> Sure enough, The Software Alliance—a Washington, D.C. anti-piracy organization—claimed digital piracy declined by 37 percent in 2017.
Since The Software Aliance only estimates piracy of PC software, this seems like a weird source to quote in an article about media piracy.
I also wonder, now that people get scary notices from their ISP whenever they torrent anything, if more people are turning to less-easy-to-track alternatives?
> I also wonder, now that people get scary notices from their ISP whenever they torrent anything, if more people are turning to less-easy-to-track alternatives?
Do people still get these notices? I recall getting one many years ago, but after starting to use a VPN for any torrent traffic, I haven't gotten one.
As an aside, the moment a streaming service removes the ad-free plan, or drastically increases price of ad-free, will be the moment that service is canceled for many people. I've recently canceled Prime and am now downloading the shows I hadn't yet finished or wanted to watch again.
Additionally, I fully understand this is my own entitlement, but if I've paid licensing fees[0] for content for a period of time then I feel zero guilt about downloading that content if the service changes the terms of the deal, such as by removing ad-free viewing.
I bring this up fairly often but I do not understand why people’s default privacy mental image is torrenting and not the perfectly convenient Netflix clones like Sflix that require no software
I doubt that very many people here even knows how civilians pirate things. These threads are always full of people describing how they have a 80PB ZFS array on OVH with a Plex server, unlimited Usenet block account, and 50 private trackers, acting like they’re describing anything relevant to anyone besides the ultra-nerdy.
Sharing streaming service passwords. 16-part Family Guy episodes on TikTok, and ridiculous ad-ridden streaming websites ending in odd TLDs are all the rage. The latest generation of young adults grew up on Chromebooks.
Like, sure. But SFlix is easier than all of those things and is a perfect match to a Chromebook. I just don’t understand why it’s not in the public conscious.
There are many other reasons people pirate, it's not all about convenience and cost. Personally I would never pay a cent to Disney again, because I do not like them and do not want to support their business. A lot of people would not pirate anything if they could pay the creators directly, without the questionable middlemen.
The good news is that many of the problems can be solved with a single solution. Bring back pay-to-own, make it convenient by having marketplaces where you simply pick and payments are done automatically in the background. Give artists and creators the ability to self-publish on the platforms. That in turn will bring down the cost, because now the money goes directly to them.
What's that you say, a team of hundreds of people has worked on a movie? That can all be baked into the token if payments are handled by a smart contract and they can each get their exact percentage with each sale.
Seems a lot fairer for everyone involved. It will also increase quality again, or at least give a boost to productions people want to see. The issue with the current model is that viewers are not directly voting with the wallets anymore, the studios do it for them. That will not stand, there is a growing disconnect between what these corporations produce and what people actually want to see. You can hear people complain all over about how the quality of movies and TV shows is declining. The subscription model is flawed, sooner or later it will die.
Studios like money and will produce what makes money. When that changes, they’ll slowly adapt. Slowly being the key word. People love their blockbusters, though, so that’s less likely to change.
It's the disingenuous corporate stances, not the content, that are so contemptible. Especially when they adopt them to wield like orthodoxy to isolate and disenfranchise, not uplift, it's clear that they did it for power, not for ethical or equity reasons.
Like the NPR member station that wrongfully fired the disabled Muslim last year. One of his jokes, "Kind of Racist":
“I work at one of these places that’s so woke it’s kinda racist,” the joke reads in part. “Like this lady asked my boss, she’s like ‘Yo, does Jad consider himself a person of color?’ because she was making a list of us. Fucking hell? Sick, alright. I get to be in this lady’s brown dude Pokédex.”
This joke was called “a powerful condemnation, in a funny way, of what [Sleiman] calls corporatized racial consciousness that makes him, a person of color, feel uncomfortable because he would prefer to be categorized as a whole person regardless of the color of his skin.”
He makes another point about not being given the choice of being "white" after 9/11. And now, there's this weird mixed dance somewhere between "we can't depict Koreans as fruit sellers in school books" and "who do we need to enforce labeling on right now to make marketing more valuable over the next 30 years?". NPR seems to want to maintain a moral high ground, and they think this is what sets them apart from their perceived ideological opposition - manufacturing both the demographic and their brand loyalty.
lol. I scrolled to find “smart contact” and found it. This is completely unrealistic, utopian thinking. I’ll risk the egg on my face when indie Iron Man 4 comes out.
What's wrong with indie content? The web first enabled a big boom in that field and it's taken a lot of attention from traditional media. Much of Youtube is basically "indie" media and some of the content is extremely popular. Social media is indie news, if you will.
