. Therefore, pirating e.g. The Legend Of Zelda: The Wind Waker (released 2003) hurts nobody and is perfectly moral.
any media that's been gimped to only run on certain platforms. For instance, various ebooks require Adobe DRM, which doesn't run on Linux (not to be confused with Android), which causes a bunch of problems. For instance, the ReMarkable tablet runs Linux and thus can't read those ebooks, and DIY e-reader devices such as The Open Book would need to increase the chip's performance by orders of magnitude to run the DRM (without DRM, the chip only needs to render text, it's utterly trivial).
With games that are console-exclusive, there's an argument against my position that goes thusly: "without the expectation of exclusivity to this platform, publishers would never offer the money to develop this game in the first place. Thus, not supporting their platform-linkage is economic harm". Which is a whole rabbithole that I'd happily(?) detail, but not in this bulletpoint. But basically: that has nothing to do with the game itself (i.e. the game isn't intrinsically tied to that platform's tech, it's purely a commercial arrangement) and is anticompetitive behaviour that ought to be illegal - it is absolutely not a moral justification nowadays. It made some sense for consoles back when consoles needed to be purpose-built with the games also needing to be purpose-built for the console, and so making consoles a loss-leader made more sense.
any media in legal limbo. The 2002 game Mafia is not permitted to be distributed with its soundtrack. This is due to legal dispute over ownership, and realistically all that matters is where the profits from new sales of the game go. The obvious solution is to keep selling but put the profits in escrow. But they didn't, so as a game player, frankly: I don't care, not my problem, fuck em.
any manipulative antifeature bullshit: There are a bunch of games (mostly F2P games) that deliberately make a game boring and charge you money to remove that feature. Doing this in a $60 game is just greed, it's shitty and we all know it. People say "well just don't buy the game", which is just bootlicking the free market. Making this shit legal worsens the game, the entire point of copyright is to monetarily incentivise more and better games, it shouldn't even be legal. Although with F2P games this is a grey area (because that manipulative bullshit is their business, and they're kind of upfront about the fact).
I loved Shadow Of Mordor. The sequel, Shadow Of War was sadly mangled with manipulative BS that was embedded into the core design. They mostly removed the BS due to popular outcry, but some core design decisions still remain that only make sense as support for the manipulative BS - like the whole "you can't control an orc that's higher level than you" thing. If they hadn't removed it, then I'd say fuck em; as it still is, I'm not happy and I haven't bought the game (out of principle I generally haven't pirated stuff, I really ought to break that habit), the world would be a better place if Ubisoft hadn't prioritized microtransaction opportunities at the cost of the quality of the game.
So more generally, my principles here are:
Speaking of the legal system: videogame patents should not exist. Not to be confused with videogame copyright (which should exist, albeit much shorter). Ubisoft patented Shadow Of War's Nemesis system, which means it's impossible for any competing game to create a "Shadow Of War, but better" game for the next ~20 years (without licensing the patent, which realistically won't happen). It was absurd when Atari patented minigames in the loading screen and it's absurd now. Having a great game idea already rewards you by giving you a leg up on the game you develop with it.
So in conclusion: the system is fucked, if they can fuck me then I can fuck them. If you say to stop fucking them when they're fucking me then fuck you. If I'm fucking them when they're not fucking me then that's fucked.
Personally, I think you could have stopped right there. These days, that is the entirety of my pro-piracy argument.
I have long since given up trying to figure out who's at fault, how it could be fixed, what people/corps/govts should do about it ... because at the end of the day, no one is going to take my advice, even if I do figure out a good solution.
So, I just pirate stuff, and hope that someday, the system will get fixed. When the opportunity arises to contribute directly to an artistic creator, I usually do. But beyond that, I just quit worrying about it.
~ Quellcrist Falconer, "Things I Should Have Learnt by Now, Volume II", from Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan
I'd say it's closer, but never fully true. There is no way to reach full concensus for justice. Only adequate compromise for a peaceful society.
I, for example, would implement a law banning all circumcision for children under 13. I'd allow medical exemptions, but not religious ones. This would be perfectly just in my eyes, because a newborn cannot consent to surgery, and bodily autonomy trumps tradition and "because I want it to look like Dad's."
Others would consider this unjust persecution of their personal rights for religious freedom and/or control over their children.
Piracy is the consumer equivalent of striking. It shows that demand is there, but for one reason or another, customers don't want to buy. Opposed to just artificially signaling "nobody wants this game, we shouldn't make others like it."
Music streaming wouldn't exist without the rampant, widespread piracy of the 90's and early 00's. I'd say the streaming model as currently widespread is unfair to artists...but that's a solvable problem...just not one publishers care about.
I really enjoy your perspective and complete comment here. You might enjoy the book Copyright's Paradox by Neil Weinstock Netanel (Oxford, 2008). In his words:
Additionally:
I think that is a part of it. Sure, there are definitely some immoral studios out there that garner much less sympathy for pirating. But then there are some at best petty reasons and at worst outright misinformation reasons that people use to justify said Piracy.
I think the arguments over Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is a great example: it had performance issues (like, ever other Switch game ever) and there were accusations of it being a lazy upgrade to Breath of the Wild which took too long to come out (which is a borderline misinformed take). You hear reasons like this to emulate it on PC for "the true experience" and it makes it hard to sympathize for actual ethical quandries or outright criminal acts. The audience simply sounds entitled to do something and makes up some reason after the fact.
