This feels a little sensationalized. This is just how dmca work. Party 1 files a notice, party 2 files a counter notice, party 1 either puts up or shuts up. The article makes it sound like github is picking sides, where really they are just not getting in the middle of the fight.
This is far from how it should work. The MPAA needed to certify a good faith belief the code was infringing. There is no reasonable way they could believe that the code itself was infringing on their copyrights.
The fact they had no concern at all filing a frivolous take-down request shows how broken the DMCA checks and balances are. This is a long standing problem [1]
I don’t agree with what the MPAA did, but they didn’t claim the code was infringing on their rights. They claimed the code facilitated infringement, which is also not allowed under the DMCA.
It’s _arguably_ not allowed by the DMCA, but outside the scope of the notice-and-takedown provisions which only provide for takedown of specific infringing works. Statutory infringements outside of that very narrow scope would require a traditional lawsuit with actual court oversight.
MPAA is not stupid and they knowingly abused the process in this case because they wanted to put Microsoft in a tight situation and gauge their response. Of course it went exactly as planned with Microsoft rolling over like every other tech company that won’t stand up for its users’ rights.
This is _exactly_ why we need decentralized P2P tech btw.
> Moreover, the Project in question hosts software that is distributed and used to infringe on the MPA Member Studios’ copyrights. See Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios, Inc. v. Grokster Ltd., 545 U.S. 913, 940 n.13 (2005) (‘the distribution of a product can itself give rise to liability where evidence shows that the distributor intended and encouraged the product to be used to infringe’)
I agree though, they went around the courts with a DMCA takedown, and should’ve sued.
The fact that the software could be used for infringement is irrelevant because the software itself is not infringing (someone else brought up web browsers as another example of this).
The MPAA are legally savvy enough to know this was an abuse of process. If any DMCA reforms are needed, top of my list would be removing takedown privileges from copyright holders that abuse it.
I wonder if you had say said same with a website that does not ban child porn or somehow encouraged paedophilia or let users discuss black lynching in public forum. I know they are extreme examples but sometimes the blanket statement like 'software itself is not infringing' should be used with more caution.
In popcorn time's I support it to be back but this does not mean I support fully uncensored net.
If laws are regularly abused for extraneous purposes then we no longer live in a society with rule of law. Armed gangs are replaced by teams of lawyers but the effect is the same.
There may be value in taking down tools used to aid copyright but if that is a desired outcome congress should pass a law permitting it.
It’s true, this was never a valid DMCA complaint in the first place. The fact that a company with the resources of Microsoft went along with it unquestioningly shows exactly what we can expect from their “benevolent stewardship” of all the developer resources they’ve recently acquired. I’ve already started moving my projects off of Github and will no longer use it outside of an employment context.
I agree, the original take down request was inappropriate (although i've heard of much worse abuses). I think everything after that point though was pretty standard, and in particular github's behaviour in all this wss very standard.
The most puzzling thing is they already beat piracy with netflix but now they are trying to kill the convenience by splitting content over 20 platforms causing piracy to come back.
Beating piracy isn't the goal, maximizing profit is.
Netflix was giving the industry what... 10 dollars per family? They think they can get more than that by splitting into 20 different platforms. They're probably right.
They definitely didn’t beat piracy with Netflix, I’m not even sure they slowed it down much.
Netflix in 2020 is an entirely different service than it was in 2011 back when their library was full of major titles.
The reality is that the owners of content want their own distribution platforms, maybe because they saw what Apple did to the music industry via iTunes, but I’m not sure.
> Netflix in 2020 is an entirely different service than it was in 2011
so the content creation companies shot themselves in the foot by pulling their content to try to own the distribution platform (because it would theoretically give 'em more profits vs sharing it with netflix).
But consumers saw value in netflix because the large library of content to be had for around $10 price point - this beats piracy of $0 for unlimited content. Now, for the same level of content as before, you'd have to pay for a half-dozen or so subscription services - likely adding up to 60-90 dollars per month. Piracy is starting to look good again for most people.
> so the content creation companies shot themselves in the foot
Analysts speculate that the market for streaming services will saturate eventually, but I’m not sure we’ve seen it yet. Disney’s stock is the only one I can see that doesn’t have a YTD gain, but that particular decline follows the the global market trends and Disney faces hard times with their parks these days. Bottom line is that these new platforms don’t seem to be hurting that much.
Large content owners saw the writing on the wall when they were negotiating their contracts with Netflix by adding termination clauses once Netflix viewership reached a certain point.
The consumers are really the only ones hurting at the moment IMO.
Music streaming services have almost completely killed music piracy. It only exists today as a way for serious torrenting enthusiasts to get lossless or obscure albums
indeed thats probably also one of the most important reasons why they went on funding their own shows, and I don't think that there is another company that tries to bootstrap regional quality shows like netflix. As setting up your own streaming platform becomes easier most of the advantage netflix would provide is maybe just easier service offering outside of the main region of the network and less legal burden
New seasons come out on Amazon Prime first, and only hit Netflix much later. Since the new season of The 100 is about to come out you're finally caught up on Netflix
> every time i sign up again I find it lacking tonnes of content.
This has nothing to do with Netflix though and everything to do with broadcasters buying rights in a region/country.
If ABC agreed to an exclusive license of Arrow to TV3 Australia, then Netflix cannot stream Arrow to Australia customers of Netflix. But can stream to New Zealand.
What these production companies need to do is stop being greedy, let a few services exist for competition, and allow licensing to 1 or more services.
As consumers we may need to buy 2-3 subscriptions, but production companies can pick and choose which services have their content by licensing to the highest bidder.
Unfortunately what we have is every production company trying to run their own service to get the maximum profits which means consumers are stuck buying 5+ services to watch all we want. And because of this, piracy will continue to exist.
You can defend netflix all you like. Its still a sub par experience to torrenting.
Stop trying to "fix" a working distribution network.
Start improving it. Legitimize the distribution, get rid of the scummy torrent sites, empower the people, and run ads directly in the content like they are already doing with product placement or self release with skipable ads.
No, its not the perfect, most effective profit wise, but that isnt the fucking point is it. Supplying the people with entertainment is. Artwork is. Culture is.
You can still make profit, nobody will complain, but if you start shitting on the fans you deserve to get whats comin.
Seriously, the industry had its entire distribution channel paid and developed for free, and they shit on it instead of embracing it.
Can you imagine if amazon was able to get people to deliver their products to eachother for free? You think theyd be upset?
Netflix is "TV, evolved" - including cable TV. It's not comparable to Spotify or iTunes ("CD, evolved"), which made music piracy almost irrelevant with their very comprehensive catalogs.
Netflix content beats many open TV channels in my area, at least in the fiction and documentary arenas. And like some TV/cable networks do, Netflix invests heavily in producing their own content. It's just a matter of time until they figure out how/if/when they will launch a TV-like continuous stream of content that includes news, weather, sports, gameshows, realities... And add more focus on "live" and sell differentiated content packages by user taste.
I'm lucky to live in a country with a wide public broadcasting network (Germany). So I'm pretty sure that if Netflix comes up with a linear stream, I won't come back anymore. That split of content killed it for me and at this point streaming or 1-click hosters work well enough for the selected content I need. For everything else I have our public broadcasting network.
If they implement some continuous streaming (a hunch of mine), it would be just another box in your Netflix home grid.
Click on it for autoplay to start and watch a bundled playlist of current (random) content or, if they decide to dig into it: news, weather, sports etc.
The problem is everyone is going to pick the one that has the most content and is most popular, so the competitors will all die unless they start making exclusivity deals.
I am not a big fan of "solve by regulating" but I feel this is a case where I would like it to work.
Just say that every content producer must license their work for a "reasonable" price which is connected to the actual viewership (we can do this with streaming).
Companies may litigate this into oblivion but more likely the majority of content would become available cross- distribution.
Don't cinemas work somewhat like this? You have chains owned by WB or whatever by they also show content from other content producers.
Monopolies are bad in generally free markets. Intellectual property and copyright are antithetical to markets. Copyright exists to grant (in the modern era thanks to Disney, permanent) monopolies to applicable works, thus divorcing them from the market. So you can't really frame a discussion on the behavior of rightsholders relative to markets when their "market" is manufactured by government and meant to keep their works monopoloized.
The real consideration in regards to copyright and market forces is how market forces right against copyright - the existence of tcp, bittorrent, popcorn time, the hundreds of websites streaming copyrighted material against the rightsholders will - they are all the actual market offering information without the monopolization aspect. Its the distortion in the intention because you aren't supposed to have options in procuring copyrighted works - the distribution channels were originally complicated and expensive enough that centralization was required to create copies and thus anyone violating copyright was targetable. The system becomes dysfunctional when millions of people are giving away copies for free, on demand, instantly, anywhere in the world via the Internet - or in the olden days, via CD or VHS rips. It was the advent of digitization of information that brought about the paradigm shift threatening the institution, not any one specific implementation of the concept.
But yea, monopoly is generally regarded as a bad thing in economics. Why is a huge segment of the economy then built around manufacturing artificial monopolies, primarily to the benefit of those with the means to enforce the terms of said monopolies - rarely an individual creator, often a fortune 500 company.
The problem is all of the competing products are almost identical in all the features and software departments. The only way they can compete is on content, but the platforms are only useful when they have most of what you want. The more platforms compete on content, the less useful they all get.
>The most puzzling thing is they already beat piracy with netflix
You expect them to hand their content over to a middle-man (who is also a competitor), when building a streaming service is trivial with lots of capital?
We were obviously heading in the direction of fragmented, a la carte services for a long time. I don't find having multiple services aggravating; I guess I'm in the minority.
They're just trying to justify illegal software. Like when people defended P2P file sharing as "but you can use it to download linux" or recently bitcoin as "but it's also great for transferring money internationally."
The way Popcorn Time is advertised makes it pretty clear:
>No restrictions. Watch any movie or TV show as many times as you want.
>Awesome catalogue. If the movie or TV show is out there, Popcorn Time will find the best version possible and start streaming it right away.
It's pretty clearly about piracy. That being said, it can obviously also be used to watch non-pirated movies, and the way things are going with Youtube at the moment (censoring various videos on non-copyright grounds) could actually make PT a great alternative.
No, I am a consultant software engineer (finance, simulations). Also a researcher, but I am not getting paid in bitcoins from my university... yet. There is a (relatively) small, but growing international Bitcoin services economy, without much of red tape and prohibitive regulations concerning hiring people globally.
If you work for e.g. Coinbase, you can opt in to be compensated in Bitcoin. If you are in the business of writing software for crypto exchanges (like myself), this is also kind of a default option.
For the record, War Thunder is using P2P to distribute software updates and has been doing that for years.
And most major Linux distributions do have torrents for their installation images.
Also more recently distributed technologies have been kinda morfing together with P2P, with PeerTube, IPFS, Fediverse and all the various cryptocurrencies.
So that we don't have to relies on a platform which is infamous for automatic ban anything it's automated system think inappropriate. Like now, if you utter the word coronavirus, you may get banned regardless of the content.
I think it's still quite far from having no legitimate uses:
The app is for watching movies. there are lots of movies that are legal to distribute this way for anybody. And people could have rights to copy specific films from other routes. Copyright terms (if they exist) vary by jurisdiction, some countries have eg 25 years from date of production for movies.
Popcorn Time != BitTorrent, though. The way Popcorn Time and other BT streaming clients does torrenting is pretty bad for the the overall swarm health — everyone is seeding and leeching the beginning but availability deteriorates the deeper you go. My BT client of choice, Transmission, explicitly rejected the idea of getting chunks sequentially (you have to patch the source yourself if you really want to do that). So, if you can, contribute to swarm health by downloading with a traditional client upfront. And seed to a reasonable ratio, of course.
Transmission does allow you to set a priority, so for multi episode series (or albums) you can get the first file and play it while the others are still downloading. But random chunks is fine after that.
With far more people's download speed being much higher than the data rate of the content, this matters far less. Sure, you are downloading some blocks from the start of the file, but you are also getting blocks from the middle and end of the file at the same time, which you can exchange with other users tit for tat.
Also, the benefits of tit for tat sharing to prevent Leachers are also less important - with more people having faster internet, there isnt anymore the "everyone wants to download far more than they can be bothered to upload" issue.
With the exception of popular torrents (where swarm health is usually a non-issue), most of the time download speed is limited by the number of seeders and their upload speeds, not the leechers’ download speeds. The problem arises when all leechers request the beginning of an old and/or obscure torrent from one or few leechers.
> there isnt anymore the "everyone wants to download far more than they can be bothered to upload" issue.
There’s the “people quit their BT client as soon as they finish their download” problem which faster internet doesn’t solve.
Are there any VPNs that support the throughput speeds many consumers have access to these days? I have my client set to a 10:1 ratio, but rarely will a file actually reach that because I don't want to leave my slow VPN online for that long degrading my performance for other online tasks.
You can use split tunnelling or linux network namespaces to keep the VPN running at all times, but with only your torrent client‘s network connection going through it.
Some VPN companies also provide apps with the feature built-in.
I've used commercial VPN with acceptable (think ~100Mbps) but not amazing throughput.
But for BT I just set up a secondary on-demand network interface on my Linux server specifically for OpenVPN (just need a shell script to add a couple ip(8) rules, and stick that shell script into the up command of ovpn config). Then I bind my transmission-daemon to that specific interface (bind-address-ipv4 option). This way all BT traffic goes through OpenVPN, but other traffic is not affected. Works for any OpenVPN provider.
> The problem arises when all leechers request the beginning of an old and/or obscure torrent from one or few leechers.
If the sending client prioritizes data to clients requesting rare blocks, that problem is solved. It will also give clients an incentive to download the rarest blocks first to keep the swarm healthy.
