Popcorn Time 4.0
github.comI'm a huge fan of swing manouche (jazz style developed during the '40s). I can't find albums in legal sources that I can instead find in Nicotine++ (a Linux version of the old Soulseek). What should I do? Accept that I won't find it?
I remember once writing to an Aussie record label asking for a copy of an old album of Brett Garsed. They told me I wouldn't find it here in Europe nor they had the means to send it to me. Should I just accept it? Once again, I could find it in Nicotine++.
I can't find many movies I like in original language in Netflix, HBO and Amazon, all services I have legal accounts for. Again, should I just accept I won't watch them knowing that I might find them in other channels?
I live in Spain, country where I pay a compensation copyright tax for every pen drive, computer, hard drive, TV set, etc, I purchase just in case I download something "illegally".
It turns out I'm lazy/I choose not to spend the required time and I accept not enjoying albums and movies I otherwise would.
Well, let me tell you I applaud Popcorn Time.
Fellow Soulseeker here. The compensation copyright tax ended in 2011:
Cancellation of the fee
On March 24, 2011, the National Court annulled the order that regulates the rates applicable to the various devices and supports recorded with the digital canon. The reason is that, because it is a regulation, it needed procedures related to supporting and economic reports that were not carried out.
On July 12, 2011, the Congress of Deputies voted favorably on a non-law proposal that urges the Government to abolish said canon and replace it with another compensation formula for authors and content owners that is more suited to copies and uses actually made.
On December 31, 2011 the canon was definitively repealed by the newly constituted new Congress of Deputies, being replaced by a new payment this time by the State whose procedure is about to be developed.
Source (in spanish): https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_por_copia_privada_(Espa%...
I join the clapping, sorry for the nitpick!
Nothing to feel sorry about! I don't know how I could have missed that but I'm so lucky it ended! Having said this, I still find myself entitled to search for copies of cultural material I like :)
Still, too lazy/don't have the time to do it.
> I still find myself entitled
I think that sums it up pretty well. Thanks for at least being honest about it.
Is it being entitled wanting to be entertained by a piece of art or media?
That is its very purpose.
Having wants is not being entitled. Thinking that one deserves and should have everything one wants is being entitled.
The purpose of art or media is whatever the creator wants it to be. If they are an artist creating solely for the purpose of making art for be people to enjoy, then your premise is acceptable. If the artist is trying to earn money for their work, then that is their choice. If the artist wants to release their work for the world to enjoy, there are legit ways of doing that and protecting it so that other cannot prevent that free enjoyment.
I know I'm tilting at windmills with this topic on this particular website, but creating art isn't free and nobody has the right to be entertained by it just by being (either the work or the viewer) be default.
The purpose of copyright, according to the Constitution which gives the government the right to grant it, is to promote the public domain. It's not doing that very effectively now that copyright remains in effect 70 years past the death of the artist.
> The purpose of art or media is whatever the creator wants it to be.
Your argument is complicated by the fact that a lot of media, and especially for old out-of-print works, the copyright holder is not the person who actually created the work. At best it is a descendant family member, at worst it is a person or corporation who came into the copyright without the knowledge and consent of the artist.
We're talking about music from the 40s. The various copyright extensions are part of the problem.
Being entitled doesn't mean "I should have anything I want without giving something up". It means that I believe that I have "payed" for this in some way. You may be delusional for believing it, or overvaluating you "payment" though. I would add that self-entitlement would be a good term if you are the only one who determined the value of the object of want and the value of your sacrifice.
> Having wants is not being entitled. Thinking that one deserves and should have everything one wants is being entitled.
U.S. of A would like to have a word with you.
> The purpose of art or media is whatever the creator wants it to be.
The purpose of art and media is to generate revenue. People who create just for art are an insignificant minority. The main issue is that when this art does not generate revenue it is thrown away. Then it is no more art. It becomes (like) garbage.
>I remember once writing to an Aussie record label asking for a copy of an old album of Brett Garsed
I applaud the effort at legitimately trying to get a copy. However, sounds like an opportunity still might exist. Small record labels are always hard pressed for cash. Maybe there's a business deal to be made. I'm sure they would be open to licensing the music to you. You could then release the album yourself, or maybe a compilation album with tracks from other artists in the same style of music. Now you have the opportunity to bring that music to a wider audience based on your interest while maybe making a little money on it as well.
This is HN after all. Maybe there's some new website you can make that allows cash strapped record labels to distribute the music legitimately using some new programming language of the day. You could then write up a Show HN and let us all know. We might even be interested.
This was 20 years ago, my friend. The world wasn't as connected as it is now. I actually struggled to find out the record label!
Sure, physical media for the average consumer is no longer a thing. We sold vinyl records, and that is still a desirable thing for the niche markets. So, maybe just think of it from a slightly different angle/perspective. Make it a collector's item. Collectors want physical product to own/possess/show off. There's still a market for physical forms of musical recordings. If this is really a niche product, then cater to the niche market. The niche market knows/accepts it is niche and there's a bit of a premium mark up that can be taken advantage of here. Surely, you're not the only person looking for this type of sound. Capitalize on that like we did. Do it as a side hustle. Reach out to labels that own the rights to the track you like. Put together a compilation. Produce the physical product. If you don't do it, who will? Granted, it's way more work than just pirating a copy from someone else.
What deals could a small label make with an unknown trader with no reputation that are better than uploading the backlog to Spotify with little effort and hoping for a bit of income? This is assuming that the label has the right to upload the works.
Things are possible. One just needs the courage to ask and possibly be told no, and even more courage to proceed if they say yes.
I have personal experience of starting a niche record store with a friend. We were both tired of the music we wanted not being available and decided we'd do it ourselves. Neither of us had any idea about the music industry. We both put in $500 each. Every dime of that was used to buy the initial inventory. We had no money to have a website built (circa 1999). So I learned how to use MySQL and PHP and built one. During the years we ran the business, there were many conversations with artists and record labels. We sold compilation albums where other people licensed individual tracks from labels and arranged them together onto a CD. We even had several discussions about starting our label, but stopped short of that.
It's called Spotify, Apple Music, Google Music (does it still exist?)
My brother made a song with 10 yearly listens and I can find it on there.
Also Bandcamp is a thing. Very few dinosaurs or really, super niche artists are on neither platform.
>I'm a huge fan of swing manouche (jazz style developed during the '40s). I can't find albums in legal sources that I can instead find in Nicotine++ (a Linux version of the old Soulseek). What should I do? Accept that I won't find it?
Not sure if you've heard of it or not, but Discogs might be a great place for you to source and purchase a used copy of those albums.
I tried using this, 1st of all the music was in CDs by a third party seller - which is not a deal breaker but may be to some others.
However,seller declined to ship me discs(to india) even though i was willing to pay shipping. He said customs tends to seize items like music cds
Ah bummer! :(
Thanks for the recommendation, sir! I will check it out!
> I live in Spain, country where I pay a compensation copyright tax for every ...
I don't know specifically about Spain, but this 'copyright tax' [that was introduced in most, if not all European countries, probably a directive] was for you to legally be able to create copies on your devices of legally acquired contents.
The interpretation you have been giving it, is mentally satisfying, but not legally tenable
There seems to be contents on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=manouche . I leave it for you as home-work to ddgo the solution from there.
It still is a ripoff. Nobody says I'm going to use that storage to take copies.
But yeah "I took a backup but lost the original, good thing I took the backup!" ;).
Yes, it's a rip-off, I'm trying to state the facts, that does not mean I agree with it nor that I adhere to it.
I mean, one of the answers to your question is in fact: "accept that you do not get to consume that media".
I'm not advocating for or against what you are choosing to do, but the position of "it's my only choice" is not really accurate. You have no inherent right to that media.
Popcorn Time and other P2P file sharing tools are convenient, but let's not be hypocrites about it, they enable illegal behaviour and allow you to go against the wishes of content creators, denying them both revenue from and control of their creations.
You in fact have no inherent right to control other people's computers.
It's hard to justify why you think that creators have a right to the contents of your hard drive and wallet. I don't remember being party to the social or legal contract that created such rights nor realistically do I have a voice in changing it.
If society says that as a poor person in addition to having less of everything else I ought to enjoy less movies, music, books, games then perhaps society can go to hell.
Without judgment I find it amusing that these arguments rapidly converge to ones used by the participants on subreddits for shoplifting and stealing.
I'm not saying the acts are equivalent, just that the positions are.
It also feels like statistically I should have read at least one comment where someone is convinced by argument that their copyright infringement is wrong but over twenty years on the Internet, I actually haven't. Very interesting.
It's also pretty easy for me to not judge since I've done things of dubious ethicality myself: I've never paid for a full copy of a textbook. Either I've bought the Asian copy or I've been part of a pool-and-photocopy group. Even now I use scihub preferentially.
Interestingly, the scihub usage is more acceptable online than the pool-and-photocopy but in real life no one has given me any grief for either.
To be honest, I don't feel very guilty either. And I'd do it again. If I attempt to see it as something shameful, convincing arguments defending myself pop out. I suspect it's something in the shape of the elephant and the mahout - the justification comes because I've already decided what I'll do. What I'll do is not rationally justified - that's coming after.
