A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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Piracy is only illegal because we made it so. We can change that.
I think what we should do is to have better non-piracy ways of owning things instead of "making piracy legal" (what does that even mean?)
I think the more nuanced take is that we should be making "piracy" legal by expanding and protecting fair use and rights to make personal copies. There are lots of things that are called piracy now that really shouldn't be. Making "piracy" legal still leaves plenty of room for artists to get paid.
How do you change that without completely stripping property rights away from artists though? Not just corporate IP, but all artists?
Piracy doesn't take money from artists, just ask Cory Doctorow, a person making their living as a writer while uploading the torrents of his novels himself.
Corporate consolidation is what kills the artists. The studios make less movies per year, so the a list actors go to television and take the roles Rob Morrow used to get.
That's the neat part: you don't have to, because copyright was never a property right to begin with.
First, not only are ideas not property, they're pretty much exactly the opposite of it. I'll let Thomas Jefferson himself explain this one:
It has been pretended by some (and in England especially) that inventors have a natural and exclusive right to their inventions; & not merely for their own lives, but inheritable to their heirs. but while it is a moot question whether the origin of any kind of property is derived from nature at all, it would be singular to admit a natural, and even an hereditary right to inventions. it is agreed by those who have seriously considered the subject, that no individual has, of natural right, a separate property in an acre of land, for instance. by an universal law indeed, whatever, whether fixed or moveable, belongs to all men equally and in common, is the property, for the moment, of him who occupies it; but when he relinquishes the occupation the property goes with it. stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society. it would be curious then if an idea, the fugitive fermentation of an individual brain, could, of natural right, be claimed in exclusive and stable property. if nature has made any one thing less susceptible, than all others, of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an Idea; which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the reciever cannot dispossess himself of it. it’s peculiar character too is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. he who recieves an idea from me, recieves instruction himself, without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, recieves light without darkening me.
Second, a copyright isn't a right, either; it's a privilege. Consider the Copyright Clause: it is one of the enumerated powers of Congress, giving Congress the authority to issue temporary monopolies to creators, for the sole and express purpose "to promote the progress of science and the useful arts." Note that that's a power, not an obligation, and the purpose is not "because the creator is entitled to it" or anything similar to that.
Besides, think of it this way: if copyright were actually a property right, the fact that it expires would be unconstitutional under the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment. But it does expire, so it clearly isn't a property right.
If buying isnt owning then piracy isnt stealing
Piracy has never been theft, it has always been and still remain copyright infringement. That being said go ahead and pirate, I'm not your dad.
When record companies make a fuss about the danger of “piracy”, they’re not talking about violent attacks on shipping. What they complain about is the sharing of copies of music, an activity in which millions of people participate in a spirit of cooperation. The term “piracy” is used by record companies to demonize sharing and cooperation by equating them to kidnaping, murder and theft.
Pretty straightforward. You need to host your stuff on your own hardware, ideally. You need good backups. You obviously can pay someone to do it for you but it does add complexity. In any case, streaming services are dead men walking by this point I think.
This is worse than a streaming service dropping a show. They are removing the ability to play digital files that people purchased.
Subscription streaming where you don’t “own” anything probably has a future, but I think you’re right that the writing is on the wall for digital media purchases.
What’s funny is that’s how it started. Apple sold movies as early as 2007 before Netflix or Amazon video or whatever and expected you to host the files locally either on your computer or your AppleTV (which had a hard disk drive at the time) and stream it locally over iTunes. If you lost the file, that was supposed to be it.
Of course, you still had to authenticate your files with the DRM service, and eventually they moved libraries online and gave you streaming access to any files you had purchased.
She later said Telstra had contacted her and offered a free Fetch box, which she acknowledged was a “reasonable resolution”.
And we have learned exactly nothing here. See you in 2 years when Fetch closes down and you are not getting anything back because you actually did not "buy" those movies on Fetch but on the previous platform.
Yep, assuming this new service lasts that long. Could be a year or less.
You will own nothing and be happy.
This is why sites like lemmy are important.
We need to put an end to corporate tyranny.
Humans in power are too egocentric to not be kept in check.
Corporations had already proven they cannot be trusted with any long-term leasing or subscription long before they started passing that phrase around.