You can argue about a lack of fairness, but I feel it's missing the forest for the trees. "don't like it don't buy it " shouldn't be used as a dismissal intended to shut down a conversation (although, yes. It very often is used that way. The woes of internet communication). It should be used to acknowledge two factors:
In the worst case, there is now more success and choices in the industry and no one loses except some tribalists vying for [favorite game] to the point where they clash with [opposing game]. I know there's a feeling of schadenfreude from seeing a bad company get just desserts, but as you said: the video game market isn't fair. The most successful games in a financial standpoint won't be the fairest nor most high quality ones. BUT taking even 0.01% of such a player base to the "underpriveledged" games can be such a boon to smaller studios as to make.
personally my "piracy metrics" are very straightforward: If there is some way to officially support the release in my country, I will avoid pirating. To use your metrics as how my idea formed:
It's mostly trivial in the grand scheme of things, but the general spirit I want to spread is "don't spend your time hating and wrecking when you can help others you do support rise up". Going into piracy as a way to punish is futile and simply bad for the soul.
*But at the same time, it does feel like the ultimate way to defeat piracy; put as much of the game on the server and you minimize any attack vectors. Those that get through are easy to identify and easier to punish. It limits your game design and completely flips the way you develop games, but from a business standpoint it seems like the inevitable endgame for the cat and mouse of piracy.)
Stealing is open to definition, but by long jurisprudence stealing requires that you intend to permanently deprive the “rightful owner” of their use of the thing.
Unauthorized copying is a crime now thanks to dumb statutes, but it’s not stealing.
If I write a book, my “use of it” involves being able to sell copies of it to make a living. If you start distributing photocopies of it for free, you are depriving me of that use.
Are they, though? Most things I pirate are things I wouldn't have bought anyway.
Even though publishers will defend this argument tooth and nail, 1000 illegal copies are not equal to 1000 lost sales.
I have acquired a lot of copyrighted material I didn't have license to. Just getting that out there to frame my position on this before what I state next.
I find the "I wouldn't have bought anyway" framing to be a bit disingenuous. I used to think along those lines too, but I also recognize that by occupying a significant amount of my time with things I didn't purchase, it gives me the freedom to look at any one thing and feel that I could have done something else with my time and not felt the need to purchase it otherwise. It's easy for me to say I wouldn't have purchased X movie that I pirated, because I can go play Y game that I pirated to occupy my time if I pretend like I never bought X movie. Now if I didn't have X movie or Y game, and then the new Z tv show comes out on some streaming service that I don't have, I might have a lot of free time that I don't know what to spend it on and feel more compelled to spend it accessing streaming service to watch Z tv show.
Of course there's other factors too, I'm not saying it's guaranteed that someone would purchase either, I just find it a weak way to argue because it's inherently unprovable, not just to everyone else but also to yourself. There are situations where it's potentially sort of provable like if you actually have no money at all to even buy it, but for people making this argument that seems to be pretty rare. It also makes it so the only way it can be even remotely provable to others is to have to give an excessive amount of detail of your life. Otherwise it just sounds like you're making excuses that you can't even prove to yourself.
I don't think speaking generally about purchasing behaviors is flawed in the same way, just when speaking about a specific individual and specific circumstances. I can't know for sure that I wouldn't buy something, but I can know that when you look at how the MPAA/RIAA etc. claim their losses from copyright infringement, it essentially proves that every infringement isn't theft because ultimately the numbers that come from those calculations exceed the actual money that is circulating. So broadly that proves that not every infringing download is something someone would have otherwise purchased, but identifying specific cases is more difficult.
Yes, but the thing of which I might deprive you of using does not exist until I create it.
More technically, the thing must exist before I can take it.
You’ve got it exactly backwards. If I am the author of the book, I created it.
It seems you are being pedantic, but for clarity:
In order for a theft to occur, a thing must be removed by the bad actor in such a way as the original holder may no longer use it. Making a copy is creating a new thing which never existed for the original
Holder.
I’m not being pedantic. Your insistence that making unauthorized copies of a creative work doesn’t harm its author is absurd. It’s entirely irrelevant that no physical object is taken from the author.
The difference between selling copies of a creative work and selling a physical object is that a copy of creative work exists solely for the purpose of being sold. So if you refuse to sell it, for some reason, then no actual value is lost by people making unauthorized copies.
For instance, any videogame sold in India for the standard US-market price of $60US will be widely pirated, and rightly so, because basically the median income there is $300 per month (which mostly goes to food and rent). It's a stupid price that nobody can actually pay, so it's effectively not being sold.
In other words, at that cost there is no opportunity, so the opportunity cost is squat. At which point, there's substantial benefit in pirating it and no real reason not to.
Another example might be Japanese doujin (basically: indie comics). Japan is historically very inward-focused, they don't care about selling overseas so it makes no difference if english fan-translations are published and distributed freely.
Both of these cases would be radically different if piracy actually stole physical objects, as that would interfere with the authors' operations.
Well, now you are assigning statements to me that I have not made. I have said nothing about harm or even morality. I am working for truth and clarity, and pointing out that making a copy is not theft.