I'd speculate (idly) that this is the same mechanism in other pirates.
I deal with shoplifters daily none have yet expressed the position that private property ought not to exist much less provided a fair line of reasoning supporting the position.
Oh there's a subreddit where they met where they'd say that all the time. Don't know if it's still up.
> You in fact have no inherent right to control other people's computers.
The legal system in your jurisdiction may disagree with you on that one.
> It's hard to justify why you think that creators have a right to the contents of your hard drive and wallet
I never tried to "justify" creators doing anything to your computer or anyone else's? Show me where I said that? That's a preexisting grindy-axe you brought along with you, friend..
I simply said that P2P file sharing denies content creators (big and small) control over the use of the works they own.
Which is strikingly similar to your position that other people shouldn't control your belongings, don't you think?
There is only one class of possessions. All else is aggrements not possessions and in a wholly owned subsidiary of the rich I don't feel morally bound by the agreements between the upper middle class and the owner class.
The agreement is that the government will attempt to keep you and I from improving each other's lots by sharing under the idea that the notes hanging in the air forged of air and emotions are sort of like a ham sandwich.
From what I can tell they have secured increasingly one sided agreements mostly by legalized corruption wherein the parties who write nothing, sing nothing, express nothing, invent nothing but own much make campaign contributions.
Physical property is problematic itself but certainly cannot be fixed incrementally or in total by pretending property isn't a thing because one must still deal with the exclusive nature of physical goods whether we acknowledge the fact or not whereas piracy can indeed simply route around the upper classes contact's.
You seem to be an extremely cynical individual. I'm sorry to see that. Wish I could help.
I'm not sure why you classify abstract reasoning as cynicism. If you are less pessimistic about your fellow man its likely you are merely in a better position where you can afford an objectively less realistic position.
I know I don't regularly worry about how a broken system funnels food into American's trash cans while others starve because I personally have never been in a position where starvation is even remotely possible.
> I'm a huge fan of swing manouche (jazz style developed during the '40s).
Keep in mind that many of the content creators are now dead.
I am very aware! And it's not that popular, reason why it's hard to find.
OT, but as a fan of Django who doesn't know any other artists of the genre - do you have some recommendations? :D
Really?! Start by this, listen to this radio (there are many more) and once you like an artist, find him in Spotify and look for similar artists. http://www.jazzradio.fr/radio/webradio/10/jazz-manouche
I'm going to be honest with all of you. You all are doing something that is ethically and morally wrong and statements like this are only way too human attempts to justify the actions of things you know are clearly wrong. You can't find legal sources of swing manouche just like you can't find legal sources of the Mona Lisa by Leonardo da vinci. What are you going to do? make a counterfeit copy of the Mona Lisa then buy tickets to the art museum to absolve you of all crimes?
That being said I use popcorn time and stremio and torrents regularly. The difference is, I don't justify my crimes. I'm aware of what I'm doing, I don't need to live in a universe that is a self created moral illusion. I likely will do something unethical if I could hide it and it made economic sense. I am human and, morally, I am imperfect, but unlike most of you, morally, I am aware of my imperfections and I don't try to construct logical scaffolding to lie to myself and others. I can pirate because most people pay for the things I pirate, such a model is only sustainable if most people don't do what I do. Things like popcorn time threaten to change the balance.
If you want to save the world or do better for the world, do not assume that the world is as described by our parent poster pachico. It's not intelligent to assume that people are going to use popcorn time then purchase Netflix to offset some of that guilt (still a crime btw). Assume the world is made out of people who are as pachico really is.. people who are morally grey but make up lies and illusions to comfort themselves into thinking they are justified in their crimes.
I stopped pirating games 10 years ago when my salary crossed a threshold where it wasn't worth my time anymore to pirate a game vs. the convenience to buy it from steam. The way to combat piracy is to create systems that appeal to the previous aforementioned logic.
Spotify was a step in the right direction but it eliminated much of the huge profits made by the music industry. Perhaps those profits were ludicrously too large anyway. Either way, the way forward isn't trying to justify your crimes. It's admitting that hey, we are victims of the tragedy of the commons, we use popcorn time because it's free and easy to use... to combat this situation you either need to take steps to destroy this product or come up with something way better.
For the sake of argument, I'm contemplating the idea of counterfeiting Mona Lisa, as you say. I can't see anything wrong with it if it's for my own personal pleasure and I'm not hurting anyone.
Don't forget copyright is a human construct and is far from being perfect. Also the amount of years after which art becomes public is human made and totally arbitrary. Why not 2 years? Why not 500 years? Ethics are not in the game here, I'm afraid. I'd like you to reply but please, restrain yourself from insults this time. Thanks
Ok it's not wrong from a very technical sense for the mona lisa. I obviously meant forgery, where you claim the painting is an actual mona lisa... but Who cares? That's not my point.
My point is what you're doing is wrong and you know it on some level.
Without disagreeing with what you wrote, you are conflating ethical and moral with legal and criminal. They are not the same and it makes it difficult to understand the foundation upon which you rest.
You're right, I didn't want to get into a philosophical argument on technicalities.
That wasn't the point. The point is that a lot of these technicalities are self constructed justifications. Illusions and lies we tell ourselves to cope with our imperfection. I conflate because I don't care about the technicalities, I'm talking about something primal and simple.
In its most simplistic form, this is what I mean:
If I create a work of art to make money or even for just limited showings and you copy it and distribute it without my permission, than you are doing something wrong and you know it.
That's all. My argument is saying that anything on top of that is an attempt to justify your actions.
You seem to be quite sure about the type of person I am and defining me grey is quite insulting but that's beyond what is being discussed here. You seem to have missed what I wrote a out having accounts of Spotify and 3 video streaming services.
I am also tempted to tell you that you might want to revise you usage of the words morally and ethically and that these are probably more profound than to be applied to a kid wanting to buy an album but failed to find it. Having said this, have a good day.
>I am also tempted to tell you that you might want to revise you usage of the words morally and ethically and that these are probably more profound than to be applied to a kid wanting to buy an album but failed to find it. Having said this, have a good day.
Don't make it profound. Make it simple. The kid couldn't find the album so he DLed it illegally. The kid is aware of this illegality at some level.
That awareness is how simple the situation actually is. The profoundness arises when someone tries to justify the situation. I use the word ethics and morals as one would use it in common english parlance about discussions of such matters, I am not asking for a philosophical definition of said terms.
Here's where you are wrong, also: it wasn't illegal (at least at the time - now I don't know since I don't download stuff). So, being that the case, all your profound, simple, philosophical or vague attempts to find this illegal, and therefore wrong, are useless, I'm afraid. As pointed by someone also, you seem to argue that illegal follows wrong but that's not granted. Legality is an attempt to out in practice a certain amount of ideas about what right and wrong is by a certain society at a given time in history, that's all.
I didn't make anything profound or philosiphical that's just you. I'm conflating illegality, morality and ethics into a singular simple concept: What you did is wrong plain and simple, and you're aware of it.
What's going on with your 'philosophy' now is a complicated attempt at justification.
My specific case was live albums of a band named Waso, which were never printed in CD. The only digital copies were fans that owned original vinil records from the '70s and digitalised them. What do you do in this case? I remember downloading a copy of them and not feeling any kind of remorse about it. Not sure it helps but I was myself a musician and my brother plays too as is his only source of income. I know a bit of the industry.
Well let's put it this way, does the artist as the the creator of said art permit you to do such a thing?
If the artist is okay with it great! But if the artist is not okay with at all does he own the rights to the art he created? Does he have the right to permit you not to copy his things? That is the ethical question.
Did you have the right to do it without asking the artist for permission? What if one day the artist did actually want to make a profit off his work?
This is not an ethical question, again, this is, at most, a legal question.
Your argument about the Mona Lisa i absurd. You can indeed make as many copies of her as you like and even sell them or put them on paid display to others (if they'll even pay to see it) and it's not in the least bit illegal, as long as you don't claim they're the original. It doesn't fit this scenario. Secondly, you first accuse a bunch of people here of moral infringements then plainly state that you yourself commit piracy, but that it's somehow better, because you don't "justify" your "crimes". You actually do, by saying it's less morally wrong because you're "aware" of your actions.
Quite a shit mix of contradictions.
>You actually do, by saying it's less morally wrong because you're "aware" of your actions.
This is an utter lie. I never said this. Me being aware of my actions does NOT make any of my actions more moral. I never said this. You are either lying or delusional.
I'm actually a very high scorer on the psychopathy spectrum. The official term is antisocial disorder. This means I am technically less moral than most people.
Me being aware of my actions only makes me aware of my actions and my morality and who I actually am as a person. That's it.
>as long as you don't claim they're the original. It doesn't fit this scenario.
You're getting into technicalities. Let me put it simply. It fits. I'm talking about the general notion and feeling about plagiarism. This is the ENTIRE point of my conversation. Copying something without permission is in general wrong. There are cases where if the author is dead for over a century then things may feel gray, but who cares.
