> "We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem. If a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24 x 7, purchasable from the convenience of your personal computer, and the legal provider says the product is region-locked, will come to your country 3 months after the US release, and can only be purchased at a brick and mortar store, then the pirate's service is more valuable."
I agree with Gabe here. I basically stopped pirating games once I could add something that I like to my collection during steam sale for a nice discount instead of waiting for days for whatever service to ship it.
I can also return it if I end up not lilinkg it, not like with a physical copy.
Price is part of it, and paying customers should never have a worse experience than those getting something for free. With DRM, activation severs that can be shut down, exclusivity deals, and fragmentation of marketplaces… paying customers often get a worse experience.
I'd just like a DRM filter on steam. You can filter out free to play and DLC so they never appear on the store page. It would be great if you could also filter out DRM (even by type if they're feeling motivated).
Then i'd bet if they gave the publisher statistics on how many people never see their game because it contains denuvo or a 3rd party launcher you'd see meanigful change, and if not then at least the store is nicer for the steam customers who care about it.
Steam's DRM is optional (edit: by this I mean it's a checkbox that the devs can tick if they want Steam DRM for their game) and extremely lightweight to be fair, and it's been cracked for 2 decades at this point as well.
MTX and Always-Online BS is also down to the individual games, nothing Steam can do about it realistically.
Disney plus doesn't allow casting to my pc to my tv with desktop mirroring. This is DRM crap.
I was using that to watch the same movie my children were watching while I was doing some work and I couldn't.
This is true. I think I stopped pirating games - as soon as I could afford Steam games. Only rarely pirate games to "try" them out - then buy it on Steam. It also helps that they've gotten easy to run on Linux.
imo it's still true bc of drm and vanishing content. Take AC 2. I'm not sure but afaik they turned off their servers or are about to do so and as result the pirated game will give you all the content, compared to og deluxe version that will not be able to get the content from the server. Games are pirated anyways regardless of drm, but drm will affect fps and the content can be vanished once servers are turned off, so you basically still get an inferior service compared to pirates, maybe less inferior compared to the past, but still inferior.
Yep, GabeN has always been right on the ball with this. I stopped pirating games altogether and have like 900 games on Steam at this point. I still pirate music, shows, movies and software quite liberally, mostly because trying to find what content is on which platform is a massive hassle. Jellyfin + sonarr/radarr makes it completely painless plus I actually own the files and they can never be retroactively removed, so why on earth would I go with the alternative?
I still pay for stuff on Bandcamp, but that's not because it's easier but because I want to support the artists I enjoy more directly.
Well, I'd stop paying for Netflix well before I'd stop paying for Spotify because Spotify has much closer to the "everything"of that particular form of entertainment than Netflix does, and new albums and songs are relatively instantly available on the service.
For whatever reason, the ability to arrange music licensing to allow for an aggregator of everything is much easier than for movie and TV show licensing.
When I was younger I’d always have music playing in the background but now I only listen to music intentionally – mostly when I’m walking in town or on public transport. I usually download a select number of albums in advance and listen to complete albums at a time – just as I did with other media. Ideally, my monthly Spotify spend would be divided among the few artists that I actually listen to. Instead, the (small) share of revenue that the artist gets is their fractional share of what everyone else is listening to (most likely as background† music, selected by a Spotify algorithm or playlist), i.e., it’s not proportional to the amount of times that I listen to the artist.
† I’d often hear good music being played in a small (usually independent, not a chain) store or café where the workers have some control over what they’re listening to in their work-place. In the past, I used to discover new music and have some good conversations by asking staff in a shop what is the music they’re playing on the sound system. For the past few years, that hasn’t worked so well: the staff stare blankly, are surprised at the question and/or show no interest in what’s being fed to them by Spotify.
I have a deal with myself, that I'm a few months behind on actually, to spend at least $10 a month (the equivalent of my old Google music sub) on Bandcamp - and on primarily Australian music, to support local in my minimal way.
Spotify lacks when you venture into niche older genres. I was doing a deep dive into ska and rocksteady and the content on Spotify was not at all complete. A quick visit to the successor of what.cd and I’ve got access to more accurately cataloged releases than I could listen to.
There’s no such thing as casual music discovery though with piracy. It’s a bit like visiting the largest record store ever built. You’ve gotta thumb through the albums and talk to the other nerds.
Music licensing is pretty much centralized and standardized for historical reasons. So streaming music services pretty much have "everything" (reasonably mainstream) and are essentially commodities aside from device support, UIs, playlists, etc.
There are also some weird decisions made by content owners. For example: Star Trek Strange New Worlds is available in my country on SkyShowtime, but only in 1080p SDR. This is a relatively new streaming service that only launched last year, yet they do not support 4k or HDR. The same series is available through 'alternative sources' in 4k HDR.
I have no idea why they would not offer it in 4k, it's not a licensing issue since both ST:SNW and SkyShowtime are owned by Paramount. It's mind boggling why they would sabotage their own service like that.
I know people who programmed an app for controlling this kind of thing- licensing agreements for video content on streaming platforms. The “period” entity was a huge monster with many fields. Resolution amongst them.
> why they would not offer it in 4k
That’s because the other license was either too pricey, or simply unavailable (another platform might have purchased exclusivity for that show in 4k in your area)
Paid streamed content should do something like mobile virtual network operators, so people can pay for what they use.
Currently only piracy provides this service, and paid content services are choosing legislation over competition.
The established players really should be working on this, because it's only a matter of time before some pirate service turns legit and eats all their lunches.
You can buy/rent streaming content a la carte in many cases (modulo exclusives to a streaming service). Given the prevalence of all you can eat streaming, I think many people forget this.
Someone I know argued a number of years back that Napster was about convenience not price.
I disagreed at the time. And I still think that's too blunt a statement for the population as a whole. But the popularity of streaming music services in particular does suggest there's definitely a lot of truth to it for many people at the right price point.
when you are young you have a lot of time and not a lot of money. Naturally attracted to piracy.