Why? It appears, in the essence, it's a video player that support streaming over the BitTorrent protocol. Do you also claims FTP server/client software has no legitimate use other than copyright infringement?
There are so many video streaming usage as everyone is now capable of capturing the video and uploading it live.
No, really, they have to wait for the counter notice or they are liable too. I’m sure MPAA would love to sue a billion dollar company and not just random people on the net.
As another commenter pointed out since it wasnt infringing directly (code wasn't infringing copyrighted code) it actually does not fall under that constraint.
Even if I'm wrong, this is a valid way to dos my repo. Like when it happens on YouTube people loose money right and that's some people's main income. This can be even worse.
How almost every service provider reacts to DMCA notices is by taking down the content ASAP, and if they receive a counter-notice, putting it back up after 2 weeks. They do not make any decisions on whether the content is actually infringing or not. By doing that, they make themselves liable if it actually is copyright-infringing material.
If you aren't okay with that, use a service provider in a jurisdiction not governed by DMCA laws, or run your own service provider and take on that liability yourself.
Funnily enough I was watching a YouTube video, or live stream, by popular artist Lost Frequencies in which he showed and explained how he remixed a song. Popcorn Time was prominently displayed in his Dock.
I had popcorn time installed for a while, but it kept running services in the background and spamming notifications, even when I killed them. After a few days of that I uninstalled it.
The mobile versions are a shitshow, they clearly have lower priority - probably because the main source of revenue for PT at the moment is the vpn contracts it tries to sell at every turn, which is really a desktop thing.
I noticed that too initially - the CPU usage was very high while the movie was playing. So I wrote a script to control the resources used by it. Haven't noticed the issue since so not sure if the latest version is "good" or it is the script.
P2P git is an interesting idea indeed. There is GitTorrent [1], but it appears to be mostly abandoned at the moment (for the last 5 years).
The idea is quite nice but I wish it wasn't based in NodeJS. I also don't like that it integrates BitCoin - personally I think it just motivates people to try and take over the project.
EDIT: There's also GitChain [2] which again seems abandoned (since 6 years).
I love git-ssb!
There's one caveat: if you want to version things bigger than 5MB, you'll need to change the maximum blob size of your ssb client.
Also, please be gentle with the instance linked above. If you're running patchwork and have git-ssb installed, it should be available on http://localhost:7718 instead, that's really the way to go.
Around 5MB seems a reasonable maximum size for git objects either way - I think that for larger objects, it should be coupled with some alternative remote for large objects. I haven't tried either, but git-annex seems to support IPFS[0] and there's also at least one implementation of IPFS for git-lfs[1].
Have you ever tried actually using IPFS for anything? It really doesn't live up to their marketing materials. The goals are sound and the marketing materials are great, but the implementation can barely hobble along.
Also, weird judgement. Going all NIH on URIs, and yes I've read the threads about their "reasons" and they're nonsense, it was entirely a distraction from the project's core functionality. Infrastructure-tier service with a canonical implementation in a language that's no good for writing libraries and too inefficient to be always-on in embedded and probably even a bit iffy on mobile (mind, I like Go).
Anyway, I'm not sure how any kind of p2p system like that's gonna work for the average person and become mainstream when most consumer devices run on battery and drop off the network constantly to save power. Yes there are gateways but that kinda defeats the purpose. Seems better suited as a datacenter tool than something to ship out to normal end users.
At any rate it's not designed for anonymity, so its utility as a piracy tool is limited unless you're on a private IPFS network, which requires server resources.
Git already is p2p. The whole centralized-git-through-github-or-whatnot is a fairly recent invention. Originally you'd pull directly from other developers repositories. The role of PR was fulfilled by emailing patchsets around.
All github does is provide convenience. If you want to use github in a peer-to-peer fashion all the tools are already there.
Stop inventing stories. How do I pull from developer's repo? Don't say every author will need to host some server with ssh. Imagine the rate at which unmaintained repos will become unavailable.
That also depended on the project. With the right ports forwarded on your home router, servers can pop up and down as required.
Mercurial had a single command for this, "hg serve", that would just pop up a webserver for sharing. It was extremely useful for me during university, and I've often considered it a key failing that git does not provide a similar command out of the box. As a result, the distributed nature of git is hidden from a lot of people.
For the record, the command to make git do what mercurial does with hg serve is "git daemon --reuseaddr --base-path=. --export-all --verbose --enable=receive-pack".
Obviously this is insecure and anyone who can establish a connection can push and pull from your repo, but if you're just jamming with some friends you don't need github.
You've got this the wrong way round. Someone hosts a mailing list and some "canonical" repo - e.g. Linus's Linux tree - authors post patches to the mailing list. If you want to see every patch ever submitted you subscribe to the mailing list, and your mail server holds a copy of them all. You can download archives of the mailing lists via public-inbox and suchlike. And when you want to work on it, you grab Linus's tree.
The vast majority of Linux developers don't have their own publicly-accessible repository that you can pull from - they push patches to the mailing list.
Various archives can host copies of the mailing lists (you can ask https://www.mail-archive.com to do so for you), and the git repository can obviously be mirrored anywhere anyone who can clone it likes. Congratulations, you now have a globally mirrored, decentralised development process where the canonical repo and any patches submitted never disappear.
You pull (or clone) by doing `git clone $path` where $path can be almost anything you want. A network path over NFS, a ssh path, and more. And if it's not supported, you can add support for more protocols, like IPFS, secure scuttlebutt and many more.
I see why people disagree with this, but it's a valid point IMO, if not on a technical level then on a socio-technical level. From the perspective of censorship, it's (close to) the worst idea to have one centralized... hub (hehe) to host code commons (like popcorn-time).
But instead having many small hand-maintained servers, the admin of each is responsible for what's hosted on it, and of which there is no registry, doesn't sound much better.
Very likely there would be a handful of effective central nodes in that network, but if you take down a couple of them, you end up with a situation where already-involved devs might still be able to navigate the landscape, but for a newcomer it might be really hard to find one of those nodes, or be sure it's one with the "right" revisions.
This is because Pagure stores not just code but also all the project metadata (issues, PRs, Wiki pages, etc.).¨
In comparison most other git forges, including the big ones (GitHub/GitLab) store all project metadata in a central database, so if you want to move or even backup/restore a project you need to do a complicated export/import process.
In comparison on Pagure you can just clone the repo and get all the project data with it. Then just put it on another Pagure instance - done.
Should not be hard to adapt this system to be backed by a distributed system from below.
Git already is p2p / decentralized, but I suspect you mean that you don't store all the files on your own system.
But that's where bittorrent comes in, they've solved that issue already.
A p2p bittorrent / magnet file index would work though, through Git (for an offline copy) or otherwise. I'm sure something like that already exists though, I've not been in the piracy world for a while now.
If you know who the author is, and assuming the author is not ready to revoke citizenship how is this going to solve it? DMCA (or whatever law your country has) is also applicable to IPFS.
One solution is hiding names from everything like say Pirate Bay/Silk Road but I would not trust anything like that to run in my machine. I wouldn't even download TPB app if it is going to be released. It would also make discovery very hard.
It would at least put some barriers to DMCA requests as they would have to sift through ISP logs which would take quite a bit time especially if you use a vpn.
I mean realistically speaking, only solution to DMCA is through lobbying but that is almost impossible for individuals to do. This is something that needs to be done through large tech companies but it seems they think laws like DMCA increases the regulatory burden on their competitors and hence don’t care.
The funny thing is that the MPAA are so clueless, they don’t even know popcorntime are their own worst enemies. They kept splitting out, rewriting from scratch, failing to establish a trusted way of distributing the app, then the latest releases have been so bad that people are abandoning it in droves - you can see the fallout on reddit. The ban was meant to DOS them for a few weeks, now that cinemas are shut and all eyes are on digital, but ended up being a big advertising campaign for PT. Good on the lawyers for getting paid to fail!
PT itself is a relatively banal app anyway, even if it gets nuked someone else will rewrite it. Napster begat Gnutella begat BitTorrent begat Popcorn, it will not end until the movie business gives consumers what they want: a cheap global service to watch anything anytime.
I also have another reason why I feel like download and off-line-only video is important:
Privacy.
Streaming services have increasingly terrifying and inescapable telemetry. Spotify, Netflix, Amazon, Google - all of them collect extremely telling things about us due to when we pause video, for how long, which bits we rewind back to, when we consume the content during the time, where (GPS-wise), how often we play them, the collective profiling of us based on what we download in general...and many other things we don't even know about.
After listening to Shoshana Zuboff's audiobook 'The Age of Surveillance Capitalism' - the most important book I have ever read on technology - I am very aware of this. The data companies don't want us to be aware of what they're doing to us.
I'm not condoning piracy, and I believe content creators should be fairly compensated for their hard work - but unless there's a convenient way to be able to consume content in my own open-source local software such as MPV, all offline, and in full privacy without being spied on, I refuse to legitimise the alternative.
I realise there's still blu-ray and DVD, but not always - many releases are web only, now. I'd even pay a premium more for such non-DRM content...your move, Hollywood.
It was never natural to have people watch and profile us when we're already paying money to watch personal entertainment, on this massive global scale.
> when we pause video, for how long, which bits we rewind back to, when we consume the content during the time, where (GPS-wise), how often we play them
is entirely hidden. What model gives that up, but keeps the identity of the video you're watching private?
Not at all. You share with an assortment of randoms that you're downloading a particular file (that they're also downloading) at a particular time. That's all. You don't tell them when you watched it, how many times, whether and when you paused it, or whether you fast forwarded the naughty bits or went back to re-watch them. It's far less intrusive.
And most importantly, those few randoms don't have a flood of other data being scraped from your phone, social media, credit card transactions etc. to cross-correlate your viewing with. They don't see that you paused the movie when the main character put on some Nikes and went online shopping for a pair of Nikes for yourself. They don't see that you have friends over. They don't see what brand of microwave popcorn you watch with your movies. They don't care.
I have some bad news for you. None of us will ever find out what you watched on Netflix. Netflix won’t share that data with anyone, nor will anyone serve Netflix a warrant to find out what.
But any peer on the torrent you downloaded knows your IP address. Content holders often do this, they monitor the IP addresses that download their shows and send the user a letter via their ISP to cease and desist.
Till when ? Because now they don't have (?) model to profit from it ? All streaming platforms are grabbing all remote control presses thoroughly. That's data first approach. Ask your favorite SMART TV too.
They'll share their data with the NSA when they come knocking, just like all the other large corporations. In fact, they probably already _are_ sharing it.
Judging from the stuff in the Afghanistan Papers link posted in a thread here the other day, there's already a huge group of major US(?) companies freely sharing intel with US intelligence agencies—the implication, in context, was that they'd either opened up access to some portion of their data on users/citizens for intel agencies to dig through whenever they want, or that they're actively looking for certain kinds of info then passing that along, not just that they respond to warrants—and that's considered common-enough knowledge that its existence wasn't redacted. Dunno who's included but I doubt none of the big tech companies are.
Yeah, because to get around pesky things like needing warrants signed by a judge they simply sign contracts with these companies who provide them with tons of info for a hefty fee. See: The C.I.A. and their fat ten year contract with WaPo.
Kids usually. I know I didn't have money to buy a VPN when I was in high school, but I wasn't going to let that stop me from watching the entire backlog of anime my friends were enjoying at the time. Luckily, that was a bit before the letter's started going out with more consistency.
Here's the threat model. A president of the united states calls up his friend in Netflix "Hey can I get a list of all my enemies in my admin, in congress, in courts and the military". Said friend says "sure thing I'll just run some sql queries for who watched movie x, y, z and hand you the results".
Now said president discovers that a few people he considered trustworthy seem to be secretly having qualms about his increasing powergrabs. He manufactures a few roadblocks in their careers and within a year and a half they have all been cleaned out.
With them gone he is able to go ever further and more brazen. One day he proclaims himself dictator, and all branches cheer and celebrate.
Wait, you mean to tell me that all those BitTorrent peers are now aware of my VPN IP address?? I should let my VPN provider know so that they can forward the DMCA complaints to me...
Tonight I wanted to watch Spider-Man: Far From Home with my kids. I have subscriptions to Netflix, Disney+, Amazon Prime, Criterion, Apple TV+ and PBS. Yet, my only option was to purchase it digitally via iTunes for $15. There was no rental option. It wasn’t available in Disney+ because I assume Sony holds the rights despite the rest of Marvel belonging to Disney. It’s only available for purchase and not rental because I assume: greed.
So I downloaded it off Usenet instead.
Edit: Starz apparently has distribution rights at the moment. 7 days free then $8.99/month. So I could’ve legally watched it for free by signing up via Apple and canceling. Sigh. This is exhausting Hollywood. Get your shit together.
I think Outlander might be one of its more popular series now. Based on a book series and brought to TV by Ronald D Moore who did Battlestar Galactica (which personally I am cautious about because the last season or 2 of BSG was not my favorite)
Speaking of “dafuq” streaming services, RDM has a new series on Apple TV+ called For All Mankind which is an alternate history of the space race. It starts a little slow, but it’s worth your time.
If I remember correctly, Moore had the whole thing planned out but then the studio truncated his timetable so he had to speed things up to get to the end which is why the last two seasons are not stellar.
Yes all of that and one another reason I cancelled my Netflix account for was - it just won't let me successfully hide/remove the content I disliked, didn't finish because I didn't find it good enough, didn't want to see again, and even the content I had actually finished watching! It was almost mocking me everywhere!
e.g. I explicitly disliked a show and anytime I'd open Netflix, for days/weeks, it be on top either a banner or one of the first in one or many categories. Felt almost like mocking :)
If your libraries is shallow (which anyway consisted of mostly r trite subpar content) it's your problem - don't hit me with your pathetic dark pattern. Their support kept giving robotic answers. It was outrageous.