Honestly I don’t even know if DMs are a thing on Tildes, never tried, but my go-to places such as those of which you are speaking are fading fast, so if you’d be willing to share your sources…
I'll DM the names of the sites to you. But they are private torrent sites. and unfortunately, I don't have any invites at the moment.
If you are unfamiliar with private torrent trackers. They are a bit of a pain to get into by design. I think the idea is to have some kind of token barrier to entry to keep out anti-piracy authorities as well trolls/people with bad intentions who might vandalize the user-supported collection.
The barriers are basically social networking rather than technical in nature. if someone is interested my best advice would be to go to r/trackers or whatever other private tracker communities you can find. There are probably some good discords and stuff too, but I've been content with my memberships so long I've grown out of touch with the wider community. You can ask around these communities for invites or often private tackers will have official threads where they will give out invites for short periods when they want to grow the site.
Once you are on a private tracker each one has different minimum requirements to be able to keep your membership. But I've always found that part very easy to maintain. Basically, if you have a PC that you can leave on 24/7 and keep everything you download seeding for at least a few weeks then you are golden.
The best private sites are very hard to get invites to and have higher standards. So you may have to join a smaller lesser-known site that won't be quite as nice, maintain good stats there for a while, and then use connections there and show off your stats to get into a nicer site, and so on, climbing the ladder.
It sounds like a pain and it is, I think mainly because it is illegal and not because of any practical limitations. But once you are on one of the major sites it is like a utopia. My movie site is like a cleaner version of IMDB except you can download every movie in whatever format you like. The community is obsessive about quality, there are no cam recordings or anything like that. If a movie is theatre only and no high-quality version has been released or leaked then it is just not available on the site. Any kind of audio artifacts, sync issues, burned-in subtitles or anything like that is unacceptable and the torrent will be flagged and removed within an hour or 2. I don't even remember seeing anything like that in years, most of the quality flags I see are about weird codec/frame rate complaints that I barely understand and would have never noticed, but people still argue about them and compete to upload "fixed" versions of the movie. The site has a linked database of cast and crew for every movie so you can quickly browse everything an actor/director has done and quickly download whatever you are interested in. There are curated collections of movies like AFIs top 100 etc. Each movie has its ratings based on internal site user ratings as well as meta critic and IMDB ratings with links. There are top 10 active lists for day/week/month/year so you can see what is popular. It feels like a peek at how great the internet could be if it wasn't profit-driven. Kind of like Wikipedia (or Tildes ;) ).
Wow—I've never really gotten too far into private trackers, I had no idea what I was up against. I guess it's not 2009 anymore... sigh. Guess I'm probably stuck with my own lowly sources at this point, dang. Thanks for the info!
Yeah private trackers are more like a serious hobby has always been my perception, especially early on to get into them, and maybe later on a little less is required but still some ongoing effort is required. That's why I use Usenet instead, which has it's own initial learning curve but it's actually a lot more open (more straightforward, it's more technical hurdles to overcome in setup than the type of hurdles you have to deal with in private trackers) and costs a small amount of money up front for some of the services (like $40-60 or so per year combined across various services).
I’ve looked into Usenet before, and I’ve used IRC and whatnot way back so I think I could swing it, but I haven’t made it all the way in yet—maybe I’ll give it another shot.
I mostly relied on r/usenet for various guides and recommendations for services to sign up to. I also looked up various black friday deals, even after black friday, and many of them still work long after black friday, and those deals are generally the best pricing (without these deals, it would likely be hard to hit the $40-60 a year mark).
The part that was confusing to me initially was just the structure of how it worked. The provider is the server that actually hold the content, which is where you spend the most money gaining access to those networks. The indexers are the services that actually go out and find the content on those networks and make it easy to discover and download for the user. You pay for a few indexers at a nominal price to cover most things. Then you can setup automation software to make your life easier in the long run like Sonarr, Radarr etc. and you plug in API keys into these so they can access the providers and indexers on your behalf.
One thing I experienced is that not all of the providers are like big orgs or whatever. Like I paid for one and had to wait awhile for the guy to seemingly manually set up my account. That didn't seem to be an unusual occurrence based on other posts, just mentioning that because I could see how some might panic and think someone is scamming them if their account isn't automatically created upon payment.
I also used privacy.com to generate virtual cards to sign up for most of those services and set strict limits just because I felt safer that way. They could only charge the amount that I set, and I could throw away virtual card once the transaction was complete. Last I knew this service only worked if you're in the US, but you might be able to find similar things for other countries.
Usenet
They are. Click on a users name, click the sidebar, then click “send a private message.”
May I check: does it have Pavee Lackeen? https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0469691/
yes, but only one standard-def version.
https://envs.sh/uM3.PNG
Just don't give the machine the password to your network
There are some HP printers that are sold with a strict internet connectivity requirement. They do not print offline. Ever. Not sure if you can trick them or whatnot.
Then don't buy them. For me any machine that requires me to be online is a deal breaker. I manage my machines, not vice versa
Personally, I refuse to buy them. They offend my sensibilities. However, the offline capable versions (exact same hw but allow offline printing) are sold at higher prices. So I can see why some people support this business model
To be frank, it’s the demand for cheap products that create these kinds of behaviors. Every shitty thing that has happened with printers is because of this. It’s why printers are sold with a razor and blade model resulting in extremely overpriced ink cartridges. It’s also why most printers are effectively unserviceable, and why they fail so frequently. People don’t understand why businesses spend so much money on Xerox machines that require service contracts, but it’s entirely because they are reliable, serviceable, and aren’t likely to cause problems in their workflows.