I don't want to get into technicalities because I don't care for the technicalities and neither do you. We all are aware of the cases there's no need to argue about it. If you want to argue about how a "technicality" makes the original posters plagiarism correct than don't care yo have that conversation because it's a waste of my time.
I fully agree with you on all points except: "still a crime btw". 'pirating' on this small scale without a direct financial benefit [money coming towards you] is a violation of the copyright act(s) and you would end up in civil court.
Say what you will about stealing, illegality, unsavouriness.
If the film industry would collectively take their head out of their arses and provide such a simple interface and wide catalogue to the masses, they would make hundreds of billions.
I would literally pay $50 a month for an official and legal version of this.
The end users don't really care that it is not possible because "legal reasons". This app proves otherwise and I wholeheartedly approve of their mission.
EDIT: if I would pay $50 a month, why am I not buying/renting movies on iTunes or Amazon for the same amount? For the same reason Spotify or Apple Music are making a killing. Give me a flat rate and let me watch _everything_, it's hard to decide if that new movie just out is worth spending $15 on. Might be crap.
The whole business model of the content industry is based on perverting the idea of copyright and extending it beyond any reasonable limit. And with copyright terms extended to eternity and beyond, they are effectively stealing the cultural intellectual property of every living generation, depriving us of the basic means to creatively comment on our own cultural heritage.
So, I have no problem with "stealing".
Having used various streaming apps (Netflix, Watchever, Apple TV, the media libraries of T-Online here in Germany and various libraries of local TV stations), I am surprised that the interface, usability and stability of my basic home entertainment center (Kodi running on an old Raspberry Pi 2) are still vastly superior.
I, too, would happily pay 50 EUR / month for ANY streaming service with a decent interface and a movie library that covers the 20th century. The easiest and cheapest (and mostly legal) way to watch classics for me is still to go to the public library (with an extensive DVD / BluRay collection), rent the movie, rip it and watch it via Kodi. This costs me 10 EUR a year.
That being said, what we need is a standardized way to stream movie and music content, and handle payments. This would include a standardized API to list available content with descriptions, images and prices. This would make it possible to use a private home entertainment system like Kodi efficiently and legally and would get rid of the need to use / install 100,000 different apps for each streaming service. It completely eludes why the current level of abstraction between the different providers is the app, the only explanations I can come up with is branding, a total lack of collaboration between the providers and copyright protection.
I'm going to link to one of my old comments and a reply from fouric - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21482394
>I think the bigger issue than paying for multiple services is duplicate licensing. If I sign up for DirecTV, Amazon Prime, and CBS how many shows am I triple licensing? If all these companies want me to sign up for multiple services, there needs to be a way for them to pass "already licensed" information to each other, and pro-rate their bills accordingly.
>ATT, Comcast, Disney, CBS already own almost all the historical content. Id rather pay a small licensing fee to those 4 and then be able to watch their content on any platform, rather than deal with multiple middlemen that have CBS, Comcast, Disney, ATT licensing costs built into their product price. IF I select DirecTV/ATT as my "licensing manager" then any time I sign up for Disney+, Peacock+, CBS All Access, I want a discount off one of the two ends (would make more sense to give all my subscription info to DirecTV and get a DirecTV discount. Then DirecTV can go to Disney and say "17% of our customers dont need to pay Disney licensing costs, weve adjusted our payment to you accordingly.)
> fouric: This is actually really important. While it's immoral to take the results of someone else's work without compensating them, it's also immoral to charge your customers multiple times for the same product.
It would really benefit the viewer to decouple "what am I licensed for" from "what app do i need to play this" and just allow my media player to access all my libraries regardless of which licensing/billing manager and video player I choose to use.. Movies Anywhere, Vudu, Roku, Apple and Amazon have made some progress on this front, but its still way too convoluted.
It is not stealing. It may be illegal, but it isn't stealing nor robbery. You may be violating the copyright law, but nobody is taken away any object and there is no threat of violence. When people get access to copyrighted works, then at first, it is good for people. Only then the idea is that the creators can't make a living by producing those works. We can solve that differently, without using copyright. Copyright is a weirdly anti-market and authoritarian concept where the government artificially makes something scarce by punishing supply. In any case, distributing stuff is not stealing. /rant
An official and legal version of this wouldn't be $50/month, it would be more like $200/month. It includes movies from every major company, and films while they are still in the cinema.
Streaming music has set the price floor. For the price of an album a month you can stream all the music you want, even new releases.
What makes you think movies should have a multiple of 10 instead of 1 for a monthly subscription fee?
I'll attempt an answer, the cost should be whatever the market will bare. The market could likely boom at $50/mth, but at $200 it would be niche. The industry seems to even be coalescing around $30/mth (my guess) through consumers paying for multiple services.
I'm fairly certain that movies are far more expensive to produce than music albums.
True. Now, compare the number of music albums produced per studio to the number of movies. We’re explicitly talking about paying per time rather than per work here; one movie versus one album is misleading and/or irrelevant.
To me, $50 seems more realistic because of data caps. You simply cannot stream enough content nowadays without forking over more money to ISPs. Pricing would become a balancing act. It’s an interesting thought experiment to wonder how those two giants would battle out the responsibility of bandwidth.
If you can get up-to-date movies still in the cinema, you would pay $50 just to take a family to the cinema once.
I think this is dependant upon your country. Most ISPs in the UK are unlimited.
That isn't far off what cable costs...
I'm not sure what you're getting at. First, when I had cable it was more like $100/mo, which included internet access. I also didn't get films still in the cinema with my package.
For that price it would be cheaper for me to “buy” the movies I want to watch outright. You’d have to watch a lot of movies to recoup the cost.
I don’t know what things are like in other parts of the world, but the US market has shown a preference for renting large-library access over buying individual works. There are exceptions, when the costs got skewed too far and the perception grows that the “large library” is actually a small library plus a lot of dross (see Cable TV), but even then it took decades of Worst-in-the-nation service issues, billing ‘hijinks’, and predatory pricing to convince Americans to start cutting the cord.
I absolutely agree on the rental risk factor. It discourages discovery of new things. In addition to that, the rental terms on these services suck.
Here's an example: A month ago, my wife and I rented Casino from Amazon Prime for like $3 or whatever. It is a long movie, so we paused half way through with a plan to finish it the next day. The next evening rolls around and we discover we only had 24 hours to finish it once we had started it. We just paid again cause its only $3, but also resolved to never rent from Amazon Prime again.
These systems are a worse experience than pirating. It doesn't have to be that way.
That's two conversations mixed up in one: one about what is, as in, a prediction of what we can expect people to do, without any value judgements, and another about what ought to be, as in, what's our moral and ethical opinion of this behavior. And while the second one is a very tempting rabbit hole of flame wars, the first one is very clear cut: if you give people access to everything (or almost everything) for a reasonable subscription price, they won't pirate stuff anymore.
> That's two conversations mixed up in one: one about what is, as in, a prediction of what we can expect people to do, without any value judgements, and another about what ought to be, as in, what's our moral and ethical opinion of this behavior.
Economists are careful to distinguish between 'positive' and 'normative' economics, where positive economics is what's observed to happen and normative economics is what someone things ought to happen, morally, for precisely that reason. There are always the people who can't or won't make that distinction, however, including the people who refuse to distinguish between describing something and expressing approval of it. This has a particular relevance in any online community with a downvote function: If enough people are offended by a description of a state of affairs, any discussion of it will be downvoted to oblivion and will be impossible to hold in that forum, especially if downvotes are tied to how much you can participate in that forum in some fashion.
This problem is older than economics itself. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is%E2%80%93ought_problem
Here here. Been saying this for years as a satisfied Popcorn time users. Been paying for Spotify already for years too. If a legal Popcorn Time existed, I'd signup directly.
Just a minor nitpick, but it's "hear hear", not "here here", as it refers to hearing what is said.
Not trying to be snarky, just something worth considering... Owning physical media is not as popular as it once was due to the multitude of streaming options available. Subsequently, the cost of physical media has gone down due to the popularity of streaming. If you pick up some $5 blue-rays for older films here and there, or hit up a used place, $50/month can go pretty far. Best part, after a year or so, you would have amassed a pretty sizeable collection of media, that is yours to watch, forever (as long as you retain copy of the media). Can't really beat that. Archive it and stream it with Plex or Kodi (which I think is legal, as long as you own a physical copy). Other commenters have noted similar sentiments, but I feel like the subscription services are just the new cable. Until a better option exists, I find physical media to have the friendliest licensing for users.
I'd be happy to keep paying for a legal service if I could watch movies in original language (movies are dubbed here in Italy) with English subtitles. Doesn't seem to be technically impossible so is it due to legal issues? If so, isn't that insane?
> If the film industry would collectively take their head out of their arses and provide such a simple interface and wide catalogue to the masses, they would make hundreds of billions.
They are already making hundred of billions
And will make more now thanks to house confinement
Why should they change model just now?
> I would literally pay $50 a month for an official and legal version of this.
But I'm paying zero right now...
And the chances of getting caught are slightly above zero.
> They are already making hundred of billions
My point is they would make hundred of billions MORE. Some will still illegally download, but most would flock to such a service.