In Canada it seems like it was possible to rent it on iTunes. That's so weird, that means that someone got some exclusive right on renting it?
JustWatch tell me that AMC on demands had it to rent for 5.99$, is it possible that you missed that? It could be them that got the exclusive right for it... that had to be expensive for sure if it's the case.
I tried to keep things legal for a year or two, but consistently ran into this problem.
I rarely watch whatever's on. I prefer to watch specific movies from a list of recommendations. This was simply impossible.
Sometimes I couldn't find the movies I wanted. Sometimes they weren't available in my country. Sometimes they weren't available in their original language, or with the right subtitles. Sometimes the streaming platform didn't like my hardware. Sometimes it didn't let me watch the movie over more than 24 hours.
Paying to watch movies felt like paying for making the experience more grating.
Piracy gives me any movie I desire in around 20 minutes. I get a file. I own this file for as long as I want. I can play that movie offline, put it on any device, share it with anyone, or transform it as I please. It's mine.
I don't think I'll be paying for streaming again. Movie tickets absolutely, but not streaming.
The thing that killed it for me was buying an Apple TV and then finding out half the content didn’t work because my TV didn’t support some particular fucked up combination of HDCP. I wasn’t about to buy a new TV just to get a copy protection upgrade so fuck ‘em. Torrents and a usb stick it is.
I'll say there's one (and only one) good thing about HDCP: if a source/sink is HDCP compliant then it's a good indicator that it's DisplayPort or HDMI-compliant.
Ever since the mid-2000s through to today there's a load of TVs, displays, etc on the market that claimed to be DP and HDMI compatible but failed on the edge-cases (e.g. pumping 4K@60Hz down a DisplayPort 1.2 pipe). In my experience the gear that was HDCP compliant tended to perform better (but by no means perfectly cough Philips...).
Compare that to the mess of compliance and functionality with SCART connectors in the 1990s. I had a TV with a true RGB SCART input and a bunch of devices claimed to offer RGB SCART output, yet didn't actually support it (I assume because few consumers knew how to take advantage of RGB SCART, given the default was Composite-over-SCART and at SDTV it looks good enough).
That's not really a good thing about HDCP at all. Not only that, I certainly have bad devices supporting HDCP.
In reality, HDCP causes issues with DisplayPort and HDMI link by being one of the weakest links (HDCP signalling is usually the problem in long or cheap cables). Any issue makes HDCP kill the connection and renegotiate content protection, which takes time where there is no content.
We still to this day have trouble with SCART-like features. It's just now called HDMI-CEC, and is very much a hit-or-miss scenario, even within the same brand. Case-in-point: I have an older Philips Android TV, where CEC in my setup works fine. The same setup does not work at all on a slightly newer iteration of Android TVs from Philips, despite both running a similar Android Oreo build.
----
Also note: The default for SCART was composite, with optional S-Video and RGB support, and very rarely, component (which quality-wise would be somewhere around RGB). S-Video was the common "quality" setting that "just worked", which is close enough to component (and thus RGB) in quality for the material of the time.
Plus, getting suboptimal image is not as bad as getting no image at all, or missing features. HDCP and CEC is arguably a huge downgrade from SCART in that regard.
> The thing that killed it for me was buying an Apple TV and then finding out half the content didn’t work because my TV didn’t support some particular fucked up combination of HDCP. I wasn’t about to buy a new TV just to get a copy protection upgrade so fuck ‘em.
There are certain adapters that do other things, but can also be used to strip HDCP.
It's often used as part of a setup to capture the HDMI output from Macs, since those sometimes have HDCP as well.
Why do you feel so indignant about something that doesn't effect you? If you want to pay for a dozen different streaming services, nobody is stopping you.
I am a little bit indignant because it does affect me. When a small number of people abuse the system it means the rest of us can't have nice things.
If there were not rampant piracy, I would not have to know what is DRM and all of its associated inconvenience, because it wouldn't have to be a thing.
Not that the current solution isn't broken -- I do pay for (nearly) a dozen different streaming services. But I can't help feeling that I'm subsidising your lawless, anti-social approach, and it doesn't seem exactly fair that you get the better experience.
You have to acknowledge that if everyone did like you, then the whole thing wouldn't be able to sustain itself. It only works because most people take the hit and play by the rules.
Yet if region locks and other nonsense didn't exist to begin with, piracy may never have had such a foothold. The history of commercial games and digital downloads is one of insane abusive behavior of consumers.
I still have a large list of games that I have legally bought but can't play because some manner of native drm or protection - having to practice piracy is the only way I can play those games.
Denuvo, the Sony rootkit, the finite number of installs that was a thing for a while, the list goes on.
>You have to acknowledge that if everyone did like you, then the whole thing wouldn't be able to sustain itself. It only works because most people take the hit and play by the rules.
Except there's no data proving that people pirating movies/music/... are not also paying the industry.
Anecdotally, the persons I know in the habit of pirating entertainments are also some of the biggest spenders I know on the same things.
So, it's entirely possible that if everyone did like him, the whole thing would sustain itself. And if you have something tending to prove the contrary, I'm quite curious.
DRM would be a thing even if piracy weren't, and despite piracy, DRM needn't be a thing. I buy music because music is sold without DRM, despite music being easier to pirate that movies (being a fraction of the size means it can be downloaded many times faster.)
Why would DRM be a thing even if piracy weren't? Because the companies that employ it are control freaks who, among other things, would like to sell people the same product numerous times.
> I do pay for (nearly) a dozen different streaming services.
This truly is a 'You' problem. Getting upset with other people because you choose to do that is senseless. It's doubly senseless to be upset about this since dozens of streaming services would be a thing even if piracy weren't. Dozens of streaming services are a thing because these companies are control freaks that want to reinvent Netflix rather than license their content to Netflix. They want complete control over how their media is promoted and distributed, they don't like delegating any of that control to another company. Bittorrent really has jackshit to do with dozens of streaming services existing. If anybody is to blame, it's the clueless pliant consumers that reward media companies for creating netflix clones.
I pay for Spotify, reluctantly. But it does have almost all the music I want. I also buy games on Gog, if they are not on Gog I use Steam (reluctantly).
I rarely pay for a movie bar a few cinema trips and blu-rays for something I really wanted to support . The reasons:
I want a well encoded DRM free file.
I don't want to be ripped off, or at least the "Steam Sale" model should be there so you can get it at a reasonable price a few months later.
I absolutely want the high quality download option. Steaming is fine for music. I'm confident I could find my Spotify playlists fairly easily elsewhere if I needed too (legally or otherwise). Maybe they are 500GB max.
I wouldn't be confident I could replace terabytes of my favorite movies quickly. I want those archived for myself without DRM.
I will pay when the product is better than a torrent site, it is possible when the lawyers and execs allow it to happen.
Piracy seems to have arisen mostly because the commercial options were really hard to work with -- and the subsequent forceful adoption of DRM didn't help either.
Consumers want convenience. I have convenience in the cinema so I pay for movies there quite often.
As for digital distribution, I don't feel confident in any platform. You basically pay to be severely inconvenienced. Plus what happens if you want to load up 10-20 movies on your laptop and go camping? Tough luck.
The movie industry should stop trying to sell us the same thing several times. If I paid for a cinema ticket once I should have the right to download that movie and have it stored offline forever.
Almost nobody who pirated movies (of those I spoke with) did so out of being cheap or poor. Almost everybody told me "I can't even figure out how I can download the movie I paid for" and just opted for torrenting.
Sure some people will do anything and everything to pirate. But I argue they are much less compared to those who are unhappy with the current streaming offerings.
Not parent, but as a consumer I see zero to no reason I should pay money and get service that is less convenient than an existing 'solution'. In other words, if I pay, I have expectations.
Because business always end up meeting client expectation. Sometimes they do it kicking and screaming like the music industry, but now you can pay only one streaming service and have all the music. The movie industry will have the same fate in the end.
>Why do you feel so entitled to such ultimate convenience?
Businesses are in the game of enticing customers. If your homeware store is so bad that double-digit percentages of the population choose to steal glasses and cutlery from local bars rather than shop at your store, you need to take a long hard look at your business and figure out what the fuck you're doing so wrong.
You can bitch and moan about how it's wrong for people to steal from the bars if you want, but that's reality denial. It will not get you more customers.
The only thing making this "difficult" are the lawyers and execs who want that bigger bonus, so I have no problem at all pirating to get DRM free content.
Any other way you look at it digital media distribution should be a couple of dollars and an http (or torrent if they want to skip the bandwidth costs) file transfer away.
To be fair, content holders want to make as much money as possible. Their attempts to restrict/distinguish/control are only because they (wrongly IMO) believe this will end up making them more money.
The consumer frequently says they want one service, but not I'm not sure that's accurate. At the very least they want a single platform through which to organize and view content (much like cable tv was, rather than swapping between Netflix, Prime, etc), but don't necessarily want monopolistic content producers. The future is effectively cable with everything on demand.
And frankly, just having an easy accessible way to rent any motion picture if it's not on a streaming platform. There's no reason for digital copies to be so inaccessible. Some things are literally only available on dvd/blue-ray or pirated.
> The consumer frequently says they want one service, but not I'm not sure that's accurate. … And frankly, just having an easy accessible way to rent any motion picture if it's not on a streaming platform.
Wouldn't whatever this "easy accessible way" is be the one service you're skeptical people want? I don't think anyone saying "I want one service" means "I hope to be locked in to one provider", but rather "I want one easy interface, and not to have to worry about surveying and paying for lots of siloed libraries."
> I don't think anyone saying "I want one service" means "I hope to be locked in to one provider"
It's a thin line, is what I'm warning.
> I want one easy interface
Definitely this.
We have various non-standardized interfaces currently for home entertainment with machines running their own enterprise software. The playstations, xboxes, apple TV, smart tvs, etc have their own mediocre ways of cobbling things and allowing you to rent / buy / stream.
Perhaps an open-source alternative is what's needed, but that's often so late to the game.
> Perhaps an open-source alternative is what's needed, but that's often so late to the game.
The problem is that the software part of it is comparatively easy; a perfect platform from the point of view of code, robustness, and useability means nothing unless you can get the rights-holders to agree to make their content available on it.
Is this actually a hurdle considering we can access all this content right from the browser? It could just be a container pointing to the content, I don't think it's necessitated that there be native launchers such that they aren't really "on" it.
> Is this actually a hurdle considering we can access all this content right from the browser?
Right, that's sort of what I mean—accessing it isn't the point. Once you've paid for and subscribed to every different streaming service today, and checked that there aren't a few more that have sprouted up overnight, then access is a solved problem, in the browser or prettified on the desktop. The hard part, and what I think people mean when they speak of wanting one service, is not having to curate, seek out, and pay for all those different streaming services in the first place.
Definitely worth a comparison to the audio streaming market...
My Spotify subscription is £9.99 and gives me access to unlimited music from all artists (within reason - it’s very unlikely I find something not on there).
I’m willing to pay more for a video subscription that gives me access to unlimited tv and movies.
But to get everything on streaming I have to buy:
- Amazon Subscription
- Netflix Subscription
- Apple TV subscription
- Disney+ Subscription
- Now TV
- TV licence (iPlayer)
And after I have subscribed to all of these, there are still loads of movies and TV shows not covered.
I would pay for one subscription that had the content mixed in. It would be better to have a single £25 contract and get everything rather than this crazy fragmentation where you pay for 80% of the content 4 times and have to get an additional subscription if there is one series you want to watch on a different service.
I want every distribution service to have every piece of content. Just like how Blockbuster and Hollywood Video both got all the VHS tapes so you could pretty much always find the same things at each. I don't want Netflix to have one set of content, Amazon to have another, Disney to have a third, etc, and need to pay for all the services. I want multiple competing distributors.
>I have subscriptions to Netflix, Disney+, Amazon Prime, Criterion, Apple TV+ and PBS
WOW. I had netflix once for a few days, I paid for netflix just to watch House MD, a week into netflix, they removed House MD from my region, I cancelled subscription and moved to PT. Never came back to netflix, I just no longer trust them, too much effort and too much legal complications. I can imagine paying for one portal, but more than two? That's more expensive and less user friendly then cable TV.
ok not trusting them seems a little much on that example, surely they didn't promise you that House MD would be on in your region in perpetuity? Although there are probably lots other reasons not to trust them.
Yeah, this really looks to me like someone still clinking to the long obsolete broadcast model, where you had no back channel to your customers from them to request what they want & to pay for it. And also broadcasts were regionally bound.
So you sold a license to a local broadcasting company to for a time window and number of runs for a show. Not more you can do with no back channel for customers to request individual shows and pay for them. By only granting one license per are you can enforce some scarcity and get your money & hopefully users liked it. Channels could the compete who gets the best time based licenses, who gets the new hot stuff first, etc.
Now here we are with a global network with basically any user being able to request any show and pay for it (or get a subscription for a channel carrying it) and yet the media companies still carry one like one had to win an auction to get one of the broadcast masters, drag in on top of a hill to broadcast it and then return it back to someone else to do the same thing.
It does seem perfectly enough to me.
I gave them my address, details, credit card details, started watching a show from episode 1, they did not warn me "hey looks like you're watching a tv show that will be removed from netflix in a week, don't waste your time here" and it didn't expiration date on it, it just disappeared.
How would you feel to rent a car, go halfway to destination, take a nap in a hotel, then you wake up , car has no wheels, because wheels you had couldn't be used on that specific road, and you weren't warned about it. Breach of trust? Waste of time? Disappointment?