When you are an adult you have more money then time. Naturally attracted to just buy it as its the easiest.
You might never be able to root out piracy amongst the young people and if you do they will not pay since they cannot afford it. But doing so will make your service less convenient for everyone. So you gained no extra profit but made service worse for everyone else.
But now adults who would be happy to pay are inconvenienced by all the shit you throw at them, to the point they might go back to piracy as more convenient option.
People with more time than money vs. people with more money than time applies in a lot of contexts. You even see it in a company context--why pay someone for this service when you could just do it yourself? I know I could do it in a day. (Well, it's a distraction that we don't need and, if we can offload it that makes sense for us to do.)
I used to buy loads of legit content. VHS macrovision degraded quality for "anti-piracy purposes". Basically it flashed contrast and automatic gain would fuck up.
Then it was DVD. This was probably the best format cause it was easy to rip. Again, ripping is illegal cause DMCA (Note: breaking DMCA is worse a crime than copyright infringement). Its yet another case where property rights are superseded by some bullshit intellectual right. These media fucks couldnt be happy to just sell content... they wanted to sell it again and again and again.
Then HD-DVD came out for a short while. Supported by MS and Xbox. I didnt buy it, and the format died. No big loss since everything that Im aware of was also published on Bluray.
And Bluray. It's a cracked format. Discs and players demand internet connection. Bunch of anti-purchaser crap. There's rippers for this stuff too.
And now, it's streaming streaming streaming. You never get any discs, and you never retain ownership of any shows. There is no more "loan buddy the DVD". You now have to provide the login, which is of course linked to your CC number. And because of "streaming", when you leave, you take nothing with you.
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Whereas piracy, I download it once, and I have it. It'll work on any device. I can back it up. I can put it on a media server. I can copy it to a friend (sharing is caring, right?). Nothing is fighting me tooth and nail each step.
So, even if I have enough money for as much music and videos as I want, why in the hell would I pay piles-o-money for garbage service, garbage quality media, abusive handling of customer, and little to nothing to show for money paid?
Nah, I'll stick with piracy. I get treated better in that avenue all around.
> For years, consumers griped about cable bundling and having to pay high prices for hundreds of channels they never watched in order to get the handful they enjoyed. Despite the growing availability of legal streaming options since then, piracy statistics show that infringement has remained a real concern.
That's the thing isn't it? It was convenient when streaming first came on the scene. Everything in one place. "I'll gladly pay for the convenience". After roughly a decade it's approaching the state where it's as fractured as before, but now you pay a lot more - all services combined. So I'm not surprised it's growing again.
I don't mind paying for a service at all; I'll happily switch one service for another every month or few months. The main sticking point the diaspora causes for me is I can't find what I want. Maybe some people subscribe to a service and happily browse and watch what's available. I'm not a huge show or movie buff so I tend to go by personal recommendations so for me the process is flipped. I start with a movie or a show and go 'okay, where do I watch this?'. Finding out is ridiculously annoying. Furthermore, there are services like Prime that will show you what they have in stock that is for sale AND what's included with the subscription in the same view. That means I can't tell at a glance what I can watch as part of my subscription and what I have to pay extra for.
It seems purposely obtuse to me, to nickel and dime. And even if I do pay extra to 'buy' a movie, the Sony debacle has shown that I can't assume I can watch stuff that I have bought indefinitely.
Streaming services have fragmented, increased prices, and fought back against account sharing at a bad time, too - as inflation and cost-of-living have skyrocketed.
Need to save some money? - First thing to cut back on is entertainment-related subscriptions.
Even when I have access to streaming from a provider - streaming from my own box is more reliable and convenient: access to my library from a single app; if it's on the disk I know I can watch it whenever.
It's easier to find the media on a pirate site, than to try to guess which service has streaming rights for a show or movie in my country.
I think it's interesting to contrast this with music. Music is dominated by a few big labels, which makes it very easy for each provider (Spotify, Apple Music etc.) to provide a complete catalogue and thus convenience. (Though this does mean Spotify's unit economics are much worse, partially explaining the foray into podcasts and recent layoffs etc.)
Furthermore, whereas we hardly rewatch the same movies, we constantly re-listen to the same music we first encountered in our adolescence (nobody can convince me that the 90s is not the pinnacle of pop music). This makes things like playlists a lot more valuable and sticky.
I am not particularly ideological about copyright/piracy one way or another, but I know I probably won't be pirating music anytime soon.
> I am not particularly ideological about copyright/piracy one way or another, but I know I probably won't be pirating music anytime soon.
And yet, if musicians being able to pay the bills is your concern, saving what you pay to spotify and buying a few albums on bandcamp instead is possibly the way to go.
> I've been a professional musician since the end days of selling CDs, and I would like to say that having experienced the decline of CD sales because of piracy transition into the paid streaming era it's unambiguous that musicians were better off when mostly everyone was pirating and then some people bought CDs or other merch out of a desire to support vs today when everyone pays a nominal fee to a corporation that pays us nothing and also satisfies their desire to support despite not actually offering support.
I don't think it's that music is dominated by a few big labels. Film and television is substantially dominated by a comparably small group of organizations.
The difference is that music licensing has for the most part not been split into channels or subject to exclusive licensing. Music availability has usually been somewhat universal. If one radio station can air a track, most of the others can too. If one store can sell a record or CD, most of the others can too. If one streaming service can stream something, most of the others can too.
With movies and TV, this hasn't really been the case. Typically, one cable TV channel will license the content exclusively, so if you want to consume that content, you need that channel.
The video streaming model we see today is just a natural continuation of the previous business model based on competing through exclusivity. This isn't to say that it makes sense, just that that's the difference of the two.
I subscribe to Apple Music but, honestly, if music streaming services went away tomorrow I'd be pretty happy with my own library which is mostly music I bought on physical media at some point or other. (Yes, some is from Napster but mostly replacing songs on old vinyl albums.)