We're not all criminals because it's fun. We just hate the inconvenience of trying to watch a movie legally in 2020, especially if you're outside of US, or worse yet, outside of the Western world.
Apple built iTunes on the success of Kazaa.
that is an absurd assertion. iTunes predates Kazaa by several months and iTunes never had any P2P capabilities.
It's not entirely absurd IMO, it could be that iTunes did so well because Kazaa, et al., had laid the groundwork for an expectation of "any tune, any time" and iTunes came closest to that?
perhaps, I think iTunes did so well because of iPods and iPhones.
People had gigabytes of free music on their computers and wanted a place to store them that enabled easy playback, hence the iPod. iTunes removed the friction necessary in piracy and priced inventory low enough to emerge as a viable alternative.
'... it's hard to decide if that new movie just out is worth spending $15 on. Might be crap.'
As well a restaurant might be crap too, or a website or mason work... look up reviews before buying.
Or don't, and watch Netflix or Popcorn Time.
The market is speaking.
Except looking at reviews for a movie spoils the movie.
You can always go by the number itself, or a critic that you trust.
If you go too a restaurant and the food is really terrible, then you can refuse to pay, send a dish back, get a reduction/waiver of the bill - even the best places get it wrong sometimes.
Anyone ever got money back from Amazon/Apple/whoever because a movie they sold you sucked?
> Anyone ever got money back from Amazon/Apple/whoever because a movie they sold you sucked?
IDK, I'll find out within 72 hours. I just asked Microsoft to give me my money back for Dynasty Warriors 9 (I'd call it broke as fuck, but it's probably subjective).
I did once get a refund request for a Toy Story 4 ticket because the director and I happen to share some names.
Where I live, our major cinema chain will refund your ticket if you leave in the first 20(?) minutes of a movie.
This doesn't really explain your position on why you don't just buy/rent $50 worth of movies per month.
edit: I don't have Spotify or Apple Music. Can you expand on this without putting it in terms of those services?
Flat fee. All you can eat.
I don't want to do the cost-benefit analysis of "do I want to spend $X for this movie?". I can afford it, I'm not counting pennies, but when I see a price figure I spend a few seconds deciding whether it's worth it or not, and sometimes the answer is NO.
On subscription services you just click and enjoy. I'm already paying for it, the answer is always YES.
But there's a limit. I will not pay for 10 different services at $9.99/mo to have access to 70% of the movie repertoire. No way in hell.
> This doesn't really explain your position on why you don't just buy/rent $50 worth of movies per month.
Isn’t their position that they’d like this thing to exist? I don’t see how you need to have a Spotify or Apple Music account to understand the argument.
What "thing"?
You can currently buy or rent whatever you want and watch it. I haven't found anything on a streaming service that isn't also for sale/rent somewhere and have found things for sale that are not available on streaming services.
If you want access to "_everything_", and are willing to pay a premium over existing services, buying/renting what you want is available today. Problem Solved, no?
Online?
I don’t really get this.
The media industry collectively thinks what they make is worth the collective cost of all their streaming services (probably hundreds of dollars a month).
They’ve spent BILLIONS making the movies that make up these catalogs.
And before you say “well they already made it back” let me remind you we’re on a tech forum, what industry makes the most money from “selling the same experience over and over again until your margins are nutty”
You feel you have the right to watch EVERYTHING they make, a subset of a few lifetimes of content just won’t do for the modern man.
So instead of sticking it to them and not buying into their game until they’re forced to reform...
you go and spend time illegally downloading their movies so that instead of getting the message “we don’t make stuff good enough to justify it’s price”, they get the message “we’re doing so well that people are stealing our content, go lobby for copyright laws harder or something Legal”.
Because more media than people who spent 100s of dollars to experience not that long ago is not ok, you need to have ALL of it. And if they don’t feel it’s in their best interests, you’re going to steal it
(and yes, it’s stealing enough with the “but I didn’t take the original”, why don’t you go copy all your employer's IP and post it on pastebin then tell the cops you just made a copy”)
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I personally pay for like, 2 services?
There is A LOT of media on there. For 30$ a month I’m getting access to more shoes and movies than cable would provide for 100s of dollars once upon a time. More than any sane person could watch in one lifetime.
Sometimes I have to forgo watching something because it’s not on the service I want. I don’t bother going to steal it. Once upon a time I was a kid with no money and no job, less impulse control and much more time to waste, so I would, let me not pretend I’ve never done it....
But now I’m an adult, I can decide not to watch something and watch something else if I feel it’s not worth my money.
If there’s a movie worth enough to me I can usually pay for access to it specifically (one off payment before someone starts waving the subscriptions are murder stick... on a tech forum).
But that’s actually never happened. Because there’s so much content there, unless you have this mentality of “I must have it all, I deserve it all, nothing less will do” I don’t see how 50$ a month of services (your cutoff) would not be enough.
> The media industry collectively thinks what they make is worth the collective cost of all their streaming services (probably hundreds of dollars a month).
Sure, they're entitled to think whatever they want. The reality is that the marginal cost of making a digital copy is near zero. Their work is widely available for free to anyone who cares to look for it. And it is extremely unlikely that the average person would ever experience any negative consequences for getting it for free.
You can think that's right or wrong or try to shame people all you want, but those are simple facts. Another fact is that for a large portion of the world, the content is not available legally even if you want to pay.
So, the content industry can learn to accept those facts and make a good service that makes some money. (Still many billions of dollars) or they can keep operating under the delusion that people should pay even more billions of dollars and get less.
The marginal cost of a digital copy of a piece of software is almost 0$
The negative consequences of just stealing it are pretty low
Unfortunately so much software has become a thin client for a fat backend, so it’s a little harder, but all said are definitely industries that pay 10,000$ a seat for software that was mostly written 20 years ago and is patched to keep it hobbling along
They’re not really going to besides waging larger and larger wars on copyright and forcing DRM
The thing is, I don’t really “shame” anyone, but I understand when “normal people” steal movies and shows
When technologists do it, it’s the biggest WTF for me.
I've used some of that $10k per seat software (AutoCAD and Revit). While that is expensive, businesses pay it because 10k is the revenue from one project using it. A very small project at that. It is also much easier to track down and sue a business compared to someone watching a movie alone in their room.
Companies that sell that software like Autodesk and Adobe also have the sense not to worry too much about individuals pirating it because more people who know how to use it means more customers later.
DRM will always fail because the content has to get decrypted at some point if anyone is going to see it.
I’m not commenting on the efficacy of DRM.
For movies and shows, to me it’s a speed bump to try and keep people who don’t really mean to steal, but would gladly copy the disk and give it to all their friends as a favor.
Gaming and software is also pretty similar, it’s a speed bump. Maybe keep you from casually copying the software onto everyone’s machine.
Denuvo showed the game industry DRM can buy you some freedom from piracy in the most critical sales period, even if only for a few days, but yeah it’s not infallible (and is sold with that caveat)
I actually feel like on commercial software part of it is it let’s the nail you with DCMA if you circumvent their DRM directly, but I’m not a lawyer and that’s just my musings...
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The thing is, they pay 10k a seat because it makes them revenue.
Bur entertainment isn’t about revenue, it’s about enjoyment.
People pay 400$ to get their family into an amusement park for one day of entertainment.
Netflix is what? 13$ a month for access to 3,000+ movies, and how many shows?
Entertainment value is not a fungible good or anything, but to me that’s a very favorable comparison.
I’ve never felt I wasn’t getting my money’s worth for the 30$ I pay to literally always have something to watch on TV...
I happily pay for Spotify.
I've done for years.
I also, less happily, pay for Netflix. I refuse to pay monthly fees for the rest of them but I'll pay to rent a movie online sometimes.
My issues with this whole thing:
- things I buy (i.e. not rent) aren't really mine and can disappear at any time if the publisher decides so (or just fail to keep their DRM servers alive.)
- massive abuse of copyright for something it wasn't meant for.
- the idea that it is OK to keep Europeans away from huge parts of the collection for no good reason.
As I've said multiple times: I'll happily pay more for media, but there is one rule
- no more subscriptions: anything subscription-based must replace one of my existing subscriptions.
- reasonable prices
I also happily pay for Netflix. And Amazon. And HBO. and Disney+. So, if something isn't on one of those services, yeah, I'm going to pirate it. I've already tithed more than enough to the entertainment industry. Most of the time the thing I want to watch isn't available on the services yet, but will be in 3-6 months. Like movies that just came out on video and they want to milk people who will pay $20 to watch it right away before it goes to all the streaming services. Nuts to that.
It’s your choice. If we were on any other forum I would get this mentality a little more but a tech forum of all places.
“I paid this one developer and this other developer and all of them are selling copies of the binaries so it’s not like each copy is worth anything anyways, and it’s ok if I steal a copy of this third developer's software because paying these developers means I deserve all the software that isn’t made by them too because developers in general want way more money than I think their software is worth”
???
It’s kind of like, most of us get to see how the bacon is made, and should get all of this nonsense about “the marginal cost of a movie” is silly. A lot of people here make very good money because 1000 hrs of development can become 1,000,000 dollars of revenue because the output of that 1000 hrs can be sold again and again and again ad nauseum.