Of course this doesn’t just affect printers, it affects everything. It’s part of why there are so many garbage products, and why work keeps getting offshored to countries with lower standards of living and local wages are being depressed. For a system that is supposed to create optimum economic efficiency, it sure does create a lot of real-world entropy and waste.
Just to be clear, I am not blaming people for asking for less expensive goods. My wording is coming from the frustration of dealing with so many people who buy the cheapest printers and then complain about the problems they have with them. I mean to blame the system rather than the people who have no choice but to participate in it.
Part of it is just wealth inequality. If everyone had to save up to buy a high-quality good, I think it would lower both a bit of the "keeping up with the Jonses" and the demand for ever-cheaper goods.
Even then, I think a simple law that mandated 10 repair-or-replace warantees for everything would eliminate the ability to cut quality to lower price below a reasonable threshold. It would also make manufacturers really think about if changing the form factor of their battery will be worth it to shave off 0.05 mm off their latest phone.
I understand where you're coming from, and I advocate for those kinds of laws being put in place, but at the same time the cynic in me is saying that simple laws are the ones with the most loopholes.
When I say "simple law," I mean in the sense that it's a relatively simple implementation compared to trying to regulate consumer goods quality through any other mechanism.
Namely, because we already have a pretty good layperson understanding of how it should work.
Businesses are always going to structure incentives trying to get the outcomes they want, but the fact that they care so much about my machine phoning home reinforces my belief that cooperating is not in my best interest.
15-20 years ago, I refused to buy cell phones that A) did not have a user-accessible/replaceable battery in them, or that B) had a camera.
The industry will force it's preferences down your throat.
I mean, to some extent your preference is overruled by others. It's become very clear that people simply won't consider a phone without a camera; it's as important to them as wifi antennas.
That said, while some things become ubiquitous, others become niches that you can still look for. That's part of what the Fairphone is trying to tap into. But after a brief lookup, it seems even Samsung has a modern-ish (2022) phone with a replaceable battery.
But it doesn't help that there are simply less companies making phones these days. HTC and LG are big and recent exits from the scene. Sony has never had much worldwide headway and still falls behind competition. Motorola and Nokia aren't really trying to compete with flagships right now at all (though, they are trying to enter with their own flavors of flip phones). It's a rough market and no one is really challenging Samsung, so they become a de facto pseudo-monopoly for Android.
If you stumble upon more info about this, please share it with the rest of us or make a standalone post. Many of us are owners of Brother printers.
Thanks for following up!
I seem to remember something about a smart TV auto-connecting to any unsecured network when left offline?
I haven’t observed this behavior myself but it wouldn’t surprise me. I’ve been decrying the lack of “dumb TV” options on the market for years. I just want a high-quality screen that displays what I tell it to. No ads, no “content ID” surveillance, no built-in streaming app crapware. I ended up getting a Vizio TV (a known offender, like all the brands frankly) with the deliberate plan that we would never connect it to the internet. It has been sufficient, I’m able to use HDMI in for all the content I want and haven’t had any really trouble except for the TV’s clock which can’t be set manually for some stupid reason.
Then my mother-in-law housesat for us while we were out for a week and couldn’t figure out how to work Netflix on the Playstation so she connected the TV to our wifi network. I was flabbergasted. No idea what it did while it was online but as soon as I got home I blocked it at the network level. Haven’t seen any unwanted behavior since.
Which leaves me wondering a bit if I’ve been too paranoid about this whole thing. I’m still annoyed about the business model these TV manufacturers have all bought into, and will keep doing my part to keep my devices in line. But I was actually surprised it didn’t start showing me ads or nagging me to restore the connection. It was less user-hostile than I expected it to be.
No, you're not too paranoid. Just because they're not showing you ads doesn't mean the TV isn't content IDing everything on the screen and phoning home with that information to sell as part of your advertising profile.
That's bad enough.
Vizio isn't just one of the bad ones, they may be one of the worst ones.
But that's an old article. Perhaps everyone is as bad as they were now.
Sadly these days with the advanced features the nicer TVs give you, disabling internet access also removes the ability to get incremental updates. Some TVs actually get increased capabilities from software updates (i.e. higher refresh rates, more accurate colors, etc).
This is amusing, if only because the exact same thing has happened at my house. SmartTV connected as just a screen, mother in law couldn't figure out that it's just a Windows computer with keyboard and mouse, so connected it to Guest Wifi to get at Netflix.
Solid problem solving, but just get over the hurdle of being scared of it and you'll see it's like the computer you use at home all day. There's not a dozen remotes or anything, just power on the screen, use keyboard and mouse.
I'm definitely mixing urban legends and two specific user-reported issues. In one case a user claimed their network connected smart TV was constantly acting as an unsecured hotspot their neighbors were using.
The other was someone claiming their samsung smart tv connected to an unsecured network autonomously. I saw a link to it on this Hacker News thread a few years ago, and now the original post on reddit is locked behind a private subreddit. The post to samsung's forums is also a missing page. In any case with just one self reported event I think we can safely put this in the "doesn't happen, but technically feasible" bin.