>That's the thing isn't it? It was convenient when streaming first came on the scene. Everything in one place.
I have to subscribe to a service where maybe only a tv show interests me and the rest is junk. Subscribe to another service for another tv show, and so on.
That is not convenient. Give me a website where I can pick from all online available media I can only watch and pay what I want.
I own a full cable package with rights to ESPN, but didn't have the app downloaded on my phone. I tried to catch the end of a game in the web browser, and ESPN.com refused to allow access via web. Guess what was faster to search for?
Let's not even talk about the NFL, there are 2 times a year where I cannot watch a Dolphins game, living in Florida, while paying for NFL+ / NFL Game Pass. The whole streaming rights system is a joke, I forget the exact issue but IIRC NFL doesn't have rights to sell the games to local broadcasters, so it simply isn't available in the teams home state on their service.
I wish I had a way to quantify it, but it also seems like _investment_ has skyrocketed. 20 years ago HBO might make a high quality, high budget show. Now we have shows like the Marvel TV Shows, Wheel of Time, Foundation, House of the Dragon, the Mandalorian, Rings of Power, etc.. that all have MASSIVE budgets. A lot of that was funded by free money, but I think the quality and expectation of TV shows has gone up quite a bit.
Aside from the odd miniseries, TV was mostly sitcoms, cop shows, reality TV over time, etc. Even HBO was mostly a way to watch movies until the Sopranos came along. There's been a massive transformation over the past few decades to TV being something on par with film in terms of talent and production values. I have no idea what the shows on network TV even are these days and, as far as I'm aware, there's nothing with any sort of buzz.
When talking about new, great content, parent mentioned only sci-fi and fantasy content: Marvel TV Shows, Wheel of Time, Foundation, House of the Dragon, the Mandalorian, Rings of Power, etc
So, it seemed that if you are into that stuff, you have some amazing content. But what if you are not?
I tend towards SF myself but Deadwood, Russian Doll, Ted Lasso, The Morning Show, Succession... There's a lot of quality TV out there on streaming across a range of genres.
It's the only thing that keeps intellectual property in check. Without the option, publishers just have a legal monopoly. When piracy increases, it means consumers are unhappy.
To spell out what I think you're saying, the way to be ethical and have ownership is to pay for the content and then download a version of it so that you both supported the creator and have a copy of what you paid for.
You can make a case for ethical use cases, for sure, as you've done. Piracy as a valuable tool for archival.
You can also make a case, not based on ethics, but to think about it as a way of consumers exercising control over their media consumption. If they don't like what's on offer from the big media companies (who exploit everyone in the production chain so enrich the execs and investors) then they can go somewhere else. With enough piracy, media companies are forced to provide a better deal. This is what lead to the creation of Netflix, and what led Apple to use their considerable market forces to get the industry behind DRM-free music. I think we can all agree that some balance of power between corporate behemoths and their customers is a good thing. In this model, piracy is actually a competitor in the media industry. You are competing for those customers. I think Netflix really understood this at the beginning, and it got gigantic by basically stealing customers from pirate sites.
Let's take another perspective to present on argument on whether or not to pirate media:
Pirated media, like a lot of illicit activities which takes place outside official channels presents a security risk. Never pirate any kind of software! This is how some of the great tragedies happen in infosec. I recall hearing some stories from security folks, about breaches which started as employees downloading cracks and keygens for photoshop and the like on work machines. Jesus H. Christ on a cracker. Music and movies, for savvy users, is significantly more safe since for the most part, those media files don't (or can't) contain executable code. There are edge cases, like abandonware where it is impossible sometimes to purchase the software you are looking for, and abandonware is relatively safe in the scheme of things.
Another argument: The socio-economic class argument. If you are not wealthy enough to afford what wealthier people (or people from wealthier nations) are paying for, it's OK to pirate it. It's harming no-one, as you were never going to be a paying customer in the first place. In some cases, whatever media may be impossible to legally purchase in your country.
There's also the techno-libertarian/pirate party perspective of "Information wants to be free", but honestly that's getting a bit abstract and I can't articulate well that perspective in a way that makes sense to me if you're talking about music and TV shows. Software though - reverse engineering software, and making your own version, I can get behind and it makes sense.
What I won't do is share which of these perspectives I live by, or tell you which perspectives you should live by (other than that second one: For god's sake don't pirate software for your own good). The "don't pirate software" was a talking point I recently wrote down in a Readme.txt for my nephews who are getting their first gaming PC's for Christmas (from myself and my brother).
It's always funny for me how the lost profits they calculate are inflated as hell.
Here for example, they state that the US economy lost 29B$ due to piracy. In majority of the cases people who downloaded some of these shows/music would never buy all of these at full price.
I personally subscribe to 3-5 streaming services and still if I'm looking for something classic (e.g. 1995 Heat) it always turns out to be either unavailable in my region or only provided on some niche platform I've never heard of. If you're just watching what's hot right now then everything works fine, but any other case you're in trouble and have to dig through the internet just like in the old days of pirate bay.
> It's always funny for me how the lost profits they calculate are inflated as hell.
It's also funny they don't account for the free distribution, reach, branding, and market penetration that Piracy gives them.
We've had the release of the GTA VI trailer a few days ago and it reminded me of how me and my friends became truly fans of the series with GTA Vice City.
We were kids and couldn't afford it so we had to play it in some other way - plus with the modding scene bringing Multi Theft Auto (MTA) we could play GTA Vice City online with friends.
If it wasn't for that there are plenty of people who wouldn't have helped make the franchise into what it became. They got fans for free, who wouldn't be able to play the game either way, thanks to mass distribution. Those folks ended up becoming paying customers into the franchise later down the line.
Minecraft is a good example of that, they never really cracked down on the piracy before the Microsoft acquisition. But since its advertisement was word-to-mouth, that huge pirate userbase probably brought a lot of paying users
> Internet piracy isn’t ethically justifiable, but it is convenient.