More and more it is becoming a good idea to store things on your own private equipment. If we don't demand ownership of our own possessions we will soon own nothing
i tried to get into streaming but i grew increasingly uncomfortable with paying forever as titles appear and disappear at the whim of suits. how could that possibly be a pleasant UX for customers?
i'd take the hassle of having discs or managing a server any day of the week over paying these goons for access to their files which they happily negotiate away for financial reasons. it's just a disgusting paradigm. when netflix was starting streaming, i thought (i was like 15) we were emerging into a great new age, where every show you could ever want was on one beautiful service.
now they won't even let you share accounts or screenshot the fucking show (a pig-headed anti-piracy measure which is mind-blowingly stupid given every single show on there is available for free if you know where to look ANYWAY. what are they DOING.)
fuck streaming, fuck netflix, fuck spotify. crash and burn. topple like the house of cards you are.
increasingly uncomfortable with paying forever
And paying more and more as time goes on. The thing that shits me the most is the increased prices but decreased range/quality of content. That's clearly not a business model aimed at customer satisfaction.
I download or capture everything I pay for. I paid for it, it's mine.
I need to look into capturing. Feels like a nice middle ground.
same. I buy a lot of software/games and media/music/movies, and before I buy I always make sure I can pirate it down the road if I need to. if I can't, I reconsider how much I need it. I'll switch to my pirated copy at the drop of a hat without a drop of guilt. if it has annoying or unperformant drm? it makes me sign up for an account to use my paid software on my own computer? its servers go down and it won't boot? switched.
What would it take to get a "Steam but TV/movies instead of games"? I feel like if I could see reviews of movies and I could buy them and download them and have them forever and buy them on sale and all that good stuff, it wouldn't be so bad.
How come none of the streaming services have gone for this model? Steam is swimming in money, surely this method could work?
I mean I hate to say it but if steam closed up shop tomorrow your games are gone too. You buy a license, not a copy, from steam
Yes that is true - although many games on Steam can play offline so because I download the game, I own it in that fashion. They can't take that away.
But compare with GOG then. They sell games, you download them with no DRM so you own the download essentially.
Yeah GOG is a better ownership model. Steam is not ownership
But compare with GOG then. They sell games, you download them with no DRM so you own the download essentially.
This is the model digital media should take, frankly. Anything less may as well be misleading marketing, as far as I'm concerned.
Steam really did try with the movies idea, it didn't last too long though. Licensing is a bitch to maintain.
"buy"
"own"
"piracy"
... Wait, no. Piracy is the answer!
it feels good to host a media server.
It's also a fucking nightmare when shit explodes, but damn do i feel good in every other instance.
The idea that you could trust a corporation, any corporation, at its word is laughable on its face, and yet the courts have been relying on them to "follow the rules" unsupervised for years. Now capitalism doesn't make anything that isn't designed as a piece of shit that falls apart, and everything is a lie that they're also making money from, from plastics recycling (not real and they make money on the chemicals they sell to the recycling industry) to the content you make that they get paid for and you don't.
The whole thing needs to go, all of it.
If purchasing isn't ownership, piracy isn't stealing.
You don't own anything that is not on your own system and/or without any DRM.
There are obvious responses here along the lines of embracing piracy and (re-)embracing hard copy ownership.
All that aside though, this feels like a fairly obvious point for legal intervention. I wouldn't be surprised if there are already existing grounds for legal action, it's just that the stakes are likely small enough and costs of legal action high enough to be prohibitive. Which is where the government should come in on the advice of a consumer body.
Some reasonable things that could be done:
These are basic things based on transparency that tend to already exist in consumer regulation (depending on your jurisdiction of course). Streaming companies will likely whinge (and probably have already to prevent any regulation around this), but that's the point ... to force them to clean up their act.
As far as the relations between streaming services and the studios (or whoever owns the distribution rights), it makes perfect sense for all contracts to have embedded in them that any digital purchase must be respected for the life of the purchaser even if the item cannot be purchased any more. It's not hard, it's just the price of doing business.
All of this is likely the result of the studios being the dicks they truly are and still being used to pushing everyone around (and of course the tech world being narcissistic liars).
*Arr Suite, QBT, and a Jellyfin Server. Done and done. There are scripts to set it all up in less than 30 seconds...
Don't use scripts unless you know how it works otherwise you will have trouble troubleshooting when something doesn't work. But by the time you read and understand how the script works, you already learn how to deploy it manually.
Leopards ate my face.
I never DREAMED Amazon would take away my content I bought! Just because they erased the novel 1984 off of everyone’s Kindles a few years back doesn’t mean leopards would eat MY face.
They could offer a way to download a copy and steganographically tag it to hell with your id so that they know if you distribute it. You can "loan it out" by letting friends stream off your Plex or whatever. If you start selling that streaming service or it shows up in torrents, it has your ID on it.
Boom, you own it forever and you're incentivized not to over share.
Or you know sell DRM free versions and let people do whatever, but that probably has a snowballs chance in hell.