You can always choose a large monitor and exclusively use streaming services for your television needs.
Related question. I have a smart tv that I only want for dumb features. I didn't give it any network passwords. BUT. If I were to use it as a monitor for my computer, do you know it would try to read my key strokes? Get my Network password that way and call home with my computer's data? I sound stupidly paranoid but I guess I am.
Some (most?) modern smart TVs do have ACR (Automatic Content Recognition) that try to determine what you're watching. So they do have the capability of capturing the screen. But as long as you have password masking turned on, it would be impossible to read passwords as the HDMI and DisplayPort standards don't support HID data like keystrokes/mouse movement. Since both do support back channel data (like HDMI CEC), it could be possible to send this data, but your graphics card would have to support it and I can't say I've ever heard of anybody doing this.
So in short, presently if you were to display a password on an Internet connected smart tv, it's possible that it could be captured. You of course, can disable ACR and the simplest solution is to just not connect the TV to the Internet at all.
In the future, it's possible that GPU manufacturers could coordinate with TV manufacturers to pass through keyboard data. I could see somebody trying this at some point, but the backlash would be devastating when caught.
If any GPU manufacturer starts making TVs or any TV manufacturer starts making GPUs, I would stay far far away lol
This is not a realistic threat. On the technical side, automated content recognition is (sadly) a thing, but it works like Shazam. That is to say, it compares snapshots to known content - if you're watching a show, it can figure out what you're watching, much like Shazam can identify a song for you. But just like Shazam would be lost if you hummed it an original melody, ACR can't just recognize anything. Almost everything you'd do on a computer would not be contained in the comparison library and thus would not be comprehensible to the smart TV.
Figuring out your wifi password and then connecting to the right network, based just on image processing, would likely be quite challenging. And all for a very minimal gain, since the expectation is that everyone will choose to connect the TV to the internet regardless.
I believe you are asking a technical question about activity on your computer available for surveillance by your smart tv (or really, any connected device).
The answer depends on how you connect, and the settings on your computer. I know there is a fair amount of back and forth along both hdmi and displayport. Of course any kind of wireless connection means your tv is on the network with all that entails.
I’m hoping someone has more detailed information about what data is available to hdmi and displayport devices.
There is a reason I keep buying CDs, DVDs and Blu rays instead of paying for various subscription services...
Maybe I should set up new firewall rule for my printer though. But it is 5 years old Brother, I'm not that afraid of problems with it.
That option is fading fast. Some shows just are not getting printed on physical media anymore.
I won't watch them then. It is their choice if they don't want my money.
I've honestly been blown away in the last year by how advanced piracy has gotten. Netflix/et. al. haven't really done anything but compete over which shows they're currently licensing for a decade.
With a few youtube tutorials you can have an old PC setup to automagically grab everything from shows the day they air to movies that are too old/obscure to be on any steaming service and play them on your TV/computer/phone.
I'll send you a DM copied from when I helped someone else. Tildes does not officially condone piracy so I'll refrain from posting it here.
They do allow linking to web archives of websites with paywalls, so just instructions should be fine.
This was more of a "how to set up a download farm 101" type of instruction set that I don't think fits within the Tildes rules.
I'm of course happy to share, but I just figured I'd be respectful of the piracy stance that Tildes holds.
The archiving topic is iffy, but that's because there's no stopping archiving so Tildes won't try. They do want to note that copying entire articles is a good way to flag a website for infringement, so archive links are condoned to at least allow some leeway. Piracy fits that bill. Not being outright supportive means you won't be held liable for hosting pirated content. I don't want to force Deimos' hands with piracy content.
Precisely.
I do hope it was useful though as I didn't check the content to see if it applied to your situation. Nevertheless, reading up on Sonarr, Radarr, and Prowlarr is a good starting point.
No worries, I'll send it right away.
I do want to note that it points mostly towards the stellar documentation of the creators of these tools, as I can't do it justice in a Tildes DM.
It'll point you in the right direction though. When I sent it over the first time, that user was up and running in a very short timeframe because it really is very simple.
It looks more daunting that it is, really.
A basic setup will take you no more than an hour, perhaps two. Depending on computer skills maybe less.
Could you also send that my way? Thank you!
Any chance you could DM me that as well? Also very curious
Ditto.
You may want to reply directly to OP, he may not see your comment under mine here. FYI
Good tip! I went back to see what happened with the thread as it became more popular than I expected (I received more than quite a few DMs! If anyone else is interested, don't hesitate) and saw this by chance. I probably would've missed it otherwise.
This is precisely what I mentioned - by pirating your, uh, friend basically create need for such content. It doesn't make them any money by pirating it, but the word about it gets in between people and some of them will actualy spend money on it.
It really comes poorly across the language barrier :-(
I'm not crazy enough to suggest this. I believe I'm realist :-) I'm just taking such stance myself. Even thoigh there is content that I would like to watch (upcoming Fallout series, for example), I'm not payng subscription for it and I won't be pirating it. The idea behind this stance is kinda "If you don't do it user-friendly way then I don't care about you doing it at all".