To me the movie industry and the software industry are two sides of the same coin, if anything we have the more extreme version of their setup with much better margins.
If you want to steal a movie because you can’t afford it or you feel entitled to have “all the stuff I wanna see right now immediately how dare they make me wait for my movie that I deserve or give me the choice to pay more for earlier access so they can squeeze all the profit from the multi million dollar investment they made” and tell other people what they have the right to price their creative product go right ahead.
That entitlement coming from technologists will still get me though.
That's one way to look at it, I suppose. Lots of software that's for sale also only exists because of open source work that the creators released for free. Some of it is probably even used in the movie industry.
I'm not against making a profit and it doesn't look like the movie industry has any trouble doing that.
Entitlement has nothing to do with it. I don't believe that the movie industry owes me anything. It's just that this option exists and when they make it harder (or in some cases impossible) to pay for something than it is to get it for free, what do you think is going to happen?
Suppose each grocery story required everyone who entered to submit to a body cavity search and complete an application detailing their entire credit history before anyone was allowed to shop at the store. Meanwhile, Fat Tony has some groceries that "fell off a truck" that anyone can walk up and buy. Who are people going to shop at? Again, I'm not saying it's right. I'm just saying, what do you think is going to happen when you make it harder for people to buy your stuff than it is to steal it?
Your options are
1. make it harder to steal - which doesn't really work for digital works. This is the industry's main strategy.
2. make it easier to buy. The music industry seems to have figured this out and it's no longer worth pirating compared to simply subscribing to Spotify. Once they felt that the only way anyone should get their music is by paying $20 for a CD (which was really a price-fixing cartel but that's neither here nor there). They had to come to terms with the fact that nobody is going to pay whatever fantasy price they think they can charge when it can be had for free and the movie industry is going to have to learn the same lesson.
FOSS - fully agreed. It's at the core of many industries (movie-relevant example... guess how many encoders are based on ffmpeg? Answer: practically all of them. Patent restrictions around codecs are so complex that it takes a questionably-legal product used in quiet ways to get real business done).
At least tw0 different perspectives here I think, requiring two different thought processes.
When viewed as a collective social issue, gray- and black-market forces are part of the panoply of market forces, and that is a good thing. If every human on the planet voluntarily conformed to white market forces no matter what the terms, we would be completely, totally screwed. At the very least, the work required to tune the legal system to accommodate everyone's needs satisfactorily would produce a big mess. To some degree, it's the corruption, work arounds and back room dealing that enable the system to keep functioning, given that legislators and enforcers are flawed humans just like the rest of us.
When viewed as an individual, personal issue, we need to draw the line somewhere with our own behaviour. We need to decide when we're going to take the risk and go around the system as it exists, based on our feeling of how fair the system is, and we should consider things like what harm we're doing, and whether we're being hypocritical, as part of that. There is most certainly some hypocrisy in creating and defending IP controls on software products, but calling an open season on digital media; but it's also obviously not 1:1. I believe, morally, that it's important to really think about what the impact might be when you pirate something.
Basically I think as a participant in the system you need to be aware of both. Perspective #1 helps defuse the rage, and perspective #2 directs your personal actions.
Personally, with media, I draw the line at failing to find a reasonably-priced option. In my country, digital delivery platforms are hamstrung, and cable packages are foolishly assembled. I'm caught in a gap created by distribution contracts that mean I need to pay minimum $50/mo cable to watch the one or two shows I actually want to watch with no direct-buy or digital delivery service available. I don't accept that as reasonable, and I'm not going to get in line with it. I'd pay $20 a season/movie, easy. Give me the option and I'll do it.
But, one last note. I work in video tech, and I can assure you that the TV and movie industry is up to its eyeballs in IP negotiations, ownership disputes, technical obstacles and oppressive pre-existing distribution relationships. Content producers have to negotiate with Netflix, theatres, ISPs and cable companies, many of which are co-owned in weird ways and create serious conflicts of interest. Sony needs to negotiate with Warner/AT&T to get their show distributed, but Warner produces their own content, competing for the same pool of eyeballs, and AT&T owns massive portions of the US cable distribution and ISP space, not to mention much of the hard infrastructure those services are deployed over. It's a minor miracle that distribution rights are even negotiated successfully in the first place... I sometimes wonder if MPAA lawyers shouldn't get invited to hostage situations. So have some compassion for the corporations too, they actually can't just up and fix this thing.
The movie industry doesn't lobby because "their product is so good people are stealing it". They lobby because they can, as do other industries no one wants anything to do with.
My country passed laws to have a minimum percentage of national movies showing in theatres at any time. Lobbying has nothing to do with demand.
You’re trying to twist words by saying “so good people are stealing it” and using lobby to encompass literally every type of lobbying, which is ridiculous.
Good or bad, people will steal it because they feel entitled to it.
They lobby for things like DCMA enforcement and DRM because people steal it.
If people didn’t steal it, there would be other things to lobby about, is that your point?
I don’t think that wasn't obvious but sure.
My point is the things stealing leads them to lobby about things related to stealing, which are things that end up not being great for anyone.
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I mean to be clear, the cat is out of the bag and this line of thought is more of a thought experiment than anything.
People steal, DRM exists and DCMA exist, the status quo is set.
I don't use PopcornTime or otherwise pirate, but I completely understand the motivation of those that do. Personally, I just watch fewer movies because the value just isn't there. I subscribe to Netflix and Amazon Prime mostly because they're inexpensive and have a decent selection of kids shows. I occasionally watch a movie or TV series there, but not nearly as frequently as I did when our local grocery store offered DVD rentals for $1-2 with a large selection (much larger than RedBox offers).
These days, if there's nothing good on Netflix, I play video games or read a book because both of those offer far more value/dollar. If the movie industry offered $2 rentals for everything other than new releasees, I'd watch more movies. I'm only willing to pay $5 to watch a movie if it's a new release and I really want to watch it. I also rarely go to the theater as well because $10+ is too much for that experience unless it's opening weekend for a film I've been waiting for (we usually go on Tuesdays for the discounted rate for regular entertainment).
I wish the film industry would recognize the opportunity they have that's evidenced by projects like PopcornTime. If they make a movie platform with a nearly complete catalogue, people will use it. It's annoying to check multiple streaming platforms to see where something is available, and it's annoying to pay $5/movie to rent (that's about discounted theater prices, but without the theater experience).
Given a lot of countries are declaring the state of emergency, « state of war » for Emmanuel Macron (France), a lot of them can and will require the use of hotel, cars, or even « nationalize companies » (Italy and France). Why not also accepting that the confinement shouldn’t be an opportunity for copyright hoarders to become rich, and just temporarily allow or do nothing, so that entertainment at home be available. Perhaps even make them temporarily legal and end up with making them permanently legal.
Sometimes war-times measures become permanent (female vote in France, gun confiscation and the Tignes dam all started during the WWII) when they are good.
I've tried many times to purchase/stream films online, cash in hand, only to be denied because of various BS reasons. This is all that needs to be said about the industry and piracy.
sometimes i CAN'T buy/watch films online because they are not available in my country.
so i would have to buy the film in physical form so i can watch it.
Anyone knows what is the difference between this project and https://getpopcorntime.is ?
I know that at least one of those projects were spyware (not the original but one of its copies). I can't tell now which one was it.
I downloaded the 64bit Linux build and it has a strange executable called "payload". I moved it out of precautio and still launched the app, and it seems to work fine without this executable. What is this "payload"? Anyone know? A quick search didn't find anything relevant.
You're not the first one to notice something odd [0]
Added to the fact that you need a boatload of stuff to even build it [1], and you get an interesting cocktail of mass-exploitation.
0: https://old.reddit.com/r/mealtimevideos/comments/dulvpz/subs...
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22614247
This doesn't look good:
https://old.reddit.com/r/PopCornTime/comments/flcqsd/trojan_...
https://old.reddit.com/r/PopCornTime/comments/fknfnm/is_this...
https://old.reddit.com/r/PopCornTime/comments/fluait/the_vpn...
Anyone actually tried this update?
1. It deletes your favorites folder
2. An obnoxious blinking icon in the main page and a label while the stream is being prepared is trying to nudge you into buying a VPN service
3. The option to load subtitles is botched
Here if you want the old(0.3.x) version: https://get.popcorntime.app/repo/build/
Why 4.0 in title when it's actually v0.4.0?
https://github.com/popcorn-official/popcorn-desktop/releases...
It's rather suspicious that the macOS binaries are distributed as pkg files requiring root permissions...
Edit: the binaries inside seem OK. I assume it's to bypass the Gatekeeper lockdown when a user downloads an app file.
Just in time for the coronavirus lockdown that has the major ISPs throttling torrents to nothing due to network congestion.
Demonsaw.com
provides an IRC-router like interface that can be used to share files over encrypted and obfuscated HTTP. Give it a look if you're having torrent problems.
I am not really sure if it is the ISPs' conspiracy or that there is simply a lot more demand than supply. E.g. limited seeding a lot of leeching. Last night I wasn't able to open any of the two bittorrent catalogs that I use (PBay and rarbg).