I don't know. After the recent Sony debacle[1], I wouldn't blame anyone who goes out and downloads the content that was removed from their libraries. You already paid for it, after all.
When it was just Netflix charging a few dollars a month for loads of content, it was great. It was easier than safer than pirating, and people turned to it in droves.
Now content is spread over dozens of streaming services, with price rises happening annually and cost of living biting hard for the average person. Most of the time, you only want a handful of shows from a given service anyway, and some of those services aren't even available in your country.
The only way to combat piracy is to make it harder than just paying for content. We were there at one point, and now the tables are turning again.
> and cost of living biting hard for the average person
This is a meme that won't die. This is simply false. Real wages, real per capita GDP, real median income et. al. are all higher now than before covid. There was a 13 month burst of inflation (which correlated almost perfectly with wage growth, FWIW), and it seems like everyone lost their minds.
In 2020, the price of a Netflix standard plan was $13. Now it's $16. That's a 23% increase. The "premium" (why 4k is premium in 2023 beats me, but okay) plan has gone up 43%, from $16 to $23. [1]
Has your salary gone up 20-40% since 2020? Mine has gone up, but at less than 20%. And Netflix is only one of the costs, groceries and food seem to have gone up by ridiculous amounts like 50% or so.
That's why the cost of living bites hard. Sure, incomes have gone up. Prices seem to have gone up more. I fail to see how this is a meme.
> Sure, incomes have gone up. Prices seem to have gone up more. I fail to see how this is a meme.
It's a meme because of the "seem to have" part. You believe it because it feels true, even though it's actually false. People measure this stuff. What you say is wrong. Wages have grown faster than prices over the past 4 years. Period. You can't just throw out decades of research and process development on CPI indicators because of your Netflix bill!
> People measure this stuff. What you say is wrong.
Can you send me a link that shows measurements of:
a) X: The price of a specific standardized basket of goods used for CPI, broken down by exactly how much it cost in 2019 v/s 2023 (linking to a magic number for the whole basket is not acceptable, this needs to demonstrate exact prices of specific items, like the price of 160z of cheese. Varying baskets are also not acceptable, because then you're not measuring the same thing).
b) Y: The exact median income of a household in 2019 v/s 2023
I'll accept that prices have gone down and things have gotten better if X/Y as of 2019 is less than X/Y as of 2023.
> You can't just throw out decades of research and process development on CPI indicators because of your Netflix bill!
It's the other way round -- you can't just handwave some “decades of research and development” at people and claim that they should magically feel better off than four years prior. A lot of times this R&D is motivated by pressures that are unrelated to measuring the economic wellbeing of families, and any research is going to have its flaws that don't exactly match up to how the median family is feeling economic pressures. People who claim that the research is correct need to share specifics.
There are FRED charts elsewhere in this thread answering both your demands. But again, I don't care if you "believe" me or not. My point is precisely that your belief is decoupled from data. It's not my job to give you the data, it's yours. And by your own admission you don't want to do that. That's the problem.
Again, just chanting "FRED charts" is not a magic wand. One of the FRED chart links you posted [1] shows real median household income trending steadily downward from 2019's peak of from 78,250 in 2019 to 74,580 in 2023.
That's literally a decrease. I am not clear as to why you want me and others to somehow see that as an increase? And don't say "cherry-picking", there were no stimulus checks in 2019.
- Real median household income was $74,580 in 2022, a 2.3 percent decline from the 2021 estimate of $76,330 (Figure 1 and Table A-1).
- Householders under the age of 65 experienced a decline in median household income of 1.4 percent from 2021, while householders aged 65 and over did not experience a significant change in median income between 2021 and 2022 (Figure 1).
- The money income Gini index decreased by 1.2 percent between 2021 and 2022 (from 0.494 to 0.488); this represents the first time the Gini index has shown an annual decrease since 2007 (Figure 3 and Table A-3).
- Between 2021 and 2022, the number of full-time, year-round workers increased by 3.4 percent, compared to a 1.7 percent increase in the number of total workers. This suggests a continuing shift from working part-time or part-year to full-time, year-round work.
- In 2022, 65.6 percent of working women worked full-time, year-round. This is the largest share on record.
The real median earnings of all workers (including part-time and full-time workers) decreased 2.2 percent between 2021 and 2022. Median earnings of those who worked full-time, year-round decreased 1.3 percent (Figure 4 and Table A-6).
"""
Note that in the US, it is extremely hard to have the number for both income and wages. In my country, wages are a smaller proportion of average income every year, but i'm unable to see if it's the same in the US.
2021-22 is cherry-picked to land dead center in the middle of the inflation burst. Check the FRED charts I posted elsewhere in this thread and look to numbers before covid. They literally say the opposite.
Also, sorry if it seems I pile on you, but I was looking at disposable income for an unrelated reason and thought back at our discussion, changed to country to the US, and once again confirmed my original thoughts.
Once again, a lot of limits: 2022 was indeed worse than surrounding years, it's per capita, because median it really hard to find, and income is not really meaningful, not if the subject is the working poor.
1. 2022 was right in the middle of the disruption, which is now over.
2. You're showing a derivative chart and not the value, which amplifies noise into signal. What if it showed a giant leap in the following quarter (which it does!), would you change your mind from "it's terrible" to "it's amazing"?
3. Disposable income tends to be a noisy statistic anyway as it's a delta statistic conflates motion of two different measurables (income and expenses) that are perfectly measurable by themselves.
4. You're just wrong anyway. Here's the FRED chart (always go to FRED, always, everyone else is peddling something) of exactly the statistic you posted. Tell me if this chart is consistent with the story you interpreted:
On the income graph you shared, the same decline was present (but it stopped in 2022 too, which is the last data we have, so 'cherry-picked'). Also nothing about the gini coefficient.
Also, if wages are a shrinking percentage of income, that mean rent will slowly bring more money home than work, which is terrible news.