For example - GTA5 can't beplayed offline on Steam Deck. Because of this I din't and will not buy Red Dead Redemption 2 because Rockstar can at any time include "online-only" and I don't wat to support such behavior.
Staying within games territory - I haven't bought AC4: Black flag for PC because I haveto have Ubisoft launcher which is troublesome (on Linux, my OS of choice) but not actually needed by the game to run - it is artificially needed which is how Ubisoft wanted it. And because of this I won't buy any of their games.
I know that I, as a single person, mean nothing to them. Yet it is how I have chosen to fight suc anti-user shit. Beit aubscription-only content, artificial rewuirement of shit software or online-only even for singleplayer mode of the game.
And beieve me - I'm not missing out. There is so much good content out there without such hurdles... I.may not be able to talk with friends about newest series on that streaming service or another, but I can always talk about Home Alone, Alien or from some more modern ones Rush, Le Mans '66 etc. I will always pick older great movie over yet anoher average one. Woth games it is even easier - there are studios that encourage players to record and stream their games, publisers that don't include any un-needed crap. And indie games... And older games. I have 5000 hours of great games to play even if I stopped buying new ones right now. I don't have to pay for their bad choices...
And yes, we can kinda see that bigger companies are much farther from their customers and actually care about them less. I just take the same stance towards them.
I hope I have somehow described what I meant and answered your question.
EDIT: Had to uncensor s**t due to formatting troubles. Sorry for the word.
It's Czech. Smetimes there is perfect way of saying something in Czech but there are a few English words that can be used for that. Sometimes more of them are great in sense they actually mean what I want to say, other times I fail to pick even one that would describe it well.
With piracy... Making GTA5 run offline is softwareengineering, not piracy in my eyes :-) That is based on owning (licensing) the game in the first place though. In this case I would consider this type of piracy to be user-experience enhancement.
Now if you actually pirae the game, don't pay for it, tha is what I meant. If you get the game by non-legal means, you created that "need to have it". Even though you didn't pay for it, you became part of the game (let's say) ecosystem. You are going to tak abou it, share your experience, maybe write a review somewhere, the IP is going to get free marketing. They didn't get the money from you, they will get it from some people that you had influence on.
To be clear - I absolutely do not have anything against you personally! I'm not saying you shouldn't be doing it that way. I'm saying that by getting the game by any means and playng it, people show publishers they want the game. And publishers knowing this will make another one and very likely bodge in some other s**t features (that will get removed by some cracking party) and there we go round and round.
I decided to step out of this merry-go-around. I'd rather enjoy something that wasn't made unusable in he first place.
This just popped into my mind - microtransactions! People hate them, yet they pour huge money into them anyway. Whose fault is it that we have them then?
EDIT: Sorry for typos. I know how the words should be written, I write from my phoe whoch is why there are missing characters or spaces etc.
To be honest, I won't even bother. It's not worth my time and will kinda defeat my stance, which is "don't support them" which is done even by not actually caring about their content. Pirating it means there is aneed for the content, but on my side, there actually isn't.
tech's been there for well over a decade. The hardware's just gotten to a point where it's fast and nigh seemless. and of course, the software makes it so even a layman can set it up as long as they do a bit of research.
Of course, that's a high bar for a layman and people do just want to turn on a tv/phone and have that content update itself. Nor do any troubleshooting if something breaks. So I think streaming services are less worried than ever these days. They will still try, but pirates aren't a make or break for them.
Fair enough. I only bring it up because I was recently startled by that revelation.
I purchased what I thought was an actual print of a TV series season on eBay and was kind of alarmed when it came in and was clearly just a recording burned onto a disc. After doing some research I found out that the show was never available on disk and the hundreds of eBay listings were all of recordings that someone put together.
That sounds like pirated films on "VCDs" circa 1990s Hong Kong. There were entire malls where you could buy copied disks: go in, look at posters, point to it and show the shop keep, pay him, and leave the store empty handed and go around to the back in an hour for the newly burned disk.
Worked for PS1 games, Dreamcast games, movies, showes, audio CDs.
In Vancouver there were normal looking stores selling normal looking boxes of media as well. But they're pirated. To this day I don't know where one would go to purchase actual HK movies.
With media owners holding on to their stuff for stream and purposely not printing media, north america might be headed to that model soon.
It’s been a while since I was at a flea market aka swap meet, but that’s where I’d look as in the past there were many vendors with unknown credentials.
Kicking my nostalgia, HK VCDs used to be one of the limited ways to get subtitled anime in America. Was how I could watch Yu Yu Hakusho back in the day.
Not that the subtitles really made any sense though haha
Do you read traditional Chinese? Or did you have to try to buy the rare English subs? Yea the quality was really bad wasn't it, but most of the time there just weren't any other ways :) bad old days
English subs, but they didn't really make sense lol. I'm sad I don't have a direct reference for the Hakusho ones anymore, but someone uploaded screen caps from the One Piece ones and is similar (complete with characters having a variety of names lol): https://imgur.com/a/45Qjs
Those are hilarious 😂 how did you even make any sense of anything.....
Attach head hehehe
I know that shows don't come up on discs, but there's plenty of content out there even without subscriptions. I'm not really missing out that much. I'd rather watch good movie on physical.media that I own then be at will of someone else.