Oh I don't think it's a conspiracy; I think it's just network congestion. Torrent traffic has been QoSed to hell for a long time (as it should be tbh), so when there's congestion it's the first thing to get dropped.
FWIW I'm getting a lot of frameskips from my video chats, so I think it's legitimately congested.
> as it should be tbh
Absolutely not. There are very legal reasons torrents are used (its great for releasing large datasets). Isps should treat all data the same.
Anyone with the "all data is the same!" mindset hasn't worked in a carrier-scale network. QoS with packet prioritization is an absolute must from an ops standpoint; otherwise your DNS queries would be prioritized at the same rate as someone streaming Netflix. Drop Netflix packets and the video quality degrades a little; drop DNS packets and you effectively have a total outage and customers are burning up your phone lines. DNS and SYN/ACK are probably the highest priority, but there are other tiers for things like VoIP, online games, etc. that have good reasons to go above "bulk" traffic.
It's more about latency sensitivity than anything; but with asymmetric connections (which many ISPs, particularly cable, are forced into for very good technical reasons) Torrents in particular can have a disproportionate impact on available upstream bandwidth. For that reason, most ISPs will crush Torrent downstream to limit upstream data rates (which they can't QoS as easily). I can't say it's the wrong call; and it has nothing to do with the legality of whatever people are downloading.
I believe most ISPs don't care if the file you download is "good" or "bad". What they probably do, and IMHO should care about, is prioritizing interactive applications over bulk downloads.
What did they change?
They likely have a release notes...
Changelog hasn't been updated in 3 years. :/
https://github.com/popcorn-official/popcorn-desktop/blob/v0....
I looked on Github, Reddit, and their website. Nothing. :/
CHANGELOG.md's last entry is
0.3.10 Beta - Popcorn Is Love - 31 October 2016
No info anywhere. Did it actually change?
Quite a bit: https://github.com/popcorn-official/popcorn-desktop/compare/...
No write-up I can find though.
What effect is this going to have on torrent swarms? It seems to me that if everyone downloaded blocks in order it would defeat the purpose of bittorrent and mean the beginning would be seeded much better than the end.
When I download it, it's blocked by Windows Defender. Does anyone know why?
Windows blocks it because the app is not digitally signed with a Code Signing Certificate ($200+/year). You can still install it if you press in the "Show more" button and then "Run anyway".
The problem likely isn't the money, but rather it would paint a big red target on their back with a legal entity to sue. And it wouldn't surprise me if Microsoft would easily revoke a certificate, even without any legal judgment.
That's the problem with code signing. It's just an attempt to graft the status quo monkeysphere onto the digital realm - you "know" the author of the code, so therefore you trust it completely, because you can sue them post-hoc if they harm you. This doesn't scale to the digital world, but that hasn't stopped these unimaginative power-hungry companies from trying to force us into it.
What’s the suspected threat name? It should say when a file gets quarantined.
Torrents are terrible for streaming unless you get invited to a private tracker, and then you end up having to share a bunch too making yourself a bigger target.
The timing is juste perfect
Or ghettoflix as we call it :D
Is this the same repo that is in Archlinux AUR?
Wow, you need npm, bower, yarn, and gulp to build and run this thing. Pretty cool, though...
Or you can just download the appropriate binary for your system.
If it's not on Netflix or any streaming provider, I have no choice but to pirate it. Plain and simple. Most media content is still outside the main providers.
Pro-tip: You can now digitally rent basically every movie from Youtube or Amazon.
Services like https://www.justwatch.com/ make it easy to not break the law. I used to use Popcorn time all the time, but honestly it kinda feels good to not steal /shrug
I don't have an ethical problem with illegally pirating content either, but it does grind my gears when people make that kind argument. Nothing is forcing anyone to illegally download Westworld. Digital content isn't essential for your well-being, so I find always find it very odd when people try to justify stealing it.
> Digital content isn't essential for your well-being
It is essential for one's erudition, which historically has been considered important for an informed citizenry that knows the good and the beautiful.
Take the mid-20th century canon of films, works by directors like Ozu, Kurosawa, Godard, Truffaut, Antonioni, etc. These are recognized as classics of film art and part of our general cultural heritage now. However, due to changes in legislation in the years since they were made, they are still under copyright, and so a person would have to spend thousands of dollars to legally obtain a cultural education that, in this day and age, ought to be available to anyone regardless of their means. A person pirating such films is not necessarily doing it for daft entertainment (because often these classics are not particularly fun and entertaining), but simply to learn and be familiar with the canon.
And before you say that one can turn to the library instead of torrenting: many countries around the world never had well-stocked libraries to begin with. In fact, in some of these same countries it can be less than straightforward to purchase the content even if one has the money to spend.
It feels good to give financial support to regressive companies trying to put the Internet back in the bottle, destroy net neutrality, push us into proprietary platforms, divide online communities based on geographic location, surveil our behavior, etc?
You and I have much different takes on what feels good.
> You and I have much different takes on what feels good.
I think virtue is good for us and thus "feels good", because that has been my experience.
I think following laws that aren't inherently unjust is virtuous. The only question is if these laws are unjust or not. (In this case I guess we're just talking about the laws of paying for goods.)
> regressive companies trying to put the Internet back in the bottle, destroy net neutrality, push us into proprietary platforms, divide online communities based on geographic location, surveil our behavior, etc
This is too vague to be compelling. At the end of the day, you are paying for content that was created by human beings. Is there a middle man? Yes. Would it be better without the middle man? Also yes. Is there an alternative? Only if we are okay with not paying the creators that put in the work to make the content. I am no longer okay with that.
For me, at the end of the day, your argument is at best pointing out a less than ideal economic system and at worst it is justifying viscous behavior that, taken to its limit, can be used to justify virtually any kind of illegal behavior.
Less than ideal != unjust.
We can agree to disagree about following unjust laws. But we are not talking about "the laws of paying for goods", rather the much newer and specific laws restricting the copying of information. These laws are hardly immutable - rather they're continually being changed to extend their length and reach!
My problem isn't based on the overall economic system itself (which has been roughly in place for thousands of years), but rather with the colonization and locking down of cyberspace by that economic system. Just a few decades ago, we had a blank slate wherein we could invent new structures and norms. Now business keeps hammering on cyberspace to make it conform to the shape of the world it already conquered. As someone who enjoyed the frontier, and dreamed of what could be built, I cannot accept that.
The "creators" that are being paid less are the large dinosaur businesses that insist on ironclad copyright and control - indies have been rolling with the punches and adapting. From what I've seen, the main trend decompensating actual creatives in the movie industry is offshoring. The laws have been bought such that businesses can directly screw over human beings without a qualm, but yet us humans are supposed to feel bad about reducing the businesses' income, in hope the businesses might harm the humans slightly less? I don't buy it.
I agree with what you've said here.
But, if there's no alternative to supporting creators (directors, actors, camera ops, costuming, set dec, etc) then I'm going to keep supporting them the standard way today.
But following the existing law doesn't mean that I can't also explore, create, advocate for _new_ technology that makes cutting out the middle man more feasible. Or heck, supporting new legislation that makes things better too.
I just don't believe that this current system is fundamentally evil, but rather just "less than great". Therefore I can't justify breaking the law in this case.
Yet you can't rent TV shows, only buy. And to buy a show episode is the same price as to rent a movie, which is 2x longer. Make it possible to rent tv show episodes, and then I would be able to rent them
BTW, I also tried to buy Harlots in Canada, in physical format. It wasn't available in Blu-Ray
There are a surprising number of movies that aren't available on any streaming platforms.
> basically every movie
I find a good 10-20% of things unavailable across Netflix + all non-subscription services.
depends on where you live.
i can't rent any movies on amazon and while youtube offers some movies, they are either subtitled in my native language (which i don't like, i prefer english subtitles) or they are dubbed (which is even worse).
Will check it out. Thanks!
Best news of 2020. Literally.
Serious question about torrents: How is this not stealing? I'm not trying to be judgemental. I certainly don't have any room to do so as I used Napster and the likes back in the day. Now with the advent of Amazon Prime, Hulu, Netflix, etc, I'm genuinely curious to know the moral argument for using services and platforms that utilize torrents to distribute media other creators are actually trying to sell?
Edit: Apparently this question has upset a good number of people. It was a genuine inquiry. It would have been nice to see your thoughts in written form instead of the downvotes.
To those that did answer--thanks! Really incredible how complicated the licensing arrangements are across the world.
We were fine for a while. Netflix killed film/series piracy for me - for a while it literally made no sense.
Then, every copyright owner realized they want a slice of the streaming cake - (HBO, Disney+, all the cable networks...) and started making their content exclusive on their platforms. Now, instead of a single Netflix (or anyone else, really) subscription I would have to pay for a dozen, that I would rarely use for more than one series/film. Or I can't even get it at all, because it's not available in my country. Or only available with subtitles in a language I don't understand. Or I can't watch it on the hardware I want to.
The music industry got their shit together and even the most copyright-paranoid artists are on Spotify, or on Bandcamp (which is subscription-free). When the film industry does the same I'll gladly start paying them money again.