I see your point, although they would have to implement that functionality of notifying people, it's probably not that high priority unfortunately. I think a reasonable thing would be to show "leaving soon" notices on shows that have less than a month to go.
They used to have that feature, they used to publicly list content expiration They stopped doing that because people would unsub, and there were groups and communities around tracking the status of shows
They [netflix] ended that about the same time they ended their Public API and starting becoming a "Media Company" instead of a tech company, this is also the point in time they became less consumer centrist.
I agree it was investor pressure, I 100% disagree they were "bleeding themselves dry"
The short term thinking of modern business to chancing as much quarterly growth has humanly possible long term health be damned was the investor pressure they were / are under.
This will short term thinking will be (and has been) the cause of major problems not just in netflix but many companies
I don't know, I had Netflix notify me a few months ago when we were watching Spongebob, that it was going to be removed in a couple of weeks time. It's still there though.
I have a running list of shows that I watch / watched that have been added and removed from Netflix and Prime over the years I have been a subscriber.
I run a local media server for things I have on BluRay or DVD, I used to archive shows I could also get on one of those 2 platforms but it became major hassle because they would remove and add the shows my family wants access to all the time... When I started tracking it, it was amazing how much churn there was on popular titles
If you stick around long enough you’ll see it pop back up. Shows that are sufficiently in demand get renegotiated every few years and move platforms.
My current frustration is stargate. It is not available digitally in my region in any legal way because mgm is trying to negotiate a buyout by apple and doesn’t want any streaming rights to get in the way. I wanted to show it to my son and my options are limited to ordering a physical disk for a one-off viewing, or piracy.
If you're in the United States, Stargate is available free on broadcast in many cities. I run across it frequently when flipping between the various western channels.
I used netflix, I liked their content (99% of what I watch are series, so I don’t care about movies). What made me finally cancel was their UX that they seem hellbent on making worse and worse.
1. No, I don’t want to get rewatch suggestions.
2. Yes, I’d like to have always the same thumbnail for the same show.
3. Yes, I’d like to tell you "Never show me this show again".
4. No, I don’t want any automatic screen movement.
A cherry on top would be having a toggle to only show me shows with English subs.
Looks like you prefer to incite people over contributing to any kind of intelligent discussion. But FWIW, I kinda need to use the netflix site to look for stuff to watch.
Yeah. The Disney+ and Apple TV+ subs are via free first-year promos at the moment and I have Amazon Prime for its other benefits. PBS is included with supporting my local station. Criterion has a long tail of old movies they own both streaming and physical rights distributions to. But yeah...
If your library has it, Kanopy is free and includes a fairly large rotating set of Criterion films. Also some popular movies (Ex Machina was on there last time I checked) and a lot of documentaries. Some mostly-terrible single-camera TV learning type programs. But overall it's a damn good selection. Limited number of views per month but you can watch at least one movie a week on it—may vary library to library, not sure how the payment structure works. You won't find Marvel movies on there but if you're into cinema it's worth the time to sign up, especially if you don't pay for Criterion or any of the other, specialized streaming services along those lines.
Imagine if there was some kind of central digital rights management system, that simply kept track of which shows and movies a consumer had purchased/leased the right to see, and then they got to legally see it from wherever they pleased, including bittorrent. Forcibly (by regulation I imagine) separating the "negotiating licensing deals with rights-holders" businesses from the "delivering video to the consumers" businesses. You could stick to whatever delivery platform you preferred, maybe get a marketplace to see the cheapest options to get to view the video you wanted if it wasn't already included in any of your current subscriptions.
We could have the opposite.
A system that just list in what streaming platform a specific movie/show can be found. In that way no private info will ever be leaked.
Google has this functionality in knowledge cards (if you are signed in, you can even tell it what you subscribe to), or https://justwatch.com is a non-Google service that does the same thing.
Personally as a Condition of copyright a person should be required to allow distribution of their work in a Fair and non-discriminatory way, there should not be a concept of "exclusive", a creator or publisher should put a price on the work, then anyone can distribute that work for that price
Try as I might, I cannot subscribe to cable internet without a TV package. So I'm shelling out over $100/mo to a monopoly for both. On top of that. I pay at least $50/mo for several additional streaming services. What is the monthly cost I would have to pay to get general access to all streaming content? Twice that much? Ten times as much?
I came to the same conclusion, I can "buy" a movie with Amazon Video Prime, but they're DRMed so technically I didn't own anything. Nothing is like you buy a DVD with these streaming services.
You can create rules to hide something by right-clicking on the page and choosing 'Block an element', or by adding a rule like justwatch.com##.consent-banner in your filter parameters.
Anyone know where such websites get their data? I'm looking for an API for Netflix that would let me list all movies that have specific subtitles available.
Netflix.com/browse/subtitles only shows a limited amount of movies.
It's even worse if you watch stuff that's not popular. Hollywood is not really my thing so I usually watch more arthouse or vintage movies. Eg. 60's French or Italian cinema, or 80's/90's Asian cinema. Not only are these simply not available on most streaming/rental platforms, torrents can be incredibly hard to find without access to a private tracker. And even if I can find a public torrent it usually doesn't have many seeds.
It's really quite saddening to me that some classic
cinema is essentially dead, completely inaccessible.
I eventually found Mubi, which is a relatively cheap arthouse movie streaming/rental service. So at least I have that for now. Until they go out of business because they're not popular enough.
A friend of mine is their marketing manager, they are doing ok. The long tail is really long ;) and services like Mubi have a pretty good (and often wealthy) niche to get money from.
At lest the German version that I get to see. I want to know how much that costs but it only offers me a 7days free subscription. Even when I go to the gift option it asks me to sign in...this is terrible.
Yes, I get that too. I didn't see that because I didn't click that "start free trial version" button because it's not what I wanted to do and actually it's not even what you get when you click that button.
I disagree. If you're interested in the product and want to give it a try because you know you get a free trial, that's exactly what you're going to do. It doesn't seem bad at all to me.
60's French or Italian cinema, or 80's/90's Asian cinema
It doesn't even have to be something as niche as that. Even popular productions can be impossible to watch if the rights holders aren't interested.
Try to find 77 Sunset Strip. It was a massively popular television series that ran for years on TV. It simply doesn't exist anymore. Not on broadcast, cable, streaming, DVD, or any other platform. You can't even torrent it.
I have a relative who lives off the grid. He has this massive collection of thrift store VHS tapes that he watches. I'm so envious every time I see it. So much quality material that simply cannot be watched anymore by any means because they never made the transition to digital.
You sure? Seems to be around on torrent sites these days. (At least, most of it.)
But yes, it's frustrating that there's media out there with no legal way to watch it. At least, not unless you're lucky enough to stumble upon a secondhand physical copy.
Yup, even Evangelion was like that for many years, and so too a lot of British dramas. Even recent hits like Deutschland 83 and Utopia were missing from American market for years.
I was recently rewatching a popular show from the 00's on either Netflix or prime, I was 1/2 through the show when one day I woke up to find it completely gone from all services i am member of...
Guess what, it does not just disappear from my Plex/Emby server...
Online stream services was suppose to resolve the CableTV problem of paying for 1000 channels to watch the 5 you want.
Now Every network, every media company, every one is creating their own streaming service with all of their content "exclusive" so I would need to sign up for like 20+ services to get access to about 60% of the content that I want to watch as the other 40% is simply not on any streaming service at all it is either too new or too old
Justwatch.com has more than 85 Streaming Services in their database... that is crazy
This analogy fails on every level. There are points to be made against pirating, you made zero of them. Chocolate bars are consumed and digested, digital media is not,it can be resold, rented infinitely.
There is also the point GP may have already seen the movie in theaters, why should he have to pay to watch it again. Also gp wanted to rent the movie, not purchase it,and on top of that has multiple streaming services he is subscribed to, none of which offered the movie.
People are tired of having to hunt down what they want to watch, and many would happily pay for one service that had the full catalogaavailable regardless of region. Until this happens the MPAA will never win by greed and shooting themselves in the foot.
When the movies I want to watch are not available I just don't watch them. Movies are a luxury, it's not like steeling bread to free your starving family.
And, yes, I would download that chocolate bar. Especially if i was already paying three different services to to deliver chocolate bars to me on demand.
Then you have chosen to exclude yourself from watching literally hundreds of thousands of hours of quality entertainment that didn't make it to streaming and never will.
The main problem with software development is assuming that the leaky abstractions we are using is reality.
>So I stole it instead.
Is a leaky abstraction.
Reality would be (in a sci fi universe): "So I brought out my trusty replicator and made a molecularly identical copy of it, leaving the original behind for whoever wanted to buy it."
I think a closer analogy would be 'so I made that chocolate bar by hand using a leaked trade-secret recipe I found on the internet, and even drew the chocolate company's copyrighted logo on the wrapper I made!'
Yesterday I wanted to buy a specific brand of chocolate.
It wasn't sold in any of the stores I usually go to and already pay a considerable subscription cost for.
It was only sold in some other store for 3 times the price chocolate usually goes for.
That store also refused to just sell me the chocolate, they required that I eat it inside of their store under their watchful gaze to make sure I wasn't sharing it with anyone that didn't pay.
They also made sure I ate it on a plate and using a spoon and definitely didn't touch it with my hands.
It's only available at this store under these conditions because I assume greed.
So I used my powers of PsychoKinesis to create an atom-for-atom clone of the chocolate for sale so I could eat it at my convenience.
Then the police arrested me because I violated Nestle's ownership of their recipe for making chocolate.
+100 upvotes.
Just buying Nestle's "raw chocolate mix", melting it, putting it into trays and then letting it harden in the fridge is too hard?
Thanks to MPAA taking out popcorn in the last couple of days, I discovered in the HN post the next big and marvellous torrent thing : https://www.stremio.com/
Its like PT on steroids with add-ons.
The only caveat is taking 5 additional minutes to install add-ons (TPB+ can be your first choice to get you going)
There is one that list IMDB TOP 250, in order, ready to stream
I have Netflix and Disney+ just to buy moral credit; but since ~1y torrent at will again. Thank you MPAA for enlightening me
Actually it seems like this has changed since last I checked it.
"IMPORTANT: We do not collect any history or logs of what addons/sources you use for streaming! Furthermore, if you login as a Guest User, no personal data will be collected whatsoever." - https://web.archive.org/web/20200514142904/https://www.strem... (Their own privacy page doesn't load for me)
> What a fine technically correct and utterly useless distinction
It's not a useless distinction though. One can argue that stealing is bad because when I steal your car, you don't have access to your car anymore. If I were to copy your car I wouldn't harm you.
That doesn't mean it's okay to illegally copy something, but comparing it to theft is unhelpful at best and misleading at worst.
Clearly words don’t have meaning to you if you’re happy to reword what they said like that. Digital piracy is not and never has been theft. No one has been deprived of their property. It’s illegal, yes, and you can argue about the ethics surrounding it all you like - but the fact remains, stealing a CD and downloading an album rip are materially different things.
Speaking of CDs: the music industry (maybe RIAA was involved, I don’t know) seems to have figured out digital content delivery. I’ve got exactly one subscription for music: Spotify. I can get all the music I want to listen to with this, more than I could ever get when I used BitTorrent (public trackers were sometimes limited, and seeding on ADSL was hard). If they were to raise the price, I’d still use it. There are issues with how artists are remunerated for their work, but the problem of distribution is basically solved. Why can’t the film industry do this?
That's not a good analogy either. Apartment is a physical, limited resource, using it denies it to its owner and deteriorates its condition. Digital copy shares none of the properties with a physical resource.
Revenue from a purchase that I'm not going to make is non-existent. It can't be lost or gained.
Yhis is just a service that fills yet another gap from all this fragmentation, but in a way it's better than some media company having a monopoly on anything we can watch.
Unfortunately, on the Canadian JustWatch, I find the answer is frequently 'this is totally unavailable for you to legally view or purchase digitally in Canada', at which point I end up pirating it.
Netflix was great when it first came out, but as the providers fragment into their own streaming services it's killing the model. I'm not interested in paying >$100/mo cable-tv-channel-package-style, at this point I'd rather drop that cash on a VPN and seedbox and still have $80 left over.
> [...] it will not end until the movie business gives consumers what they want: a cheap global service to watch anything anytime.
I would happily pay something like $30 or even $50 per month if I would get access to everything anytime. But then again that's probably because right now I pay around $15 per service that only give me ~5% of the total content each.
Let me do a back of envelope calculation. This source [1] claims that the average production cost of a Hollywood movie has risen to $40 million. This is based on 5713 movies produced between 1999-2020, which is about 285 movies/year. Let's double that for fun and figure out what happens if you hit 500 million subscribers worldwide. 600 movies *40m/movie /500m subscribers = $48 /subscriber every year.
So presumably, only $4 dollars a month is more than enough to cover the cost of producing all Hollywood movies - ignore of course, all other sources of revenue such as cinema tickets and product placement etc.
Is marketing and distribution online really 9x the cost of producing the movie itself?
But how else are movie executives supposed to afford cocaine?
Jokes aside, this is a very interesting calculation - it seems the issue with a system like this would be the monopoly and centralization, as the numbers themselves stack up quite ok.
> Major Hollywood films often make 3x or more their budget in profit.
Other movies will balance this out though by making a loss - that's the business model. The interesting thing would be the average profit margin across all films at a studio or the industry.
Well yes, because they get creative with the accounting and those movies that hit $500+ million suddenly turn zero profit come time to pay taxes while some B or C film that costs a few paltry million at most to make and shovel right onto streaming services and net them $90 mil tops are what they pay taxes on, because they made a "profit".