I literally did? That's what "real" means: having more real wages means you can buy more stuff. It's already adjusted for price rises. Check out FRED if you don't believe me:
Your first graph for Median usual weekly real earnings shows a fall from 393 in Q2 2020 to 365 in Q2 2023.
Your third graph for Real Median Household Income shows a fall from 76,660 in 2020 to 74,580 today.
Even though I find it hard to take the reported inflation numbers seriously because they aren't calculated off a fixed basket of goods any more [1], those graphs don't seem to say we have more "real" wages now compared to 2020. I am confused as to why you seem to be arguing for the opposite. Am I reading them wrong or something?
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[1] From https://www.investopedia.com/articles/07/consumerpriceindex.... — "The new methodology takes into account changes in the quality of goods and the effects of substitution. Substitution, the changes consumers make in response to price increases, also changes the relative weighting of the goods in the basket. The overall result tends to be a lower CPI."
You're cherry picking the peak (literally the peak) of the covid relief though! People got huge checks in the first half of 2020, do you not remember? Why would you do that? You can see it's an outlier, growing rapidly then shrinking. Look at Q4 2019 to get pre-covid numbers and you'll see (1) there's a clear trend across the disruption and (2) it's clearly going up.
Okay, but then Real Median Income still goes down from 78,250 in 2019 to 74,580.
You probably shouldn't go too far before Covid. People aren't going to think back to how things were ~5 years before Covid, they are going back to a couple years before.
I don't agree with GP's original point (also afaik US minimum wage hasn't increased), but the way inflation is measured is with a basket of common goods that serve as proxy for "cost of living". If cost of living, the number in dollars, went up, it means prices rose, which means there was inflation. Maybe it wasn't measured "correctly" (the basket of goods isn't reflective of what people actually need to live), but in principle an increase in your "real" salary means you're better off and beating the rising cost of living
The problem with looking at streaming service pricing in the context of inflation is that a lot of people have also dropped their cable TV subscriptions. I probably subscribe to too many streaming services but I'm still paying half of what I was paying for just cable TV alone.
Then you are particularly unlucky in that your salary didn't keep up with inflation. It did (and more) for everyone else, on average. Check the FRED links I posted elsehwere in this subthread. If you don't believe in economics, why bother to make an economic point?
It's really upsetting to me to watch this notionally rationalist community descend into this kind of memery.
No, people making blanket statements about the economy based on their personal experiences (and similar anecdotes they read from forums like this one). Look at the data!
> But before you ditch the streaming services for an illegal torrent, take a look at the alarming piracy statistics we’ve compiled. They’ll show you that piracy is making a comeback, but they’ll also warn you against falling into this bad habit.
Amazon Prime in Germany has S2-4 as stream, sells S1-4. But everything only in German, and no subs.
Apple sells something? Maybe only S1? I don’t understand how I can see it without an iTunes account or maybe iTunes installed? Good job having a worse UX than either Google or Amazon, though, that takes work.
Google has only S1, and again only in German.
Sure is convenient to be able to get what I want at all, because apparently no one else sells or rents it. Sure, I could buy the DVDs (probably for a fraction of the price of buying it at Amazon), go through the hassle of ripping everything, fix the subtitles etc. like I did for ReGenesis, but that’s hours of work, so yeah, you bet I go with the convenient version, and I find it perfectly ethically justifiable.
Same boat here, also Germany. Wanted to watch the Bourdain show "No Reservations" and it's practically impossible.
There are only 3 ways:
1. Import the DVDs from the US, but pay a high cost for the DVDs, the high cost of shipping, the taxes and customs and eventually, once it arrives, watch it.
2. Be a criminal, get a VPN, fake address and data, prepaid US credit card and subscribe to discovery in the US and watch it.
Yeah, these numbers are always very dishonest. There's no accounting for
* People who were never planning to buy, including people who just plain could not afford to buy if they wanted to.
* People who bought after pirating
* People who pirated something that was not available anywhere to purchase in their region
It's basically impossible to account for all of these different reasons, but arguably none of those were really ever going to contribute the money.
Besides, people have no moral duty to support the US economy.
There are many people who will download anything within a given set of parameters and only ever watch a fraction of it. It's a form of local digital library building.
Yeah, that's true too. Basically mass data archiving, which is actually a super valuable service to society if we want to have any hope of keeping less popular digital information alive for the future.
I suspect it's most content and not just some. I may prefer to watch a specific movie, like Heat (1995), but if it's not available on the streaming services I currently pay for I'm more likely to watch something else rather than pay 15 bucks (or whatever) for it.
> More than 70,000 jobs per year in the US alone are lost because of the lost revenues that came from music piracy.
> (RIAA)
> Music industry piracy statistics highlight the costs of music piracy and the immense consequences on the American economy. Music theft costs American workers significant losses in jobs and earnings as well as costing the US government substantial lost tax revenues.
I get all the rest, and I'm at a point in my life where I pay for my media, and I don't believe in any philosophical or moral justification for piracy (nor do I condemn it - to each their own but don't be a hypocrite about what you're doing).
But these kinds of reports always lose me when they tack on these huge numbers of job and revenue losses.
The majority of people who pirate wouldn't spend the money if they couldn't pirate. So these are totally fake numbers.
In with ya. When reading that pirated music costs 70,000 jobs I just laugh. I don't think there would be more jobs (maybe a few), but that the people at the top would have a bigger salary or bonus.
Always struck by the economics these sort of orgs must be fabricating to assume that:
"Digital video piracy is costing the US economy between $29.2 and $71 billion each year." (What an absolutely huge margin)
and
"Annual global revenue losses from digital piracy are between $40 and $97.1 billion in the movie industry."
As if all these people who consume this pirate content would be purchasing it if the free alternative wasn't available to them. It's a very out of touch assumption to be making I think.
I started building a 48TB NAS this year after giving up on consumer-grade external hard drives.
