this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2023
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Piracy never went anywhere, "baby"
For our generation, sure, but there’s an entire generation of internet users that have never known a world without streaming services, and never got in to physical media, archived media, or piracy. A lot of them grew up with mobile devices only and hardly ever used desktop or laptop computers.
I was talking to some of my younger coworkers about music the other day. I mentioned something about the hundreds of gigabytes of music, all in FLAC, ALAC, and high quality mp3, and the question I got was “why? Why not just use spotify/Apple Music?” Well what happens when music from your favorite artist gets taken down because it wasn’t profitable? What happens when your favorite show gets cancelled and pulled because it wasn’t profitable?
So much data would have been flat out gone without piracy.
Reminds me of the diagram Techdirt made a couple of years ago over available books on Amazon based on year written. There was giant dip at the point where copyright kicks in that only goes up again close to the current year.
Copyright on the scale of lifetime + 75 years only helps the publishers of the most popular creators. Everyone else get screwed over. Including the creators.
https://www.techdirt.com/2012/04/03/why-missing-20th-century-books-is-even-worse-than-it-seems/
That’s a great article, I strongly agree.
I feel like copyright hurts competition and creativity by letting publishers and studios put out a relatively small number of successful works, and then ride that success for years.
If copyright terms were much shorter with no provision for renewal, it would spur a lot of creativity and competition between studios and publishers because they would effectively be forced to keep coming out with new, high quality content in order to stay relevant.
Yes, I agree with you. A suggestion I've might have read on Techdirt is to limit copyright to 5 years with a one time option to extend it for 5 years. Most works lose profitability within 5 years so the only ones impacted would be the most successful and the companies. I'm totally ok with that.
Just imagine what public libraries and streaming sites like Netflix could/would look like if anything from ten years back would be free to share.
I reached a point in my late 20s where I had enough money coming in and there were only a few streaming services where I decided to minimise my piracy if I could conveniently access something legally to make up for all the piracy I did as a teen. Seven years later and inflations huge, my pay hasn't kept pace and every tom, dick and Harry have their own service now. So it's been back to the high seas for me.
This dilution of content is really the issue. If Netflix still had the movies I want to watch, I'd just use it. Netflix is easier than piracy.
But Netflix doesn't ever have what I want to watch anymore. Now those movies are scattered across half a dozen other services that each cost $15/month. It's a pain to figure out what's streaming where and if it will cost me anything extra on top of my monthly dues. As Gabe Newell said, it's a service problem.
Piracy gets you more centralized access to more content for free. If you're behind a VPN or use a private tracker (or both) it's safe. So why spend all my money on Netflix and Hulu and Prime and Disney and Max and whatever else just to have a fifty/fifty chance that one of them might be streaming the movie I want to watch?
For someone hasn't pirated since Limewire was a thing can you walk me through the best way to do so?
Sucks about Willow my wife liked that movie and I had Carter queue to watch. Now can't watch it.
So any help I have already gone back to physical dvds but I like to access and make copies of digital stuff as well.
Get a VPN and qBittorrent and visit 1337x.to. That should do for 85-90% of what you are looking for.