I don't know about Hollywood movies, but for TV shows that would require the makers buying a perpetual license for anything they use in the show. That would probably make it too expensive to make something anyone would actually want to watch. Shows would have to have no cultural references (eg a pop song) in them at all.
More likely, they would do what Netflix is doing when faced with the same problem (time-limited licenses): they would commission more original music from cheaper, less-known (and likely younger) artists.
Honestly, I can survive the thought of not having a Bowie song in every other production.
Note: This is the company that now owns NPM. You can/should expect the same take-down standards to apply to code hosted there.
If you weren't already, I'd strongly encourage having some kind of caching proxy between you and the NPM repositories, just to ensure that some kind of takedown action won't screw up your builds.
The risk is low for most dependencies. They have experienced the left-pad drama. I would rather have to fix my dependencies and have broken builds for a short while than having to maintain a npm cache.
It makes sense. If GitHub ever became like YouTube instead of a “dumb pipe” there would be a mass exodus. Right now they hold canonical copies of the law in some places [0] and are owned by Microsoft so most people (me included) are ready to flip out if they do something awful.
I always find it interesting that inconvenience is seen as a justification for stealing. Although I did this myself for many years, so I guess I do get it after all. However, I think now in the age of Netflix and Hulu, I can get the majority of what I want at a reasonable price.
I think calling copyright infringement stealing is a hyperbole. They are very different things. Sometimes it's more than an inconvenience, though. At the present moment in time, I have no way to legally watch all but 3 Rick and Morty's episodes from the latest season (episodes 6, 7 and 8). And that's a brand new show. Don't get me started on older movies/tv shows.
We have the technology to allow everyone to have access to any film produced that we still have available in some format, but the distributors/copyright holders just can't organise themselves to make this happen, but instead give us a broken experience. I see projects like popcorn time pushing the boundaries a little bit, trying to make the problem evident.
I, for one, would like to see the copyright law reviewed. It could require you to pay part of the profits from the derivative work to copyright holders, but not give the copyright holder the power to prevent you from distributing it, for instance. That could would allow netflix, apple tv, etc to have pretty much whatever they wanted in their collection.
How do you figure you're entitled to watch everything that's ever been released? There's no precedent for that. Even taping with a VCR was in the gray area. You had to buy every movie individually, and that was really just a personal viewing license.
How do you figure that media companies are entitled to wield the power of the state in a way that doesn't create an institution of intellectual property that makes the world better for everyone?
It's not the power of the state, it's the power of a private entertainment business. You could choose to only watch open/free media like many of us do with software. It's out there.
> in a way that doesn't create an institution of intellectual property that makes the world better for everyone?
That question is loaded with your opinion (in particular the opinion I was suggesting is baseless) and so isn't really an answer at all... you want the world your way, I'm asking, beyond your opinion that it's "better for everyone" (ignoring artists, I guess), why you seem to think there's an issue of right/wrong here.
But you can't just ignore the reason... and "the state" created ways to protect intellectual property (at least in some significant part if not entirely) because creators wanted it. You can't ignore the fact that most creators are in favor of the general idea of copyright.
I didn't say you shouldn't pay for it. My suggestion was to compensate the copyright holder, just reduce their power over their creation. Currently, you need the copyright holder to agree upon you releasing their work. It doesn't need to be like that. The copyright holder can still be compensated even if they can't stop you from publishing their stuff.
> It doesn't need to be like that. The copyright holder can still be compensated even if they can't stop you from publishing their stuff.
But on your terms instead of theirs? Why would you want to reduce my power of my creation? Won't that have a chilling effect on what I produce? Can't I charge whatever price I see fit for my own work?
If I were a chef, and it were possible for you to duplicate food, would you apply the same reasoning to my infinitely duplicated meals? I should be paid, but have no leverage myself in how / how much?
Edit: and let's say I have a valid reason for not wanting to cook for you, in particular; that choice also should be taken away from me? How do you see the role of artists in our society? Assembly line workers, churning out art for mass consumption?
It's not my terms vs their terms. The terms are ours. We, as a society, decided that creators have full monopolistic power over their creation for a certain number of years. It doesn't need to be that way, though. Society can weigh the pros and cons and decide.
I don't pretend to have figured everything out, but the rate publishers pay creators doesn't need to be fixed. As long as exclusivity contracts are not allowed (including self publishing). I think we should be experimenting, though. If the rules change and the end result is that there's less content (or of lower quality), then it could be a justification to go back to the old system. We won't know if we don't try.
Taking your food example. If we had a way to duplicate food for free, it would suck if anyone is starving or having to eat the same thing everyday because of our laws. We have the power to losslessly copy data now, we should be taking advantage of it rather than outlawing it.
I disagree that it's hyperbole, but I can understand your argument. And it is debatable whether downloading through unauthorized channels is actually taking anything from the original creator.
However, I don't think content creators have an obligation to make their content universally available. I do feel as though I should limit myself to whatever avenues of distribution the creator has decided on. If that means I can't access the content at all, so be it.
I think the same about Sci-Hub although it's easy for me to say since I'm fortunate enough to be employed by an institution that gives me access to the vast majority of articles I would want anyway.
I can t find everything that I want. But what I can't find, I just don't watch. I personally don't think the unavailability of a legal avenue to access content makes downloading it illegally morally acceptable.
I think a system that willingly renders something scarce for profit, profit that doesn't reach the actual creator, more morally reprehensible than the people forced out of legal avenues to scarce goods. Just my personal thoughts.
I don't get why people would use something like popcorntime which by using you are almost guaranteed a lovely letter from your ISP (especially Comcast) when there are numerous movies sites you can go to cough cineb cough and watch whatever you want through a browser and not BitTorrent. It's the BitTorrent aspect of popcorntime that gets you flagged. Why take the risk using it?
Ah yes, those "nasty" emails saying they can cut my service that I've been receiving weekly for about over 10 years now. They have your browsing history too, you know. It's not like you're not leaving a trail watching movies on pirate websites. I don't use popcorntime, but use bittorrent quite a bit. My guess on why they haven't cut my service is possibly that I live in an area with quite a few ISP's, so they know I'll just go to a competitor and they'd rather just send me automated form emails to claim they "did something" and keep the cash.
I used to help out a video rental store, which closed this month. I made them a mail-order rental catalogue (https://rent.leosvideos.ca/) and looked into this whole fiasco.
When you buy a DVD, you can rent it to others without a license. Physical ownership.
When you buy a digital file, you're not allowed to rent it out to others without a license. Digital non-ownership. But you have the bits - that's physical ownership.
People want "one place to rent movies" but that will never work. They'd be a middleman monopoly between you and the studios - and middleman monopolies always turn out bad.
In my opinion, there is a "free market" system that the invisible hand wants, which is a digital analogue of what we had with physical distribution, that reconciles the fact that a digital file really is a (virtual) physical object (on a hard drive), and nothing else will work:
You can rent your own digital files to one person at a time via streaming.
Result: There would be multiple online streaming rental stores that have huge catalogues of whatever you want.
Speculation: Everyone would just use those. Studios would raise the prices for digital files to $10k+ because they know it will be rented out. The total sales of units would amount to the high water mark of the number of people who want to watch a file at the same time.
We'd have a rich market where there are multiple players in each layer.
> You can rent your own digital files to one person at a time via streaming.
This can never happen but only simulated, up to a point. Copying physical objects requires manufacture work, copying data is essentially free if you neglect the transmission costs. Whatever paradigm digital ownership adopts will not resemble the physical world renting mechanism.
I used your sentence as a straw-man, please forgive me. :)
I'd say the unit cost of running a proper streaming-rental service is about the same as burning a copy of a DVD (20 cents per movie). There's way more to it than just bandwidth.
Sure you could still pirate (just like you could copy DVDs) but if the path of least resistance (factoring in quality, legal and moral costs) is to just rent it legitimately then that's what people would do. Video stores could have just copied DVDs and the studios were very afraid of DVD-Rs when they came out, but that didn't pan out because it's obviously illegal and immoral.
There was a company in California in the early days that had actual people putting actual DVDs into actual DVD players that would stream on demand across the internet, but they folded when they got a legal threat. It might be legally OK - I don't think it's ever been tested in court.
So, given how very p2p git is and all, where are all the hackers here willing to stick out their neck and actually share urls where a user would find popcorn-app now?
^-- that's a very sarcastic way to say: yes, git the protocol may be decentralized, but git the (distribution) ecosystem is not and was not ever really censorship resistant beyond "I can keep what I have and share it in a small circle"
The funny thing about the streaming wars is that the music services somehow figured it out. I can pay for Google Play / Spotify / Apple Music and get literally all the music, for a single fee, from the same place. No content appearing/disappearing, no regional BS, no outrageous fees, it just works. Music piracy has basically died over the last few years cause of this -- I can't remember the last time I wanted to listen to something that I had to pirate.
I generally agree though I will say that platform exclusive music still exists. I’ve seen this primarily with hip hop, especially when Tidal was trying to break into the streaming scene. Apple Music also occasionally has platform exclusives. Usually the way I’ve seen it work though is that these new releases are initially exclusives for something like one month and then become more widely available.
Apple happened. When iTunes was new, the music industry was more than happy to give up digital distribution, because they were more interested in selling discs, and any revenue they captures from Apple was extra. The movie industry saw what Apple did to music and so movie licensing and distribution became an entrenched mess.
It matters as the total budget of a movie needs to be recouped. The vast majority of albums are likely made using a few thousand dollars [0], if there isn't a break-even the artists potentially have other avenues of making money such as gigs/concerts if not making the limelight in the future.
Movies such as that of the Mission Impossible series and the Avengers series cost $150M-$350M per movie to make [1] [2], without a theatrical release and/or a temporary pay-per-view model via Apple Movies or Amazon Prime (or most of the world being on a $20-30+/month Netflix, Disney Plus, etc. subscription, which is not the case yet), there wouldn't be much interest in financing such movies.
One significant difference is the sharp decline in value per watch/listen. Your favorite songs in your music library probably have hundreds of listens; how many times have you seen your favorite movie?
No one signs up for Spotify to binge listen for a month and then unsubscribe. In video, that's not uncommon. I heard of people who would wait for Game of Thrones to end the season, then buy a month of HBOGo and watch the whole thing, then unsubscribe. Likewise for movies; if you're okay not being up to date with the latest movies you could just buy a subscription for a month once or twice a year, watch the things you've missed and then unsubscribe.
I think that's a big part of the reason movies don't go in that direction. Most of what you're paying for in a movie is novelty: a novel plot, novel characters, novel setting, etc. Music is effectively the opposite; you find something you like, and you listen to it all the time. Their model works perfectly for a "pay per view" system.
As for the fragmentation, I suspect the amount of money that the rights owner gets to keep is higher on their own system. I.e. Netflix gets a flat $X/month/user, which they have to split among all their publishers. If you're a large enough publisher the math on what Netflix will pay you versus the number of subscribers you can get yourself probably works out.
The only better, yet still tenable, model I can think of would be for Netflix to go to a model similar to cable. I.e. you pay $10 to get access to Netflix's library. If you want to access Disney content on Netflix, you pay $8 for a Disney upgrade. If you also want WB, you pay $6 for a WB upgrade (in addition to the Disney one).
It would likely be cheaper than paying for Netflix and a separate Disney+ (I have to believe the marginal cost for distributing a movie is lower if we centralized on Netflix than it is for them both to have their own CDNs, etc). Publishers still get paid per-user, so they don't have to worry how big their piece of the Netflix pie is. Users get a single interface to stream all of their favorite stuff.
Piracy is always going to be more prevalent for movies for two primary reasons:
1) Movies are ephemeral for most people. You watch it, and you move on. You don't need something like Spotify to manage a massive library of content, you can download stuff and delete it. Keeping it involves a lot of storage
2) Music has a much larger convenience factor. I'm fairly often doing something else (driving, working, exercising) and think "dang, I want to listen to this thing I've never listened to before". Movies are typically something I plan more. I would like to see a particular movie, but not right this second. I can wait a few hours or days for it to download, no biggie. Discovery is the bigger issue with movies, and that's already provided by third party sites like Rotten Tomatoes or IMDB.
>According to the MPA, the application includes links to pirate sites, pirate APIs, and pirate torrent trackers, which are used to download pirated movies and TV-shows.
355 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 502 ms ] threadThe fact they had no concern at all filing a frivolous take-down request shows how broken the DMCA checks and balances are. This is a long standing problem [1]
[1] https://www.mondaq.com/unitedstates/media-entertainment-law/...
MPAA is not stupid and they knowingly abused the process in this case because they wanted to put Microsoft in a tight situation and gauge their response. Of course it went exactly as planned with Microsoft rolling over like every other tech company that won’t stand up for its users’ rights.
This is _exactly_ why we need decentralized P2P tech btw.
> Moreover, the Project in question hosts software that is distributed and used to infringe on the MPA Member Studios’ copyrights. See Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios, Inc. v. Grokster Ltd., 545 U.S. 913, 940 n.13 (2005) (‘the distribution of a product can itself give rise to liability where evidence shows that the distributor intended and encouraged the product to be used to infringe’)
I agree though, they went around the courts with a DMCA takedown, and should’ve sued.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MGM_Studios,_Inc._v._Grokster,....
The MPAA are legally savvy enough to know this was an abuse of process. If any DMCA reforms are needed, top of my list would be removing takedown privileges from copyright holders that abuse it.
In popcorn time's I support it to be back but this does not mean I support fully uncensored net.
There may be value in taking down tools used to aid copyright but if that is a desired outcome congress should pass a law permitting it.
https://github.com/popcorn-official
Netflix was giving the industry what... 10 dollars per family? They think they can get more than that by splitting into 20 different platforms. They're probably right.
Netflix in 2020 is an entirely different service than it was in 2011 back when their library was full of major titles.