I am fed up of wanting to watch something and needing to figure out which platform to watch it in. I'm even more fed up when stuff is region locked. What makes things worse are device limits. I have nearly a dozen devices at home and would like to watch on whatever device I'm currently using. Just because you're concerned about people sharing passwords, you should not limit me to using your app on one or two devices. It's a broken system.
Streaming is... Horrible. The experience of having to wait a year for a season of a show when US has it on day one is horrible.
And stuff which is in copyright limbo? Being unable to watch older cartoons because it's politically incorrect or because it's inappropriate for today's audiences is downright demeaning. I'd like to laugh at a Tom and Jerry bit without worrying about 2023's current comedy palette.
Spotify also ruined my music tastes by randomly polluting my playlists with stuff it thinks I should listen to because other people around me do. I do not. I'd rather listen to offline music that I've downloaded and made into manual playlists. I used to scrobble my music so I'd get recommendations. Right now, I just want to listen to a small subset of music I loved 10 years ago. Nothing new excites me.
Piracy isn't just about free stuff. It's about being able to use something freely. I'm still paying for these platforms, but I don't stream anything off them anymore. My parents use my accounts instead. I'm going to use Plex with my NAS so I can stream anything I want into my devices.
Let's see. I live in the middle east, subscribing to Netflix, Disney+, and Amazon Prime. I was in the middle of watching something and it was removed from Netflix. No problem - I'll simply open up CBS Streaming Whatever, only to be hit by a geofence.
Which form of thievery is the right one for me now. Do I use a VPN to connect to servers in another country, thereby continuing to watch my show on Netflix? Do I VPN to the service (in this case CBS) to watch it in the US, just because? As a paying customer, I frankly don't care. I open up qbittorrent, and I download the show. Why - because I can no longer pay for it in my country.
Many of us simply want to watch things. Whenever a company makes that difficult, we pirate. Once you open the door to an alternative, easy to use distribution mechanism, frankly it's hard to close.
"As of 31 December 2023, due to our content licensing arrangements with content providers, you will no longer be able to watch any of your previously purchased Discovery content and the content will be removed from your video library."
When consumers are dissuaded from purchasing content, when a purchase is not a purchase, arguments against piracy are almost insulting.
I have a friend that pirates everything. He's constantly telling me about movies and shows that just came out; usually seeing them before anyone else. For me, even if it elicits scorn, I like to pay for my media. As a youngster, I pirated. Nowadays, after knowing many artists and people involved in the creative end of things, I can't really justify that posture, anymore.
A big problem, is that all the streamers are breaking the landscape into hundreds of different parts. It's pure profit-seeking, and I can't actually argue against the business sense.
But it makes being a consumer, a nightmare. Book DRM is similar. I like to use the same reader for all my books, but was forced to crack many of them, just so I could read all my books on the same app. I also brought pirated books, because they didn't sell the ones I wanted, in the US. I would have been thrilled to pay, but they didn't want my money.
Bundles tend to become corrupted. Cable bundles are pretty much worthless, to me. They all force you to have sports, and sports are what makes the bundles expensive. I couldn't care any less, about sports. I guess I'm in a minority.
I would love to see the ability to "build your own bundle," including temporary subscriptions to services that carry just one show I want to see (I remember subscribing to YouTube Premium, just for one show. I found it to be an awful app, and quickly unsubbed, once I'd watched the show). Maybe even the ability to select individual shows, from different publishers, and watch them all on the same app. AppleTV is getting closer to that, but still has a loooong way to go.
The tech is definitely already here. The issue is with the distributors.
It will continue to thrive if companies insist on packaging content into several streaming services and wrapping them under subscriptions, region locks, and platforms, and then proceed to ask for more money and limit its usability.
This is more of a symptom than anything else.
In the 00's was mostly due to distribution, now it's mostly fragmentation and subscription layers.
The Dutch firm Ecory was commissioned to research the impact of piracy for several months, eventually submitting a 304-page report to the EU in May 2015. The report concluded that: “In general, the results do not show robust statistical evidence of displacement of sales by online copyright infringements. That does not necessarily mean that piracy has no effect but only that the statistical analysis does not prove with sufficient reliability that there is an effect.”
It's inherently dishonest to go on and about how piracy hurts industries without taking a moment to point the enormous benefit it gave them.
There is absolutely, completely no way in hell the music and video industries would have their current sizes and audiences without piracy. Netflix and Spotify wouldn't have been made if it wasn't for piracy to begin with. What kind of insane madman would ever license material to these companies in a world with no piracy whatsoever? What kind of audience is there in the first place?
I don't, for a single one goddamned second, believe that the vast majority of musicians and film makers haven't resorted to pirated material, the cost to actually have a decent collection otherwise is preposterous, the cultural benefit of piracy is ginormous, it can hardly be put into words.
> Internet piracy isn’t ethically justifiable, but it is convenient.
I don't know. I used to pirate heavily and always said once I could afford to buy stuff I would buy stuff. Then I could afford to buy stuff so I bought stuff, I used Netflix, Amazon Prime, Spotify, etc. Then I started to lose things I bought. Until they make digital purchases an actual purchase then I choose to boycott them and pirate instead. Boycotting them and not enjoying things because of this would be cutting my face off to spite my face and hurt me more than the company with the unethical business model. But if I pirate it, it only hurts them.
Piracy has a better UI/UX than legal streaming. Once that scale tipped it's not coming back without major changes.
With piracy you can watch all your shows, no matter the network/streaming-service, on one "service", one app/ui, no ads, no tracking. You literally cannot pay for that level if you wanted to. That's absurd.
If there was a legal way to do what I listed above that cost $200/mo I'd probably pay it. But you know they'd start to screw it up in record time adding in ads and the like.
It's a loud wake-up call to the media industry. The high piracy rates reflect a public rebellion against restrictive access and high costs of content. This situation is less about breaking the law and more about demanding a fairer, more accessible media landscape. It's high time for a major overhaul of how we view copyright and content distribution in the digital age.