Same boat, I haven't torrented a movie in years because Netflix gave me a good way to pay for them.
But now I have two streaming subscriptions and the catalog between them is still too sparse. I think I'd need 4 or 5 separate subscriptions to stop losing the "is this somewhere that I can watch it?" game.
Plus I have a VPN account that my phone and tablet are connected through almost all the time. I don't like having to leave that turned off when I want to watch something, often I'm multitasking and it means whatever else I'm doing is now connecting from my home IP address.
Can you recommend a good VPN for this use case?
I'm using PIA, but they were purchased recently by Kape Technologies so I'm not sure if I'll re-up when my subscription expires. Where I'm at right now is they're probably more trustworthy than Comcast, and less likely to do something like selling my IP address -> personal identity to advertisers.
https://www.hackread.com/private-internet-access-pia-vpn-sol...
They say it doesn't change anything, but with VPN services you really have no way of knowing how trustworthy they are.
https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/the-continually-e...
Still, I figure on balance I'm better off having my internet browsing aggregated with all the other traffic coming out of their endpoints versus coming from my modem's IP address.
i signed up for PIA using paypal (i thought i was just setting up my payment source, but they fully created an account) and they sent me an username + password in plain text via email.
i cannot trust a company that does that.
On the one hand, not great. On the other, what can someone do with access to your PIA account? I don't think that gives them any ability to snoop on your traffic, and there's no user data in the account for them to steal.
They could mooch off your access within the 5 device limit, or sign in online and pay your bill?
Mullvad is better
Never were fine in Australia. Half of the Dr. Who were absent because of "legal reasons". I can't recall now (I don't have subscription for almost 3 years) but there were bunch of TV shows I wanted to binge and they were unavailable or partially available. Big Bang Theory never were on Netflix IIRC, I had to pay for one of the seasons. I don't think anything from HBO is there and so on.
I'm not playing those games, I can torrent whatever I want to seen in better quality - with subtitles in variety of languages, HD or SD, some number of audio tracks with different translations if I wish (even though I don't need it after leaving in English speaking country for some time) and so on.
It's just shitty user experience.
Relevant Reddit comic: https://www.reddit.com/r/comics/comments/bcdlbf/hello_old_fr...
> The music industry got their shit together and even the most copyright-paranoid artists are on Spotify...
To be fair, unless their play count rivals Taylor Swift, those artists probably still aren't making much money. I have quite a few friends who are professional musicians and this is a common complaint.
Im nit saying spotify isnt a positive thing for consumers (and maybe also artists in the long run) but there's definitely a tradeoff to having one platform to rule them all.
I remember when people complained that cable wasn't à la carte. Now we complain that streaming services are à la carte. Its a fun cycle.
For whatever reason, video content is tightly tethered to copyright based gatekeeping profits. The cycle can be seen in literally every country.
Similar reasons for why Youtuber film-makers aren't treated seriously by Hollywood film-makers ie their portfolios aren't taken seriously. There's a weird snobbishness in the whole industry
Except... it's not. It's still bundled, just differently.
A la carte would be what Amazon Prime Video does with all of the stuff that isn't free--you just pay for the thing you actually watch.
In that case, what is the maximum amount of subscription fee that you are willing to shell out before resorting to piracy?
Personally, I think it should be tiered. I'm willing to pay ~$2 for older films (that's what my grocery store charged when I was a kid), ~$5 for new releases, and I expect a discount for paying month to month vs ala carte. So, if I watch one movie/week, $10/month seems fair since I'll probably watch 1-2 new releases and likely won't watch a movie every week. If I watch 2x that, then $15-20 seems fair. If I watch a movie every day, $50/month seems fair. Maybe pay extra for higher quality.
I currently pay for Netflix and Amazon prime, mostly so my kids can watch cartoons (we don't have c cable or satellite TV) and because my wife likes fast shipping (we watch way more Netflix than Amazon Prime though). I don't expect to pay more than either service to have access to a better selection of movies.
i already pay for: netlix, hulu, hbo, amazon prime and youtube premium.
so i already shell out a LOT of money to media companies, so i'm ok with pirating if a specific movie/series is not in any of those services because the owner of the movie/series i'm pirating is probably getting my money through any of those services.
You already know that answer is going to be different for everyone, so I don't know why you bother asking it.
A better question is when are film studios going to stop profiteering with their license fees and allow their works to be available on any platform (instead of meticulously negotiating with one platform and moving around every couple months).
The question opens up other questions exactly like you mentioned. For eg: If it was never about the price point, and more about it being available on a single platform, would you be fine with paying a very high subscription fee for a platform which holds all the catalogues?
Let me be clear, I torrent things too, but I've never really had an answer to the piracy question. I wouldnt just want to blame it on all the studios seperating out the catalogues into their own service.
I'd at least like to see what a more fair & open content market would look like. So far it's just anti-competitive, anti-consumer bullshit for TV & Movies. I haven't pirated a game after Steam got big. I haven't pirated any music after Spotify came around. Clearly the model works.
Literally Youtube. If google actually seriously got into the media business by buying up some smaller film catalogs worldwide(i'm sure AMC/criterion/some other country specific catalog collections will be easily purchasable for them as a starter), we could see streaming services go under overnight.
I think anti-trust litigation from old lawmakers is the only thing stopping them
Kind of an interesting angle. YouTube is limited in how it can compete against the film monopoly/oligopoly due to broader anti-trust concerns at Google
And in the meantime, you're just choosing not to consume their content, right?
I also don't think there's a justification for using it, however it's not stealing, it's copyright infringement.
Additionally, the loss is not one to one. Each pirated video does not equate to a lost sale. The fact that people imply that is ludicrous.
Man, I haven't said that stuff in like 20 years. Takes me back to naptser day. Now someone ask me if I would download a car!
Sometimes as a legal user you are faced with far more obstacles than the illegal user. All kinds of limitations that are made to curb piracy but actually just hurt legitimate users. This applies to every type of protected content, be it music, video, games, ebooks, etc.
This makes paying users less likely to sympathize with the content provider. And then you see those transparent attempts to skew numbers so they can generate some compassion ("This episode of GoT was pirated 30 million times which means we lost 30 million possible subscribers!!11" type thing) and you start having a really bad impression about them whether you pay for the service o not.
I am forced to torrent content that I already legally pay for just to get a proper subtitle or voice over for example, because sometimes I get a different experience for the same content based on the country I'm in.
Also as a legal user you might end up paying for subscription service you don't use. I'm subscribed to netflix and HBO and don't remember the last time when I used them... Now and then try to find something to watch but it is all shit.
Which is why we unsubscribed recently and read more books and play free or donation based games instead.
But that's a straight forward fix: unsubscribe. The problem is when all the legal options are real PITAs.
Not sure why this is getting down voted. Outside of official statements from the content providers, who are happy to bury their heads in the sand and pretend the flagged problems don't exist, general consensus is that most anti-piracy measures ruin the experience for legal users far more than for pirates. Pirates might accept lower standards of service given the all time low price of free. Paying customers of course have much higher expectations.
And the fragmentation of titles across platforms doesn't help one bit. We're basically heading to the same situation with today's cable business.
Personally, living in a country whose language I don't master means many of the titles in my Netflix catalogue are unwatchable. Anime being in Japanese and only dubbed or subed in the local language and nothing else. In English speaking countries the exact same titles have English sub or dubbing.
Good excuse to introduce The IT Crowd to those who may have missed it (:
You have to separate morality and legal technicalities to answer this properly.
For the legal part, stealing is for physical objects, eg. the victim doesn't have disposal of this stolen good anymore. This is not true for intellectual «property» since it's a copy. This is why copyright & copyright infringement has been created, whose original purpose was to protect authors from publisher and protect publishers that made advances to authors from other publishers.
For the moral part, you have no clear answer, circulation of free copies obviously reduces revenues of authors, but also it allows access of content to people that wouldn't have paid for it anyways, case where the loss of revenue is shaky.
To extend further, it's related to consumer frustration, while it's no question that being frustrated if you don't own a Ferrai is frivolous, if you can't afford it, you have to steal it from someone, the frustration occurred for copyright content is solely based on publisher/distributor strategy on maximizing revenue. The thing is, total revenue has a, albeit unknown, maximum theoretical possible, hence after a trigger frustration left is purely and solely a strategy to protect revenue. In the end, you get frustrated people just to have copyright holders a better peace of mind and revenue, and nothing else, so there's a moral balance to keep that you can't reduce to a black and white situation.
A genuine inquiry should get a genuine answer. Let me try to provide one.
Copyright law with its duration of 95 years after the authors death is practically universally seen as the result of money being transfer from large companies into the control of politicians that voted in favor of the law. Normally when laws get written as the result of money changing hand we call it corruption, but as the supreme court have show, that is not always so.
Some people have tried to fix the problem from within, but the US political system makes third-party initiatives like that rather hard. Internationally, the result of the corrupt process spread through international trade agreements where nations has to either implement the same laws or risk getting trade sanctions from the US, and thus internationally nations has accepted the same corrupt law in exchange for getting through trade deals.