The reality is that the owners of content want their own distribution platforms, maybe because they saw what Apple did to the music industry via iTunes, but I’m not sure.
so the content creation companies shot themselves in the foot by pulling their content to try to own the distribution platform (because it would theoretically give 'em more profits vs sharing it with netflix).
But consumers saw value in netflix because the large library of content to be had for around $10 price point - this beats piracy of $0 for unlimited content. Now, for the same level of content as before, you'd have to pay for a half-dozen or so subscription services - likely adding up to 60-90 dollars per month. Piracy is starting to look good again for most people.
Analysts speculate that the market for streaming services will saturate eventually, but I’m not sure we’ve seen it yet. Disney’s stock is the only one I can see that doesn’t have a YTD gain, but that particular decline follows the the global market trends and Disney faces hard times with their parks these days. Bottom line is that these new platforms don’t seem to be hurting that much.
Large content owners saw the writing on the wall when they were negotiating their contracts with Netflix by adding termination clauses once Netflix viewership reached a certain point.
The consumers are really the only ones hurting at the moment IMO.
Lol. Netflix is a joke, every time i sign up again I find it lacking tonnes of content.
It optimizes for flicking through its catalog so nobody notices its missing nearly everything.
It does this to wear you down into submission watching or rewatching some old crap.
I went to watch the last season of the 100 before the new release, found its catalog is two seasons behind. Its a mess.
Netflix stuck on season 5.
Why?
Prob same old bullshit. Exclusivity and some shit murdoch run network trying to maintain relevance in a youtube world.
Netflix is garbage all over the world, it was only every half decent in USA where its now being erroded
This has nothing to do with Netflix though and everything to do with broadcasters buying rights in a region/country.
If ABC agreed to an exclusive license of Arrow to TV3 Australia, then Netflix cannot stream Arrow to Australia customers of Netflix. But can stream to New Zealand.
What these production companies need to do is stop being greedy, let a few services exist for competition, and allow licensing to 1 or more services.
As consumers we may need to buy 2-3 subscriptions, but production companies can pick and choose which services have their content by licensing to the highest bidder.
Unfortunately what we have is every production company trying to run their own service to get the maximum profits which means consumers are stuck buying 5+ services to watch all we want. And because of this, piracy will continue to exist.
You can defend netflix all you like. Its still a sub par experience to torrenting.
Stop trying to "fix" a working distribution network.
Start improving it. Legitimize the distribution, get rid of the scummy torrent sites, empower the people, and run ads directly in the content like they are already doing with product placement or self release with skipable ads.
No, its not the perfect, most effective profit wise, but that isnt the fucking point is it. Supplying the people with entertainment is. Artwork is. Culture is.
You can still make profit, nobody will complain, but if you start shitting on the fans you deserve to get whats comin.
Seriously, the industry had its entire distribution channel paid and developed for free, and they shit on it instead of embracing it.
Can you imagine if amazon was able to get people to deliver their products to eachother for free? You think theyd be upset?
Netflix content beats many open TV channels in my area, at least in the fiction and documentary arenas. And like some TV/cable networks do, Netflix invests heavily in producing their own content. It's just a matter of time until they figure out how/if/when they will launch a TV-like continuous stream of content that includes news, weather, sports, gameshows, realities... And add more focus on "live" and sell differentiated content packages by user taste.
Click on it for autoplay to start and watch a bundled playlist of current (random) content or, if they decide to dig into it: news, weather, sports etc.
Isn't monopoly generally regarded as a bad thing? How do we reconcile that with a single provider in this case?
Just say that every content producer must license their work for a "reasonable" price which is connected to the actual viewership (we can do this with streaming).
Companies may litigate this into oblivion but more likely the majority of content would become available cross- distribution.
Don't cinemas work somewhat like this? You have chains owned by WB or whatever by they also show content from other content producers.
The real consideration in regards to copyright and market forces is how market forces right against copyright - the existence of tcp, bittorrent, popcorn time, the hundreds of websites streaming copyrighted material against the rightsholders will - they are all the actual market offering information without the monopolization aspect. Its the distortion in the intention because you aren't supposed to have options in procuring copyrighted works - the distribution channels were originally complicated and expensive enough that centralization was required to create copies and thus anyone violating copyright was targetable. The system becomes dysfunctional when millions of people are giving away copies for free, on demand, instantly, anywhere in the world via the Internet - or in the olden days, via CD or VHS rips. It was the advent of digitization of information that brought about the paradigm shift threatening the institution, not any one specific implementation of the concept.
But yea, monopoly is generally regarded as a bad thing in economics. Why is a huge segment of the economy then built around manufacturing artificial monopolies, primarily to the benefit of those with the means to enforce the terms of said monopolies - rarely an individual creator, often a fortune 500 company.
Nobody would complain if a Netflix competitor emerged with a library at least as large.
You expect them to hand their content over to a middle-man (who is also a competitor), when building a streaming service is trivial with lots of capital?
We were obviously heading in the direction of fragmented, a la carte services for a long time. I don't find having multiple services aggravating; I guess I'm in the minority.
It's not great for doing anything illegal, and criminals get caught faster because they're using Bitcoin [1].
[1] https://mashable.com/article/dark-web-child-pornography-ring...
Please define "illegal software" in this context.
The way Popcorn Time is advertised makes it pretty clear:
It's pretty clearly about piracy. That being said, it can obviously also be used to watch non-pirated movies, and the way things are going with Youtube at the moment (censoring various videos on non-copyright grounds) could actually make PT a great alternative.And most major Linux distributions do have torrents for their installation images.
Also more recently distributed technologies have been kinda morfing together with P2P, with PeerTube, IPFS, Fediverse and all the various cryptocurrencies.
The app is for watching movies. there are lots of movies that are legal to distribute this way for anybody. And people could have rights to copy specific films from other routes. Copyright terms (if they exist) vary by jurisdiction, some countries have eg 25 years from date of production for movies.
Also, the benefits of tit for tat sharing to prevent Leachers are also less important - with more people having faster internet, there isnt anymore the "everyone wants to download far more than they can be bothered to upload" issue.
> there isnt anymore the "everyone wants to download far more than they can be bothered to upload" issue.
There’s the “people quit their BT client as soon as they finish their download” problem which faster internet doesn’t solve.
Some VPN companies also provide apps with the feature built-in.
But for BT I just set up a secondary on-demand network interface on my Linux server specifically for OpenVPN (just need a shell script to add a couple ip(8) rules, and stick that shell script into the up command of ovpn config). Then I bind my transmission-daemon to that specific interface (bind-address-ipv4 option). This way all BT traffic goes through OpenVPN, but other traffic is not affected. Works for any OpenVPN provider.
If the sending client prioritizes data to clients requesting rare blocks, that problem is solved. It will also give clients an incentive to download the rarest blocks first to keep the swarm healthy.
There are so many video streaming usage as everyone is now capable of capturing the video and uploading it live.
That being said, your argument is ridiculous.
They could have froze and privated the repo and investigated the issue.
This isn't the same as a pirated move or song on YouTube. This is code. And version control or code repos are very important.
Even if I'm wrong, this is a valid way to dos my repo. Like when it happens on YouTube people loose money right and that's some people's main income. This can be even worse.
If you aren't okay with that, use a service provider in a jurisdiction not governed by DMCA laws, or run your own service provider and take on that liability yourself.
The idea is quite nice but I wish it wasn't based in NodeJS. I also don't like that it integrates BitCoin - personally I think it just motivates people to try and take over the project.
EDIT: There's also GitChain [2] which again seems abandoned (since 6 years).
[1] https://github.com/cjb/GitTorrent
[2] https://github.com/gitchain/gitchain
Also, please be gentle with the instance linked above. If you're running patchwork and have git-ssb installed, it should be available on http://localhost:7718 instead, that's really the way to go.
0: https://git-annex.branchable.com/special_remotes/ipfs/
1: https://github.com/sameer/git-lfs-ipfs
Anyway, I'm not sure how any kind of p2p system like that's gonna work for the average person and become mainstream when most consumer devices run on battery and drop off the network constantly to save power. Yes there are gateways but that kinda defeats the purpose. Seems better suited as a datacenter tool than something to ship out to normal end users.
At any rate it's not designed for anonymity, so its utility as a piracy tool is limited unless you're on a private IPFS network, which requires server resources.
All github does is provide convenience. If you want to use github in a peer-to-peer fashion all the tools are already there.
Mercurial had a single command for this, "hg serve", that would just pop up a webserver for sharing. It was extremely useful for me during university, and I've often considered it a key failing that git does not provide a similar command out of the box. As a result, the distributed nature of git is hidden from a lot of people.
For the record, the command to make git do what mercurial does with hg serve is "git daemon --reuseaddr --base-path=. --export-all --verbose --enable=receive-pack".
Obviously this is insecure and anyone who can establish a connection can push and pull from your repo, but if you're just jamming with some friends you don't need github.
You don't even have to "host a server". Simply allowing ssh access to your machine is enough.
The vast majority of Linux developers don't have their own publicly-accessible repository that you can pull from - they push patches to the mailing list.
Various archives can host copies of the mailing lists (you can ask https://www.mail-archive.com to do so for you), and the git repository can obviously be mirrored anywhere anyone who can clone it likes. Congratulations, you now have a globally mirrored, decentralised development process where the canonical repo and any patches submitted never disappear.
But instead having many small hand-maintained servers, the admin of each is responsible for what's hosted on it, and of which there is no registry, doesn't sound much better. Very likely there would be a handful of effective central nodes in that network, but if you take down a couple of them, you end up with a situation where already-involved devs might still be able to navigate the landscape, but for a newcomer it might be really hard to find one of those nodes, or be sure it's one with the "right" revisions.
https://pagure.io/pagure
This is because Pagure stores not just code but also all the project metadata (issues, PRs, Wiki pages, etc.).¨
In comparison most other git forges, including the big ones (GitHub/GitLab) store all project metadata in a central database, so if you want to move or even backup/restore a project you need to do a complicated export/import process.
In comparison on Pagure you can just clone the repo and get all the project data with it. Then just put it on another Pagure instance - done.
Should not be hard to adapt this system to be backed by a distributed system from below.
Proper p2p would be like joining a DHT swarm with a hash and downloading pieces from other peers.
But that's where bittorrent comes in, they've solved that issue already.
A p2p bittorrent / magnet file index would work though, through Git (for an offline copy) or otherwise. I'm sure something like that already exists though, I've not been in the piracy world for a while now.
One solution is hiding names from everything like say Pirate Bay/Silk Road but I would not trust anything like that to run in my machine. I wouldn't even download TPB app if it is going to be released. It would also make discovery very hard.
I mean realistically speaking, only solution to DMCA is through lobbying but that is almost impossible for individuals to do. This is something that needs to be done through large tech companies but it seems they think laws like DMCA increases the regulatory burden on their competitors and hence don’t care.
PT itself is a relatively banal app anyway, even if it gets nuked someone else will rewrite it. Napster begat Gnutella begat BitTorrent begat Popcorn, it will not end until the movie business gives consumers what they want: a cheap global service to watch anything anytime.
Privacy.
Streaming services have increasingly terrifying and inescapable telemetry. Spotify, Netflix, Amazon, Google - all of them collect extremely telling things about us due to when we pause video, for how long, which bits we rewind back to, when we consume the content during the time, where (GPS-wise), how often we play them, the collective profiling of us based on what we download in general...and many other things we don't even know about.
After listening to Shoshana Zuboff's audiobook 'The Age of Surveillance Capitalism' - the most important book I have ever read on technology - I am very aware of this. The data companies don't want us to be aware of what they're doing to us.
I'm not condoning piracy, and I believe content creators should be fairly compensated for their hard work - but unless there's a convenient way to be able to consume content in my own open-source local software such as MPV, all offline, and in full privacy without being spied on, I refuse to legitimise the alternative.
I realise there's still blu-ray and DVD, but not always - many releases are web only, now. I'd even pay a premium more for such non-DRM content...your move, Hollywood.
It was never natural to have people watch and profile us when we're already paying money to watch personal entertainment, on this massive global scale.
> when we pause video, for how long, which bits we rewind back to, when we consume the content during the time, where (GPS-wise), how often we play them
is entirely hidden. What model gives that up, but keeps the identity of the video you're watching private?
And most importantly, those few randoms don't have a flood of other data being scraped from your phone, social media, credit card transactions etc. to cross-correlate your viewing with. They don't see that you paused the movie when the main character put on some Nikes and went online shopping for a pair of Nikes for yourself. They don't see that you have friends over. They don't see what brand of microwave popcorn you watch with your movies. They don't care.
I agree about streaming services.
But any peer on the torrent you downloaded knows your IP address. Content holders often do this, they monitor the IP addresses that download their shows and send the user a letter via their ISP to cease and desist.
You think I'm only talking about Netflix? What about the data giant Spotify?
https://libraryfreedom.chat/t/extraordinary-amount-of-teleme...
And as for the one company you mention, Netflix, here's some info which simply proves your claim wrong:
https://www.reddit.com/r/netflix/comments/2uffl9/how_much_da...
https://help.netflix.com/legal/privacy
Ever heard of Max Schrems? He did exactly this (use GDPR to obtain his records) for Facebook.
Not sure why you think Netflix would never go through the same hullabaloo - they operate in the EU as well.
They'll share their data with the NSA when they come knocking, just like all the other large corporations. In fact, they probably already _are_ sharing it.
Now said president discovers that a few people he considered trustworthy seem to be secretly having qualms about his increasing powergrabs. He manufactures a few roadblocks in their careers and within a year and a half they have all been cleaned out.
With them gone he is able to go ever further and more brazen. One day he proclaims himself dictator, and all branches cheer and celebrate.