I am.subscribed to something though - LMG content (Linus tech tips and other channels) on Floatplane. The difference is huge though - I can actually download all of their videos and watch them again even if I unsubscribe. This is the service I can actually pay for. Not Netflix that can't even stream 1080p on my Linux desktop...
Technically, you don’t own the physical media any differently than you own an incoming stream. The rights vary a little, but they are still revocable rights mostly granted by some private party. It’s just harder for them ti enforce the limitations and revocations with physical media.
That's the thing. I own it, I have it in myhouse, they can't come and take it away. Maybe they could do that through law(ful ways), but are they really going to go from one house to another backed with police and search houses for physical media?
When you buy physical media, you're buying the disc but still only getting a license to watch what's on it. As @NoblePath and yourself point out, it's harder to revoke that liscense for the media on the disc itself. But this is why stuff like DRM online requirements being baked into HDMI and players and such are so onerous, because the nebulous/nefarious "They™" can potentially send a software update that can tell the device this media isn't allowed to be played anymore.
They probably can. What they can not is chage the discs that people have at home. If you have the right key (say the right verson of some PC player), you could still play the content. It doesn't matter to me, as my new Blu rays go straight into the PC drive and get ripped aka de-DRM'd.
Fun fact! You actually cannot legally play any 4K blu-ray discs on new PCs anymore because it used a DRM scheme from Intel that they stopped putting in their chips. You also cannot legally play it on any PC with an AMD CPU for the same reason.
There was also a big hulabaloo because there are still manufacturers making 4K blu-ray drives for PCs, and one major manufacturer was making new drives with firmware that MakeMKV could use without modification to rip those 4K blu-ray discs - which is technically illegal, but the only way to watch your movies on your computer. Apparently the newer versions have been patched to stop it again.
Thanks for heads up! I'm not buing any 4K movies then :-) I can live with 1080p without problems. It is them who won't see my money :-)
They can say the device it can't play the discs anymore. But they can't do that with the rips that I made from my discs. I know that licence agreements probably don't allow ripping, but my mind is at ease - I paid for the content. The same goes with playing games through emulators - I bought your game, so, please, f** off and don't dictate me on what device I will play it.
I’ve read that it is well established that it’s permissible to duplicate copyrighted material for personal use. Record companies couldn’t stop people from taping LPs they had purchased in order to listen to them in the car, for example.
I don't know if it is true, but it is said that you can make your personal copy. Personally I don't care - as I said, my mind is at easy. I have paid for it, that's what matters for me and my concience.
In some places the law disallows format shifting, and if format shifting is allowed there are normally "circumvention of technical measures" laws in place.
I like that people often just ignore the law, but I feel like we need to understand just how powerful copyright lobbying has been, and how many laws were created to serve them, and then fight back against those laws.
The thing is what is format shifting. Is it copying CD to cassette? Is it copying MKV file.frm disc to harddrive? Is it streaming Blu ray over wifi to you phone?
I still believe that I'm working on data that I bought on the disc. It may not be legal somewhere, yet I believe it to be ethical to do so. It is kinda like right to repair stuff. Did you buy your phone or have you paid for borrowing it indefinitely? I know it's not apples to apples, but I believe you understand what I mean.
You do own the movie. But the bullshit law that is the DMCA makes it illegal to circumvent DRM. So I guess in some respects you don’t actually own the movie; you own a jumbled stream of data that could be reassembled to form the movie via proprietary cryptographic methods.
IIRC BD+, the DRM scheme on Blu-ray, does actually have the ability to revoke keys, making any movie produced with it unwatchable unless you find a player that didn’t get that update.
In the US, there's a legal concept called "first-sale doctrine" that means we do effectively own the right to use and dispose of physical media, and the IP incorporated in it, in a way that we do not have with streaming.
We can sell those discs, legally. We can share them, rent them out, give them away, hand them down to our children.
I dn't know if this has some legal backing in EU as well, but that certainly is how it actually works here too.
To a certain extend, this happens to cash money too. With everything being digital, you don't own money either anymore.
I don't want to sound paranoid, but what actually is money? Does it matter if I own printed paper in my hand or if I have some number on my bank account? Both can lose their values overnight. Now, on the contrary, if we speak about gold for example...
good argument :) But gold can also lose its value. Like money it won't still your hunger.
Yeah, gold can lise its value. Still, it's physical goods that that is needed in the industry as we know it nowadays. It won't lose major part of its value overnight. The same goes for other stuff, of course, gold was just an example.
If gold lost all its value except its physical utility, that would still represent a dramatic drop in value.
The answer to that question depends on when, who, and where you ask.
Gold, or even useful commodities like grain, are still dependent for most of their value on a transactional environment (aka trade and commerce).
If you distill it you're right, it's nothing really but an agreement it's worth something.
However, unlike digital money, physical money has no dependency and works even if society collapses (provided we still trust that it's valuable). We've been able to trust currency values printed on paper for a while, that probably won't disappear overnight.
The value of currency really doesn't have anything to do with public perception or a number printed on paper. Fiat money, when it comes down to it, has value due to a government's ability to levy and collect taxes, and an international consensus of how much one is worth compared to another currency.