We have come back around to the reason that Netflix was so popular when it started. Too many walled gardens and exclusive content locked behind too high of a price.
We had cable, people hated it so they "cut the cable" and media companies just changed where that cable was plugged into homes. Now instead of cable/satellite services, it's just streaming. But the outcome is the same.
It's a mess. And as always, instead of looking for effective solutions, media is trying to guilt people into paying for their services.
Is it time for Netflix 2.0? If so, what does that look like now that every company is trying to sustain their own streaming service? Is it a small box that you attach to your TV that brings all of these disparate services together in one easy to use location?
Are we just seeing the long game of trying to get people to sign back up for cable and satellite?
> Now instead of cable/satellite services, it's just streaming. But the outcome is the same.
It's even worse. Instead of having everything in one place, we have to guess which streaming app has what we want, navigate to it, and use its proprietary interface to find the content. A major leap backwards in user experience.
Illegal streaming turning back is a sign that nowadays there are too many legal streaming services, and they cost too much. In Europe, you can spend several hundreds/month € and still non be able to view everything legally.
>"Digital video piracy is costing the US economy between $29.2 and $71 billion each year."
That is assuming that people would pay if forced to stop downloading. But what if people just quit watching the said content instead? Then should we make some laws to force people to buy content to save US economy between $29.2 and $71 billion each year?
Isn't there a kind of a difference between stealing a car and downloading a movie?
Anyway, legally obtained or illegally, it would be nice for people to binge watch content less. Get out with friends, get some fresh air, do something nice.
If people would pay for these the economy would grow by 1-2 Trillion! Sadly "4 in 10 US adults say they have no disposable income" and there are about half a million films. Say 1000 are worth watching depending on interests. Works out to about 0 per movie. They could also not watch any. A sensible goal if you ask me, unrealistic of course but we can afford to be ambitious with other peoples money.
They also wanted to read books, listen to music, read scientific publications.. preposterous! Who do these people think they are?
No verifiable sources cited, just large amounts of scary percentages.
If everybody is pirating, then everything will go away. We've heard this since cassette tapes, video tapes, decss, torrents, and we'll continue hearing it with new tech.
I say to the streaming companies and the content creators, stop bluffing. Shut it down since pirates are apparently chatting you billions.
Cash in your options, go to your private island retreat and never darken our door again. I have physical books, and walks are usually nice.
I pay a tax on all my hard drives for piracy. I try paying for official services when it’s doable (I haven’t pirated a song or a video game in years!). But the movie/tv industry do everything they can to make themselves inconvenient and frustrating. Screw ethics.
Well, the history of telephony started with a big public companies in each country and therefore the private companies started but if you have a friend with the number phone in company-foo and you have the number phone in company-bar. You can phone your friend and company-foo and company-bar do the economic accounts ( I don't know maybe it is a big data).
But the streaming platforms (netflix, disney...) are separate islands.
I think that the all content (films, tv series...) should in all platforms and if the user want to see a "disney film" in his netflix app, the netflix company do the economic balance/account with disney.
And the streaming platform war will be for good content for to avoid your user want to see other content from other platforms...because you as streaming company must paid to this content from other platform.
This is silly, it assumes people will purchase instead. I pirate stuff because I am bored and just want to watch something, my order of priorities are:
Pirate, not watch, purchase.
I agree with the arguments on fragmentation being an issue but I do wonder to what degree it's the content being produced. There's a reason why the recent South Park resonated with so many, and if you think it's because of bigotry you're not really getting it. People will hesitate when asked to pay money for a product they feel isn't genuine, regardless of how they view the world.
I really find it very misleading to report the piracy in terms of lost money. Because this always assumes that if no piracy exists, then 100% of people who did it will pay for the material otherwise. The argument goes along, this really hurts the economy by this amount. Which reminds me of the argument 'but think of the children' when talking about online privacy.
It would be interesting to check if piracy is back for pc gaming or just tv (haven't read the article yet) to verify what Gabe says (pretty sure it will)
It would be even more popular if the new generations were more tech savvy. Kids growing up with iphones do not have computers and a huge percentage that do, doesn't know how to use torrents, vpn, proxys etc.
My daughter at age eight or nine, all on her lonesome, worked out where she could stream episodes of Miraculous Ladybug online. Which then evolved to Brooklyn 99 as she got a bit older.
No subs, no sign up, I had no idea for a long time. She had no concept of what was legal, illegal or copyright, she just went a found what she wanted to watch.
wonder if this coincides with the Netflix promise to be the single platform to get all content failing. I'm on Netflix & Prime yet I still don't find the things I want to watch.
I also got Netflix and Prime. Recently, I wanted to rewatch House M.D. on Prime, but it's not available in my country anymore. I'm forced to use a VPN to enjoy content I am already paying for.
The winning formula is really simple: offer an unlimited catalog (emphasis on unlimited - including all studios and publishers) and bill monthly subscription by the hour: watch up to 24 hours a month commercial-free post-billed for $29, with additional ten hour blocks for $10. Why 24 hours? Because most TV seasons are ~12 episodes each now and there's 22 working days per month to allow for an hour of TV before bed. I would wager that most people would agree that ~$1/hour for entertainment is a fair price. The pricing model makes it easy to track how to compensate for a show's performance and scales with additional viewing. Unused time can be used to help recoup costs of unpopular productions, in the same way that cable bundling forces you to pay for shows you don't watch. Let people define caps per user on their account, both to protect against a surprise bill at the end of the month and as a parental control to ensure children don't watch too much TV.
It's not that hard! The industry just needs to get its shit together and set standards for opening up distribution.
To begin with, most streaming services don't have sufficient content to justify its existence. We've been paying for Netflix non-stop probably since 2015 but the rest are a joke. Outside of Netflix, in the last 5 years at home we've enjoyed maybe 5 shows/movies per year in all the other services combined.