So I downloaded it off Usenet instead.
Edit: Starz apparently has distribution rights at the moment. 7 days free then $8.99/month. So I could’ve legally watched it for free by signing up via Apple and canceling. Sigh. This is exhausting Hollywood. Get your shit together.
About ten years ago, Starz had a deal with Netflix to stream their content next day. I remember watching some of Party Down that way as it aired.
They had a really good short lived comedy series called "Party Down" that I loved. Had a great cast! https://m.imdb.com/title/tt1073507/
I think Outlander might be one of its more popular series now. Based on a book series and brought to TV by Ronald D Moore who did Battlestar Galactica (which personally I am cautious about because the last season or 2 of BSG was not my favorite)
e.g. I explicitly disliked a show and anytime I'd open Netflix, for days/weeks, it be on top either a banner or one of the first in one or many categories. Felt almost like mocking :)
If your libraries is shallow (which anyway consisted of mostly r trite subpar content) it's your problem - don't hit me with your pathetic dark pattern. Their support kept giving robotic answers. It was outrageous.
JustWatch tell me that AMC on demands had it to rent for 5.99$, is it possible that you missed that? It could be them that got the exclusive right for it... that had to be expensive for sure if it's the case.
I regularly tell my kids no when there's a movie we have to pay full price for. They can wait a few months.
I rarely watch whatever's on. I prefer to watch specific movies from a list of recommendations. This was simply impossible.
Sometimes I couldn't find the movies I wanted. Sometimes they weren't available in my country. Sometimes they weren't available in their original language, or with the right subtitles. Sometimes the streaming platform didn't like my hardware. Sometimes it didn't let me watch the movie over more than 24 hours.
Paying to watch movies felt like paying for making the experience more grating.
Piracy gives me any movie I desire in around 20 minutes. I get a file. I own this file for as long as I want. I can play that movie offline, put it on any device, share it with anyone, or transform it as I please. It's mine.
I don't think I'll be paying for streaming again. Movie tickets absolutely, but not streaming.
One can get HDCP bypass solutions no money at all, but the technology should never have existed in the first place.
Worse yet, despite failing so horribly, development is still going into it, with major players like Netflix pushing it as well.
Ever since the mid-2000s through to today there's a load of TVs, displays, etc on the market that claimed to be DP and HDMI compatible but failed on the edge-cases (e.g. pumping 4K@60Hz down a DisplayPort 1.2 pipe). In my experience the gear that was HDCP compliant tended to perform better (but by no means perfectly cough Philips...).
Compare that to the mess of compliance and functionality with SCART connectors in the 1990s. I had a TV with a true RGB SCART input and a bunch of devices claimed to offer RGB SCART output, yet didn't actually support it (I assume because few consumers knew how to take advantage of RGB SCART, given the default was Composite-over-SCART and at SDTV it looks good enough).
In reality, HDCP causes issues with DisplayPort and HDMI link by being one of the weakest links (HDCP signalling is usually the problem in long or cheap cables). Any issue makes HDCP kill the connection and renegotiate content protection, which takes time where there is no content.
We still to this day have trouble with SCART-like features. It's just now called HDMI-CEC, and is very much a hit-or-miss scenario, even within the same brand. Case-in-point: I have an older Philips Android TV, where CEC in my setup works fine. The same setup does not work at all on a slightly newer iteration of Android TVs from Philips, despite both running a similar Android Oreo build.
----
Also note: The default for SCART was composite, with optional S-Video and RGB support, and very rarely, component (which quality-wise would be somewhere around RGB). S-Video was the common "quality" setting that "just worked", which is close enough to component (and thus RGB) in quality for the material of the time.
Plus, getting suboptimal image is not as bad as getting no image at all, or missing features. HDCP and CEC is arguably a huge downgrade from SCART in that regard.
... this comment is longer than I intended ...
There are certain adapters that do other things, but can also be used to strip HDCP.
It's often used as part of a setup to capture the HDMI output from Macs, since those sometimes have HDCP as well.
Of course it's way better if you steal without consequence, but this is not a scalable approach.
Why do you feel so indignant about something that doesn't effect you? If you want to pay for a dozen different streaming services, nobody is stopping you.
I am a little bit indignant because it does affect me. When a small number of people abuse the system it means the rest of us can't have nice things.
If there were not rampant piracy, I would not have to know what is DRM and all of its associated inconvenience, because it wouldn't have to be a thing.
Not that the current solution isn't broken -- I do pay for (nearly) a dozen different streaming services. But I can't help feeling that I'm subsidising your lawless, anti-social approach, and it doesn't seem exactly fair that you get the better experience.
You have to acknowledge that if everyone did like you, then the whole thing wouldn't be able to sustain itself. It only works because most people take the hit and play by the rules.
I still have a large list of games that I have legally bought but can't play because some manner of native drm or protection - having to practice piracy is the only way I can play those games.
Denuvo, the Sony rootkit, the finite number of installs that was a thing for a while, the list goes on.
yeah thanks bro
Except there's no data proving that people pirating movies/music/... are not also paying the industry.
Anecdotally, the persons I know in the habit of pirating entertainments are also some of the biggest spenders I know on the same things.
So, it's entirely possible that if everyone did like him, the whole thing would sustain itself. And if you have something tending to prove the contrary, I'm quite curious.
Why would DRM be a thing even if piracy weren't? Because the companies that employ it are control freaks who, among other things, would like to sell people the same product numerous times.
> I do pay for (nearly) a dozen different streaming services.
This truly is a 'You' problem. Getting upset with other people because you choose to do that is senseless. It's doubly senseless to be upset about this since dozens of streaming services would be a thing even if piracy weren't. Dozens of streaming services are a thing because these companies are control freaks that want to reinvent Netflix rather than license their content to Netflix. They want complete control over how their media is promoted and distributed, they don't like delegating any of that control to another company. Bittorrent really has jackshit to do with dozens of streaming services existing. If anybody is to blame, it's the clueless pliant consumers that reward media companies for creating netflix clones.
No, you're subsidizing rich CEOs and their shareholders.
I rarely pay for a movie bar a few cinema trips and blu-rays for something I really wanted to support . The reasons:
I want a well encoded DRM free file.
I don't want to be ripped off, or at least the "Steam Sale" model should be there so you can get it at a reasonable price a few months later.
I absolutely want the high quality download option. Steaming is fine for music. I'm confident I could find my Spotify playlists fairly easily elsewhere if I needed too (legally or otherwise). Maybe they are 500GB max.
I wouldn't be confident I could replace terabytes of my favorite movies quickly. I want those archived for myself without DRM.
I will pay when the product is better than a torrent site, it is possible when the lawyers and execs allow it to happen.
Consumers want convenience. I have convenience in the cinema so I pay for movies there quite often.
As for digital distribution, I don't feel confident in any platform. You basically pay to be severely inconvenienced. Plus what happens if you want to load up 10-20 movies on your laptop and go camping? Tough luck.
The movie industry should stop trying to sell us the same thing several times. If I paid for a cinema ticket once I should have the right to download that movie and have it stored offline forever.
Almost nobody who pirated movies (of those I spoke with) did so out of being cheap or poor. Almost everybody told me "I can't even figure out how I can download the movie I paid for" and just opted for torrenting.
Sure some people will do anything and everything to pirate. But I argue they are much less compared to those who are unhappy with the current streaming offerings.
Which music streaming service is that?
[Not snarky, genuinely interested.]
Not all. There are many songs I had on CD that I can't play anymore.
Businesses are in the game of enticing customers. If your homeware store is so bad that double-digit percentages of the population choose to steal glasses and cutlery from local bars rather than shop at your store, you need to take a long hard look at your business and figure out what the fuck you're doing so wrong.
You can bitch and moan about how it's wrong for people to steal from the bars if you want, but that's reality denial. It will not get you more customers.
Any other way you look at it digital media distribution should be a couple of dollars and an http (or torrent if they want to skip the bandwidth costs) file transfer away.
* one service to pay for
* what they want to watch
* on the device they choose
* on their schedule
* at their location.
Content holders want: to restrict, distinguish, and control every one of those.
And frankly, just having an easy accessible way to rent any motion picture if it's not on a streaming platform. There's no reason for digital copies to be so inaccessible. Some things are literally only available on dvd/blue-ray or pirated.
Wouldn't whatever this "easy accessible way" is be the one service you're skeptical people want? I don't think anyone saying "I want one service" means "I hope to be locked in to one provider", but rather "I want one easy interface, and not to have to worry about surveying and paying for lots of siloed libraries."
It's a thin line, is what I'm warning.
> I want one easy interface
Definitely this.
We have various non-standardized interfaces currently for home entertainment with machines running their own enterprise software. The playstations, xboxes, apple TV, smart tvs, etc have their own mediocre ways of cobbling things and allowing you to rent / buy / stream.
Perhaps an open-source alternative is what's needed, but that's often so late to the game.
The problem is that the software part of it is comparatively easy; a perfect platform from the point of view of code, robustness, and useability means nothing unless you can get the rights-holders to agree to make their content available on it.
Right, that's sort of what I mean—accessing it isn't the point. Once you've paid for and subscribed to every different streaming service today, and checked that there aren't a few more that have sprouted up overnight, then access is a solved problem, in the browser or prettified on the desktop. The hard part, and what I think people mean when they speak of wanting one service, is not having to curate, seek out, and pay for all those different streaming services in the first place.
My Spotify subscription is £9.99 and gives me access to unlimited music from all artists (within reason - it’s very unlikely I find something not on there).
I’m willing to pay more for a video subscription that gives me access to unlimited tv and movies.
But to get everything on streaming I have to buy: - Amazon Subscription - Netflix Subscription - Apple TV subscription - Disney+ Subscription - Now TV - TV licence (iPlayer)
And after I have subscribed to all of these, there are still loads of movies and TV shows not covered.
I would pay for one subscription that had the content mixed in. It would be better to have a single £25 contract and get everything rather than this crazy fragmentation where you pay for 80% of the content 4 times and have to get an additional subscription if there is one series you want to watch on a different service.
WOW. I had netflix once for a few days, I paid for netflix just to watch House MD, a week into netflix, they removed House MD from my region, I cancelled subscription and moved to PT. Never came back to netflix, I just no longer trust them, too much effort and too much legal complications. I can imagine paying for one portal, but more than two? That's more expensive and less user friendly then cable TV.
Netflix have the data, he has the money, what's the problem?
The problem is "too much legal complications" and that problem does not exist on Popcorn Time.
So you sold a license to a local broadcasting company to for a time window and number of runs for a show. Not more you can do with no back channel for customers to request individual shows and pay for them. By only granting one license per are you can enforce some scarcity and get your money & hopefully users liked it. Channels could the compete who gets the best time based licenses, who gets the new hot stuff first, etc.
Now here we are with a global network with basically any user being able to request any show and pay for it (or get a subscription for a channel carrying it) and yet the media companies still carry one like one had to win an auction to get one of the broadcast masters, drag in on top of a hill to broadcast it and then return it back to someone else to do the same thing.
How would you feel to rent a car, go halfway to destination, take a nap in a hotel, then you wake up , car has no wheels, because wheels you had couldn't be used on that specific road, and you weren't warned about it. Breach of trust? Waste of time? Disappointment?
They [netflix] ended that about the same time they ended their Public API and starting becoming a "Media Company" instead of a tech company, this is also the point in time they became less consumer centrist.
The short term thinking of modern business to chancing as much quarterly growth has humanly possible long term health be damned was the investor pressure they were / are under.
This will short term thinking will be (and has been) the cause of major problems not just in netflix but many companies
I run a local media server for things I have on BluRay or DVD, I used to archive shows I could also get on one of those 2 platforms but it became major hassle because they would remove and add the shows my family wants access to all the time... When I started tracking it, it was amazing how much churn there was on popular titles
My current frustration is stargate. It is not available digitally in my region in any legal way because mgm is trying to negotiate a buyout by apple and doesn’t want any streaming rights to get in the way. I wanted to show it to my son and my options are limited to ordering a physical disk for a one-off viewing, or piracy.
1. No, I don’t want to get rewatch suggestions.
2. Yes, I’d like to have always the same thumbnail for the same show.
3. Yes, I’d like to tell you "Never show me this show again".
4. No, I don’t want any automatic screen movement.
A cherry on top would be having a toggle to only show me shows with English subs.
1. The content is nicely organised;
2. There's a button for it on my TV remotes; and
3. The UX is way more accessible for the elderly members of my family.
uBlock Origin is not the same as uBlock. I prefer Origin.
How to open the Dashboard https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Dashboard
eg. I use instantwatcher.com
It's really quite saddening to me that some classic cinema is essentially dead, completely inaccessible.
I eventually found Mubi, which is a relatively cheap arthouse movie streaming/rental service. So at least I have that for now. Until they go out of business because they're not popular enough.
I have that issue as well and i'm happy I see more and more vintage stuff (shows and movies) on Archive.
At lest the German version that I get to see. I want to know how much that costs but it only offers me a 7days free subscription. Even when I go to the gift option it asks me to sign in...this is terrible.
Might have to give this a try.
This is just bad.
I assumed that I'd have to create an account before I get to know the prices and therefore I lost interest.
It doesn't even have to be something as niche as that. Even popular productions can be impossible to watch if the rights holders aren't interested.
Try to find 77 Sunset Strip. It was a massively popular television series that ran for years on TV. It simply doesn't exist anymore. Not on broadcast, cable, streaming, DVD, or any other platform. You can't even torrent it.
I have a relative who lives off the grid. He has this massive collection of thrift store VHS tapes that he watches. I'm so envious every time I see it. So much quality material that simply cannot be watched anymore by any means because they never made the transition to digital.