Another way of looking at it is currency is debt owed by a government. That's why inflation is inextricably linked to the total amount of dollars issued and the established interest rates. (The bond issuance and maturation cycle, which usually involves increasing the money supply, thus proportionally devaluing the dollar and all debts.) It's a fractional value of what a government is worth, which is in turn how much debt it can issue (bonds) to accomplish its goals, and pay back over time through taxation.
You could probably use shares in a company as an analogy. They're fractions of the value of a company, and if that value is zero, the company is very definitely defunct. I'm paid a sizable portion of my salary in shares, which lose fractional value as more are issued (currency)...but the overall value of the shares goes up as the company demonstrates its ability to generate value (GDP). A share in a company that no longer has income (taxation, for a government) is worthless.
So...if you don't have a functioning society, your currency will be worthless overnight. But you'll have far worse things to worry about than money, and then one of the countries with a currency that has value (due to a functioning taxation apparatus) would likely perform an annexation...
Admittedly I was being a bit flippant and curt with my comment. I realise there's more to it than just trust in a currency, but at its core, trust in paper currency is stronger when there's no internet.
Don't say that before any Czech(oslovak). In 1953 due to currency reform (or whatever it would translate to) money was de-valued at up to 50:1 overnight. You had 50 thousand crowns? The next morning you had only 1 thousand... More can he found here, albeit in Czech, maybe Google translate can help: https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C4%8Ceskoslovensk%C3%A1_m%C4%9Bnov%C3%A1_reforma_(1953) (due to special characters making short link didn't work for me).
EDIT: This simply put meant making everyone from whatever they were before (either rich/middle/poor class) just poor overnight. You can try and find some inflation calculator and put 50 000 kčs (Czechoslovak crowns) in 1952 and see what it would be worth today to see what it meant for people.
EDIT2: You even don't need to as the Wikipedia oage contains information about how much sme goods cost before and after that reform which is not on par with how the money was de-valued. Goods was just more expensive after, even a few times more.
Interestingly, even paper currency can effectively be "deleted" if a government desires. It is fiat currency. I have no idea if the US federal government has this power constitutionally, but governments can simply decree that previously issued currency no longer has any value. In fact, India recently did this.
If a government has the power to do such a thing, it is actually mechanically quite easy. While we often say government-issued currency is "backed by nothing," that isn't actually true. US Currency has value because it is the only thing the US government will accept as payment for taxes.
Every person living in the US owes taxes on any income they make. And this applies regardless of what form you are paid for your labor in. If you want to contract with a farmer to help harvest a blueberry field, and you for some reason would prefer to be paid in bulk blueberries, you're free to set up such a contract. You can get paid however you want. However, even if you collect a season's wages in the form of a truck full of blueberries, you still owe Uncle Sam US dollars. You'll need to sell some of your blueberry wages to get US dollars to pay what you owe the federal government. And states and municipalities also insist on being paid in dollars.
This is ultimately what gives US currency, or any fiat currency, any value. Everyone has to pay taxes on their income, and those taxes have to be paid in dollars. We could do all our trade in barter, Euros, or Yuan if we wanted to. But since everyone in the US already needs to deal with large numbers of dollars to pay their annual tax bill, we all just agree to do all of our business in dollars.
Through this, however, is a means for a government to simply delete money, even paper money. A government can issue a decree saying, "after X date, we will no longer accept bills of Y denomination or bills printed before year Z for payment of taxes owed, deposit at the federal reserve, or payment for any federal service." If they wanted to do away with cash transactions all together, they could state, "after this date, the government will no longer accept physical currency for tax and other payments."
When they do this, the currency that they choose to stop accepting becomes worthless. It's no longer legal tender. It has no more legal backing than Confederate dollars. The currency loses its connection to the one thing that gave it value in the first place, and its worth disappears in a puff of smoke.
If they wish to, governments can delete paper currency just as effectively as they can digital currency.
We are stepping into territory where I don't hae much to add to discussion.
I just agree that if government wanted, your money is worth nothing. In past money was backed by the stae owning gold. Nowadays money is kinda construct. It is a bit like bitcoin in that it is worth what people make it worth to some degree. I'm not going deeper in his hole, sorry :-)
I'm not US, so I can't even comment on that side of things.
Nah, I don't pursue owning valuables. I just want to own what I paid for :-)
Piracy means different things to different people. Sometimes it's simply "copyright infringement", but to the English Criminal Prosecution Service piracy requires a profit motive:
https://www.cps.gov.uk/legal-guidance/cybercrime-prosecution-guidance
This is because English law says that mere copyright infringement is not a criminal offence. It becomes a criminal offence if there's an attempt at profit:
https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1988/48/part/I/chapter/VI/crossheading/offences
So, in England the argument is that i) theft is defined and piracy doesn't meet that definition and ii) theft is a criminal offence, and copyright infringement usually isn't a criminal offence.
You wouldn't steal a car - but feel free to duplicate one for yourself.
So, there I was, in England, sailing the high seas, because I was sick of paying for Amazon, Netflix, Disney and a BBC TV license and having movies and shows randomly move networks, and I couldn't watch them any longer, even after paying for a long time.
I work in the TV industry. Show licensing is a massive deal and keeping track of regions and end dates to keep the shows moving around and making money is a major part. I understand it, but as a consumer it's a bloody nightmare.
Speaking of theft, these bastards don't even pay their taxes whenever they can avoid it. Piracy is a drop in the bucket by comparison.