Then they all do crap like not streaming 4K HDR movies when the movie is available in that format. All new movies for close to a decade have been released in that format since day one.
But even outside of streaming subscriptions they fuck with enthusiasts that want to pay for movies.
Stuff like iTunes not allowing you to watch the content you've paid for when moving to another country.
Physical media is also not free of guilt. I have probably over a hundred 4K Blurays and I stopped buying those because Amazon US won't ship them to my country anymore. Local Amazon sells the same discs sometimes at 2x the price. Also plenty of manufacturers have stopped producing 4K HDR players.
And these companies aren't happy will selling us media one time. They demand that we buy it in VHS... Then DVD... Then HDDVD, oh nope BLURay. Then 'streaming'. And our rights go down and down each iteration.
I also have stacks of movies in various formats. Again, even format shifting something like a Macrovision'ed VHS or ripping a DVD is a crime. So buying legit and format shifting is a crime? Cool, I'll just download and be a pirate.
In the context of the ongoing debate on media piracy, recent actions by major streaming companies have brought to light a critical ethical dilemma. These corporations, wielding considerable monopolistic power, have increasingly adopted practices that can be seen as coercive and unethical, compelling consumers to reconsider the moral justification of piracy.
1. Price Hikes Amidst Monopolistic Control: Major streaming services like Disney+, Hulu, and Netflix have recently raised their subscription prices significantly. This increase, occurring within a relatively short span, demonstrates a trend of exploiting consumer dependency on these platforms. The illusion of fair pricing is often shattered by the fact that cheaper tiers lack standard features, pushing consumers towards more expensive options.
2. Dilution of Ownership Rights: The Sony PlayStation incident, where over 1,300 purchased TV shows were removed from user libraries without refunds, starkly highlights the erosion of digital ownership rights. This action represents a flagrant disregard for consumer investment and trust, characterizing a monopolistic overreach that undermines the very principles of fair trade and respect for consumer rights.
3. Ad-Inundated Streaming Experiences: The proliferation of ad-supported streaming models, even on platforms that previously promised ad-free experiences, adds another layer of coercion. This shift towards ad-laden content not only disrupts the viewing experience but also subtly coerces consumers into higher-priced, ad-free tiers.
4. Preservation of Cultural Artifacts: Piracy, in this context, emerges as a necessary counter to these unethical practices. It serves as a tool for preserving media in its original form, unaltered by corporate censorship or modern-day ethical reinterpretation. This aspect of piracy is crucial for maintaining the integrity of historical and cultural works.
5. Economic and Technical Exploitation: The technical details, such as limited bit depth and lack of HD in cheaper streaming options, are often obscured from the average consumer. This tactic of exploiting consumer ignorance for profit further emphasizes the unethical nature of these corporate strategies.
In the face of such corporate tyranny, piracy becomes a form of ethical defiance. It is a stand against the exploitation and manipulation of consumer rights and choices. While the legal implications of piracy cannot be ignored, the moral compulsion to resist monopolistic coercion and preserve the integrity of media content presents a compelling counter-argument.
The issue of piracy transcends mere legal boundaries and delves into the realm of ethical resistance. It's a call for fairer practices, transparency, and respect for consumer rights in the face of corporate monopolies that prioritize profit over ethical considerations.
> Internet piracy isn’t ethically justifiable, but it is convenient.
Intellectual property isn't ethically justifiable, but it is convenient for some.
> Illegal downloading of copyrighted materials takes up 24% of the global bandwidth.
In many (most?) jurisdictions downloading material is not illegal. Have these been subtracted from this figure, or is this yet another lie? Given the history of this propaganda, I'm quite sure it's the latter.
> Illegal downloading of copyrighted materials takes up 24% of the global bandwidth.
Completely impossible. Think of how much bandwidth is used for HD streaming of twitch, netflix, ABC-XYZ +, and social media. Piracy making up even 5% of global bandwidth usage is being overly generous.
"What we're looking at is any type of infringing content. Film content, television, books, software, games, music. The only thing we're not looking at is pornography."
> Illegal downloading of copyrighted materials takes up 24% of the global bandwidth.
This seems shockingly high. I wonder how different this is geographically. I would think streaming via Netflix and others, YouTube, Twitch, etc would have shrunk illegal streaming to a much smaller percentage of the total.
I'm sure it varies a lot geographically. In the US, I expect the bulk is streaming services as you say. While I'm sure there are many outliers on a forum like this, most people subscribe to a few services and watch what's available. I know I do. I'll rarely look for something elsewhere if I can't easily get it via streaming (whether subscription or a la carte).
I have no particular insight into the global situation but certainly availability is patchier and incomes are often lower.
So let’s say it varies geographically and the majority is in developing nations where finances don’t allow for relative luxuries like streaming services so people disproportionately turn to torrents. I suspect this is accurate. In this instance, what’s the point of trying to lock down illegal streaming? There isn’t an opportunity cost being missed, and the people can’t afford to pay fines, so it seems like a no win situation. Let them be and maybe as those countries develop and people become wealthier they follow the same path as developed nations where most people pay for the ease of streaming.
Which links to a Los Angeles Times article [1] from 2013, but not the study. The Los Angeles Times article also lacks a link to the study quoted. According to Creative Future, the study came from NetNames [2].
I did find some other interesting [3] articles [4] published on the Creative Future site.
The NetNames site is no longer active however it was archived [5], the full report is missing. This is infuriating. If the study cannot be read, it might as well not exist.
I found a Torrent Freak article from 2013 [6] with more details.
Probably better wording is “downloading of illegally obtained content”? Even if in a specific jurisdiction it is not illegal - someone in a jurisdiction where it is illegal bought or rented and _ripped_ that DVD (figuratively speaking).
> "We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem. If a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24 x 7, purchasable from the convenience of your personal computer, and the legal provider says the product is region-locked, will come to your country 3 months after the US release, and can only be purchased at a brick and mortar store, then the pirate's service is more valuable."