You sure? Seems to be around on torrent sites these days. (At least, most of it.)
But yes, it's frustrating that there's media out there with no legal way to watch it. At least, not unless you're lucky enough to stumble upon a secondhand physical copy.
Guess what, it does not just disappear from my Plex/Emby server...
Online stream services was suppose to resolve the CableTV problem of paying for 1000 channels to watch the 5 you want.
Now Every network, every media company, every one is creating their own streaming service with all of their content "exclusive" so I would need to sign up for like 20+ services to get access to about 60% of the content that I want to watch as the other 40% is simply not on any streaming service at all it is either too new or too old
Justwatch.com has more than 85 Streaming Services in their database... that is crazy
It wasn’t sold in any of the stores I usually go to. It was only sold in some other store for 2 times the price of other similar types of chocolate.
It’s only available at this store because I assume greed.
So I stole it instead.
+100 upvotes.
Just buying a DVD on the second-hand market is too hard?
There is also the point GP may have already seen the movie in theaters, why should he have to pay to watch it again. Also gp wanted to rent the movie, not purchase it,and on top of that has multiple streaming services he is subscribed to, none of which offered the movie.
People are tired of having to hunt down what they want to watch, and many would happily pay for one service that had the full catalogaavailable regardless of region. Until this happens the MPAA will never win by greed and shooting themselves in the foot.
Because that wasn't included in the ticket price. If it was, cinema tickets would be more valuable and they would charge more.
And, yes, I would download that chocolate bar. Especially if i was already paying three different services to to deliver chocolate bars to me on demand.
Then you have chosen to exclude yourself from watching literally hundreds of thousands of hours of quality entertainment that didn't make it to streaming and never will.
>So I stole it instead.
Is a leaky abstraction.
Reality would be (in a sci fi universe): "So I brought out my trusty replicator and made a molecularly identical copy of it, leaving the original behind for whoever wanted to buy it."
It wasn't sold in any of the stores I usually go to and already pay a considerable subscription cost for.
It was only sold in some other store for 3 times the price chocolate usually goes for.
That store also refused to just sell me the chocolate, they required that I eat it inside of their store under their watchful gaze to make sure I wasn't sharing it with anyone that didn't pay.
They also made sure I ate it on a plate and using a spoon and definitely didn't touch it with my hands.
It's only available at this store under these conditions because I assume greed.
So I used my powers of PsychoKinesis to create an atom-for-atom clone of the chocolate for sale so I could eat it at my convenience.
Then the police arrested me because I violated Nestle's ownership of their recipe for making chocolate.
+100 upvotes.
Just buying Nestle's "raw chocolate mix", melting it, putting it into trays and then letting it harden in the fridge is too hard?
Its like PT on steroids with add-ons.
The only caveat is taking 5 additional minutes to install add-ons (TPB+ can be your first choice to get you going)
There is one that list IMDB TOP 250, in order, ready to stream
I have Netflix and Disney+ just to buy moral credit; but since ~1y torrent at will again. Thank you MPAA for enlightening me
When you decided you don't give a damn, the Torrentio plugin is where It's at, scrapes way many public trackers.
"IMPORTANT: We do not collect any history or logs of what addons/sources you use for streaming! Furthermore, if you login as a Guest User, no personal data will be collected whatsoever." - https://web.archive.org/web/20200514142904/https://www.strem... (Their own privacy page doesn't load for me)
That clause has not always been there.
Let's reword that as:
"I couldn't get this thing for the price I wanted so I stole a copy"
Seriously? Imagine going into a box store and doing that. You would face a high probability of being arrested for theft.
Even if he was authorized to make the copy he would have still needed to pay to use the copy.
He's not authorized to make or use the copy.
It's not a useless distinction though. One can argue that stealing is bad because when I steal your car, you don't have access to your car anymore. If I were to copy your car I wouldn't harm you.
That doesn't mean it's okay to illegally copy something, but comparing it to theft is unhelpful at best and misleading at worst.
It's not theft.
Speaking of CDs: the music industry (maybe RIAA was involved, I don’t know) seems to have figured out digital content delivery. I’ve got exactly one subscription for music: Spotify. I can get all the music I want to listen to with this, more than I could ever get when I used BitTorrent (public trackers were sometimes limited, and seeding on ADSL was hard). If they were to raise the price, I’d still use it. There are issues with how artists are remunerated for their work, but the problem of distribution is basically solved. Why can’t the film industry do this?
You deprived someone of the revenue generated by their property. Still theft.
If you squat in an apartment, is that theft?
You have not; that revenue never existed.
Squatting is sometimes legal (in the UK at least) and squatters can end up owning the property if they live there long enough.
Revenue from a purchase that I'm not going to make is non-existent. It can't be lost or gained.
Yhis is just a service that fills yet another gap from all this fragmentation, but in a way it's better than some media company having a monopoly on anything we can watch.
Now Netflix has a higher market cap than most Hollywood Studios, and Spotify has a higher market cap than most if not all record companies.
But this is the classic case of not listening to your customers and innovators dilemma.
Old models of business are very slow to change and it has happened time and time again. Movies, music, newspapers, and so forth.
All of the convenience arguments are gone now, it’s just about $15 you didn’t think you should have to pay. Super weird thing to admit!
I get doin it, but I don’t get defending it.
I would happily pay something like $30 or even $50 per month if I would get access to everything anytime. But then again that's probably because right now I pay around $15 per service that only give me ~5% of the total content each.
So presumably, only $4 dollars a month is more than enough to cover the cost of producing all Hollywood movies - ignore of course, all other sources of revenue such as cinema tickets and product placement etc.
Is marketing and distribution online really 9x the cost of producing the movie itself?
[1] https://stephenfollows.com/how-has-the-cost-of-making-a-movi...
Jokes aside, this is a very interesting calculation - it seems the issue with a system like this would be the monopoly and centralization, as the numbers themselves stack up quite ok.
And marketing costs are huge and for some reason not included in the film budget.
In 2020, people are consuming "movies" and "television" like they're the same thing. You have to include those in the cost.
Finally, if you're including worldwide subscribers, you have to include worldwide producers, not just Hollywood.
Other movies will balance this out though by making a loss - that's the business model. The interesting thing would be the average profit margin across all films at a studio or the industry.
There is risk involved and while some films flop the outcome has historically been significant profit.
Nobody is entitled to profit. Ask candlemakers.
I don't know about Hollywood movies, but for TV shows that would require the makers buying a perpetual license for anything they use in the show. That would probably make it too expensive to make something anyone would actually want to watch. Shows would have to have no cultural references (eg a pop song) in them at all.
Honestly, I can survive the thought of not having a Bowie song in every other production.
If you weren't already, I'd strongly encourage having some kind of caching proxy between you and the NPM repositories, just to ensure that some kind of takedown action won't screw up your builds.
[0]https://github.com/DCCouncil/dc-law-html
We have the technology to allow everyone to have access to any film produced that we still have available in some format, but the distributors/copyright holders just can't organise themselves to make this happen, but instead give us a broken experience. I see projects like popcorn time pushing the boundaries a little bit, trying to make the problem evident.
I, for one, would like to see the copyright law reviewed. It could require you to pay part of the profits from the derivative work to copyright holders, but not give the copyright holder the power to prevent you from distributing it, for instance. That could would allow netflix, apple tv, etc to have pretty much whatever they wanted in their collection.
> in a way that doesn't create an institution of intellectual property that makes the world better for everyone?
That question is loaded with your opinion (in particular the opinion I was suggesting is baseless) and so isn't really an answer at all... you want the world your way, I'm asking, beyond your opinion that it's "better for everyone" (ignoring artists, I guess), why you seem to think there's an issue of right/wrong here.
But on your terms instead of theirs? Why would you want to reduce my power of my creation? Won't that have a chilling effect on what I produce? Can't I charge whatever price I see fit for my own work?
If I were a chef, and it were possible for you to duplicate food, would you apply the same reasoning to my infinitely duplicated meals? I should be paid, but have no leverage myself in how / how much?
Edit: and let's say I have a valid reason for not wanting to cook for you, in particular; that choice also should be taken away from me? How do you see the role of artists in our society? Assembly line workers, churning out art for mass consumption?
I don't pretend to have figured everything out, but the rate publishers pay creators doesn't need to be fixed. As long as exclusivity contracts are not allowed (including self publishing). I think we should be experimenting, though. If the rules change and the end result is that there's less content (or of lower quality), then it could be a justification to go back to the old system. We won't know if we don't try.
Taking your food example. If we had a way to duplicate food for free, it would suck if anyone is starving or having to eat the same thing everyday because of our laws. We have the power to losslessly copy data now, we should be taking advantage of it rather than outlawing it.
However, I don't think content creators have an obligation to make their content universally available. I do feel as though I should limit myself to whatever avenues of distribution the creator has decided on. If that means I can't access the content at all, so be it.
I think the same about Sci-Hub although it's easy for me to say since I'm fortunate enough to be employed by an institution that gives me access to the vast majority of articles I would want anyway.
When you buy a DVD, you can rent it to others without a license. Physical ownership.
When you buy a digital file, you're not allowed to rent it out to others without a license. Digital non-ownership. But you have the bits - that's physical ownership.
People want "one place to rent movies" but that will never work. They'd be a middleman monopoly between you and the studios - and middleman monopolies always turn out bad.
In my opinion, there is a "free market" system that the invisible hand wants, which is a digital analogue of what we had with physical distribution, that reconciles the fact that a digital file really is a (virtual) physical object (on a hard drive), and nothing else will work:
You can rent your own digital files to one person at a time via streaming.
Result: There would be multiple online streaming rental stores that have huge catalogues of whatever you want.
Speculation: Everyone would just use those. Studios would raise the prices for digital files to $10k+ because they know it will be rented out. The total sales of units would amount to the high water mark of the number of people who want to watch a file at the same time.
We'd have a rich market where there are multiple players in each layer.
This can never happen but only simulated, up to a point. Copying physical objects requires manufacture work, copying data is essentially free if you neglect the transmission costs. Whatever paradigm digital ownership adopts will not resemble the physical world renting mechanism.
I used your sentence as a straw-man, please forgive me. :)
Sure you could still pirate (just like you could copy DVDs) but if the path of least resistance (factoring in quality, legal and moral costs) is to just rent it legitimately then that's what people would do. Video stores could have just copied DVDs and the studios were very afraid of DVD-Rs when they came out, but that didn't pan out because it's obviously illegal and immoral.
There was a company in California in the early days that had actual people putting actual DVDs into actual DVD players that would stream on demand across the internet, but they folded when they got a legal threat. It might be legally OK - I don't think it's ever been tested in court.
^-- that's a very sarcastic way to say: yes, git the protocol may be decentralized, but git the (distribution) ecosystem is not and was not ever really censorship resistant beyond "I can keep what I have and share it in a small circle"
What's so different about TV/movies?
Movies such as that of the Mission Impossible series and the Avengers series cost $150M-$350M per movie to make [1] [2], without a theatrical release and/or a temporary pay-per-view model via Apple Movies or Amazon Prime (or most of the world being on a $20-30+/month Netflix, Disney Plus, etc. subscription, which is not the case yet), there wouldn't be much interest in financing such movies.
[0] https://sonicscoop.com/2017/05/25/budget-record-album-2017/
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission:_Impossible_%E2%80%93_...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avengers:_Endgame
No one signs up for Spotify to binge listen for a month and then unsubscribe. In video, that's not uncommon. I heard of people who would wait for Game of Thrones to end the season, then buy a month of HBOGo and watch the whole thing, then unsubscribe. Likewise for movies; if you're okay not being up to date with the latest movies you could just buy a subscription for a month once or twice a year, watch the things you've missed and then unsubscribe.
I think that's a big part of the reason movies don't go in that direction. Most of what you're paying for in a movie is novelty: a novel plot, novel characters, novel setting, etc. Music is effectively the opposite; you find something you like, and you listen to it all the time. Their model works perfectly for a "pay per view" system.
As for the fragmentation, I suspect the amount of money that the rights owner gets to keep is higher on their own system. I.e. Netflix gets a flat $X/month/user, which they have to split among all their publishers. If you're a large enough publisher the math on what Netflix will pay you versus the number of subscribers you can get yourself probably works out.
The only better, yet still tenable, model I can think of would be for Netflix to go to a model similar to cable. I.e. you pay $10 to get access to Netflix's library. If you want to access Disney content on Netflix, you pay $8 for a Disney upgrade. If you also want WB, you pay $6 for a WB upgrade (in addition to the Disney one).
It would likely be cheaper than paying for Netflix and a separate Disney+ (I have to believe the marginal cost for distributing a movie is lower if we centralized on Netflix than it is for them both to have their own CDNs, etc). Publishers still get paid per-user, so they don't have to worry how big their piece of the Netflix pie is. Users get a single interface to stream all of their favorite stuff.
Piracy is always going to be more prevalent for movies for two primary reasons:
1) Movies are ephemeral for most people. You watch it, and you move on. You don't need something like Spotify to manage a massive library of content, you can download stuff and delete it. Keeping it involves a lot of storage
2) Music has a much larger convenience factor. I'm fairly often doing something else (driving, working, exercising) and think "dang, I want to listen to this thing I've never listened to before". Movies are typically something I plan more. I would like to see a particular movie, but not right this second. I can wait a few hours or days for it to download, no biggie. Discovery is the bigger issue with movies, and that's already provided by third party sites like Rotten Tomatoes or IMDB.
>According to the MPA, the application includes links to pirate sites, pirate APIs, and pirate torrent trackers, which are used to download pirated movies and TV-shows.
Laughing in Awesome Piracy[0]
0: https://github.com/Igglybuff/awesome-piracy