Some consumers do want Disney, Universal & co to feed them the 40th iteration of some lame meme, granted. I'm not saying there won't be a market for Fast and Furious 27. But dismissing everything that isn't a big budget Hollywood production is a bit much. We will see what the future brings but many people expect us to move towards more individual solutions, that's been the trend for decades.
making a movie requires upfront investment. either through crowdfunding or through dedicated investors like those studios.
so i see no way to completely eliminate the middlemen, because they will want to recoup their investment.
we could argue that everyone should get a share of the profits, but with that argument comes the downside of everyone also needing to take a cut when a film makes a loss.
i am not sure if i wouldn't prefer just get paid a fair salary for the work and let someone else take that risk.
20 comments
[ 5.1 ms ] story [ 57.1 ms ] threadSince The Software Aliance only estimates piracy of PC software, this seems like a weird source to quote in an article about media piracy.
I also wonder, now that people get scary notices from their ISP whenever they torrent anything, if more people are turning to less-easy-to-track alternatives?
Do people still get these notices? I recall getting one many years ago, but after starting to use a VPN for any torrent traffic, I haven't gotten one.
As an aside, the moment a streaming service removes the ad-free plan, or drastically increases price of ad-free, will be the moment that service is canceled for many people. I've recently canceled Prime and am now downloading the shows I hadn't yet finished or wanted to watch again.
Additionally, I fully understand this is my own entitlement, but if I've paid licensing fees[0] for content for a period of time then I feel zero guilt about downloading that content if the service changes the terms of the deal, such as by removing ad-free viewing.
[0] - A subscription to a streaming service
Sites which usually come with awful ads and tracking to pay for the gargantuan amount of bandwidth a streaming platform needs.
When I say private, it means that absolutely no one except me and my computer needs to know that I'm watching Xena for the hundredth time.
Sharing streaming service passwords. 16-part Family Guy episodes on TikTok, and ridiculous ad-ridden streaming websites ending in odd TLDs are all the rage. The latest generation of young adults grew up on Chromebooks.
The good news is that many of the problems can be solved with a single solution. Bring back pay-to-own, make it convenient by having marketplaces where you simply pick and payments are done automatically in the background. Give artists and creators the ability to self-publish on the platforms. That in turn will bring down the cost, because now the money goes directly to them.
What's that you say, a team of hundreds of people has worked on a movie? That can all be baked into the token if payments are handled by a smart contract and they can each get their exact percentage with each sale.
Seems a lot fairer for everyone involved. It will also increase quality again, or at least give a boost to productions people want to see. The issue with the current model is that viewers are not directly voting with the wallets anymore, the studios do it for them. That will not stand, there is a growing disconnect between what these corporations produce and what people actually want to see. You can hear people complain all over about how the quality of movies and TV shows is declining. The subscription model is flawed, sooner or later it will die.
And if you're pirating content you do want you're just informing studios there's no money to be made with it so they certainly won't make more of it.
Like the NPR member station that wrongfully fired the disabled Muslim last year. One of his jokes, "Kind of Racist":
“I work at one of these places that’s so woke it’s kinda racist,” the joke reads in part. “Like this lady asked my boss, she’s like ‘Yo, does Jad consider himself a person of color?’ because she was making a list of us. Fucking hell? Sick, alright. I get to be in this lady’s brown dude Pokédex.”
This joke was called “a powerful condemnation, in a funny way, of what [Sleiman] calls corporatized racial consciousness that makes him, a person of color, feel uncomfortable because he would prefer to be categorized as a whole person regardless of the color of his skin.”
He makes another point about not being given the choice of being "white" after 9/11. And now, there's this weird mixed dance somewhere between "we can't depict Koreans as fruit sellers in school books" and "who do we need to enforce labeling on right now to make marketing more valuable over the next 30 years?". NPR seems to want to maintain a moral high ground, and they think this is what sets them apart from their perceived ideological opposition - manufacturing both the demographic and their brand loyalty.
Inclusive by name, exclusive by practice.
Some consumers do want Disney, Universal & co to feed them the 40th iteration of some lame meme, granted. I'm not saying there won't be a market for Fast and Furious 27. But dismissing everything that isn't a big budget Hollywood production is a bit much. We will see what the future brings but many people expect us to move towards more individual solutions, that's been the trend for decades.
so i see no way to completely eliminate the middlemen, because they will want to recoup their investment.
we could argue that everyone should get a share of the profits, but with that argument comes the downside of everyone also needing to take a cut when a film makes a loss.
i am not sure if i wouldn't prefer just get paid a fair salary for the work and let someone else take that risk.
The EU Suppressed a 300-Page Study That Found Piracy Doesn’t Harm Sales https://gizmodo.com/the-eu-suppressed-a-300-page-study-that-...