There is no moral ground for following current copyright law except blind following. Instead what we get is individual moral decisions where for example a person might feel it being acceptable to view 95 minus 1 year after the authors death old video on youtube, but find it wrong to view a recently released cinematic movie. Each person uniquely define when, where and how they feel copyrights exclusive monopoly is morally defensible and when it is not. The result is that you get about as many different moral view on the issue as there is people.
For example, here (in Hungary) we are paying some extra 'contribution' whenever we buy storage (HDDs, SSDs, SD cards, USB sticks) that is intended to compensate artists and distributors for lost revenue because the assumption is that we'll likely store pirated stuff on them.
Therefore downloading is not illegal here (sharing is, which kind of puts torrents into a strange place).
The world is a bit crazy, isn't it.
What happened to "innocent until proven guilty"? That's just a fine where they assume you'd pirate stuff in the future!
It can be even more stupid than that. In France, where we have same sort of law, you have to pay it also if you are a business...
You can get the tax back, but you have to jump through a lot of hoop holes, and so not a lot of business do it.
It’s purely racket.
Wow. That is an interesting model! Do you know how they determine how the funds are distributed?
Sweden has the same system. You can read more about it here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy
The collected money is in general handed out by Copyswede [1], but for music it's handled by STIM [2]. STIM also supposedly handles paying money to artists played for customers at the barber, and all these special cases, and music played on TV, and so on.
I don't know for sure, but I think that the money is divided based on official sales data, so the artists who sell most also gets most of the "cassette tax" as it is known, because it was introduced as an added tax on cassettes back in the 80s.
It is not popular with consumers, since you have to pay extra for blank CDs, DVDs, USB sticks, and hard drives even if you don't use them to copy music. The tax is not to cover loss of income due to piracy, I just learned from the Wikipedia page, but to enable private copying of music without having to buy extra copies from the producer. As I said, since you have to pay even if you use the CD as a Linux boot disc, it's not very popular with the public, but a lot of people don't even know about it.
[1] https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyswede (in Swedish)
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STIM (in English)
Yes. Almost no money is given to the artists, most of it is eaten by the organization that claims to be representing them and has good political connections.
Same in Russia. But they tax not only storage but basically everything that can play music and/or video including desktops, laptops, tablets and phones.
Recently I torrented this nice little piece of art: https://www.discogs.com/Django-Reinhardt-Djangologie-1928-19.... Now, good luck finding where to buy it =). (I did try)
Spotify doesn't have even half of my collection of Johnny Horton (which I torrented as well).
Also, I'm afraid of censorship. Some of the early 20th century county singers we throwing n-words left right and center and you won't find them on Spotify. Same for Apple Music. With Apple Music it even worse. Music disappears from the library _suddenly_. Just because same shady firm has it's license expired in Australia. Internet is full of stories of people who were unable to re-download movies or music form iTunes because the right owner has deleted it from the store. No, no money back.
So the only place where I pay for music is Bandcamp, which lets you download the stuff you paid for, right here, right now in variety of formats including lossless.
The argument for piracy is always a mix between those who aren’t willing to pay for the media, and those who aren’t willing to put up with the limitations and restrictions of DRM.
Sometimes you can compromise with one side if the other is really good. Spotify is a good example, where it really is more convenient to pay $10 for every song you could ever think of.
On the other hand, there’s no similar buffet-style movie service that has more than 10% of the movies I want to watch.
It’s hard for someone to justify paying $60/month on the four streaming services (since the market is so fragmented) and still not able to watch Iron Man 2 (though 1 and 3 are there)
I don't pirate, nowadays mostly because I already have a couple of subscriptions and not enough time to consume all the content I already can.
But for me the answer is fairly obvious: availability. If video content was as convenient to consume as music, then pirating wouldn't be making a comeback. You can subscribe to all major streaming services and it's likely you won't find a given niche tv series or cult movie, unlike with music that with a single spotify sub you can listen to basically any formally published album (Ok, I know it's not strictly true, but it's closer to this state than with video)
I don't use torrents etc but to give you a customer perspective: Because of the proliferation of services and the lock-in each one of them is trying to promote, if you want to follow your favourite shows you would have to subscribe to all of them and it becomes expensive very quickly. As an European there is always the problem that some great shows that are available in the US might not be available in your country. To make mattter worse, if you're in switzerland like me you might have the option to watch a show only in German (which I don't speak) and they don't even give you access to the original english soundtrack. Faced with all these annoyances, I canceled them all. If they don't care about the customer experience I don't care about them. I use a (legal) service which allows me to watch on demand any TV show broadcast from most of European TVs in the last 7 days. It works well, it's cheap and most shows have they original english soundtrack. Some other people use torrents or dodgey streaming websites.
Which service do you use?
"Stealing" is taking something from someone. This is not stealing because you are not taking anything from anyone.
You could called it "unlicensed copying" if you want, that's legally sound.
To me, stealing implies depriving someone of something.
If I take your car, you don't have a car anymore.
If I make a copy of your movie, you still have that movie.
Arguably, you're being deprived of the money from the sale of the movie, but there are already other terms that can be used (piracy, copyright infringement).
> Arguably, you're being deprived of the money from the sale of the movie
And that's only wishy washy wish-I-had-money, nothing real. (And even that isn't really the case since sale and piracy are not mutually exclusive)
Better ease of use: I'm in France, I don't know what service has what or for how much time. Most French services will tend to propose dubbed version only, or not let me remove subtitles if I don't need them. With torrents I get access to everything on one application, with the audio and subtitle settings I want. Also I have a shitty connection so if I want good quality streaming is no-no: so I download and watch once it's done and when I want.
Edit: and for the moral part, most Hollywood people preach for communism. So let them show the way.
It isn't stealing. After you torrent something, someone else doesn't have less.
It also isn't treated as stealing by (most countries'?) legal frameworks. It's copyright infringement - and not even commercial infringement (where you are making money by infringing). Non-commercial copyright infringement isn't even criminal - it's a civil matter.
The problem is that shows/movies are spread all over these platforms, or are not even available on them. I'm happy to pay my Netflix subscription each months, but if a show I want to watch is not on it, I will pirate it. I'm not going to pay for multiple video streaming services each months.
It gets really frustrating when one service has seasons 1-3 of a show but I need to subscribe to another service to get seasons 4 and 5. I've even seen the case where season 1 and 3 are on a service but season 2 is somewhere else.
Add in the fact that these deals change all the time so season 3 might be somewhere else by the time I'm caught up and ready to watch it and the whole system is madness.
When you steal from someone, you take something that belongs to them. If someone steals your bike, you don't have a bike anymore. When you torrent, you create a _copy_ of your friends _copy_. your friend still has his copy, but now you have a copy too.
Hope that helps
For me the argument is and has basically always been availability.
I don't live in the United States and if I want to watch say Westworld, even though it's airing on the national broadcaster for free, it only does so in French, which I don't understand. There's nowhere I can legally watch the English version so my only option is piracy.
In other cases it's because the market is fragmented. Were I still living in the US, I'd happily pay $20/mo for a Netflix subscription (and do) but I wouldn't pay $10/m for each of Amazon, Hulu, Netflix, Disney Plus, HBO for American stuff plus another $10/mo for each anime streaming service that has an exclusive.
Legally, it is stealing. However, just because something is illegal doesn't make it wrong.
However, you could also think of it like the digital equivalent of sharing. If someone purchases a movie or TV series on physical disks, they could loan it to you without breaking the law. In fact, they could even make a copy of the disk and not break the law. The only way to break the law this way is by having multiple copies in use at the same time. This is just digital sharing without checks in place to make sure multiple copies of the content aren't used simultaneously.
That being said, who is really harmed when I give someone a copy for free? I'm not stealing from the content creator (I paid, after all), and I'm not selling it, and there's no guarantee that the person I gave it to would have purchased it. If the creator hasn't lost anything and I'm not taking credit for it, nobody was harmed. In my eyes, this makes piracy acceptable as long as I don't sell it.
If we didn't have such strong copyright protections, content creators would be forced to compete with piracy by offering convenience, but instead they sue. Netflix has proven to reduce piracy because they offer convenience, but that only works for content they can provide.
> Legally, it is stealing
No it isn't. If I steal your bike you no longer have a bike. You no longer have the benefits of using it for transportation, society is worse off. As you explained copyright is very different from that. So, let's not call these 2 different things the same.
Of course it is. Stealing is taking what is not given. People can play with words and logic all day but that's it. If you take something that was not given to you it's stealing. In case of torrents, the owner of the media obviously didn't sell it nor gave it.
Most likely the most legitimate reason is archiving. Streaming services often offer very poor quality for even 3 year old shows that make them look like they are from 10 years ago. Meanwhile shows from the 80s look much better as long as they are torrented.
Honestly I don't have moral problem with downloading movies that are forgotten/not available by any other means.
You can't find everything on streaming services, actually. Sometimes your only hope is to find a torrent and make a "back-up".
I wonder to what degree piracy serves as marketing ie someone pirates the film then tells three non-pirates what a good film it was, and they pay for it.
Popcorn Time or Stremio?