Oh. Making something illegal illegal again? That’ll be effective.
this post was submitted on 03 Feb 2025
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If you read the bill, heavily sponsored by the MPA, part of it is about forcing ISPs (and presumably US based VPNs) to block the DNS/URLs of "foreign criminal" sites.
It's laying the groundwork for a Great American Firewall.
You can't legislate piracy away...
But they can make up excuses for their arsenal for whenever they want to ban a site they don't like from common eyes.
"It was banned because it was pornography"
"It was banned because it was displaying pirated content"
"It was banned because it harmed the public good"
They want control over what the common people can see, hear, say, and think.
The people who create these services will always be more clever and quick to implement workarounds than politicians. It's a futile battle.
Want to avoid piracy? Make getting things easier and more convenient.
Back when Netflix was £5-10 depending on tier, had a load of content, and an account could be shared between a few trusted people, I practically gave up pirating. Now it's £18 per month for 4K (and due to rise), and doesn't have those other positives going for it, I've abandoned it in favour of Radarr+Sonarr+Plex, and am having a better experience.
For video games, I predominantly buy from Steam, because it's a good service, and so far I have not seen any evidence that Valve are going to fuck me over. They've made gaming and all the things ancillary to it a lot more convenient. So I happily pay. If they embrace enshittification, guess what I'll do?
The only games I do pirate are Nintendo/Sega games that haven't been sold in decades. Why? Because there's no feasible other way to buy them and keep them!
I don't pirate music because Spotify. For all the issues I have with it (and boy do I have a few), it still has almost every song I search for, is fairly priced, and hasn't clamped down on account sharing in the same way Netflix/Disney/etc have. I'm part of a family where we split the cost. All the music I could possibly want for £2.20 per month? Fine by me! If that goes away, I go away, yarr harr.
Not to mention Valve spearheaded major development for making Linux gaming like 200% better than it used to be, with development of Proton and everything, and giving all those work back to the entire gaming community as open source products entirely for free, bring in momentum for an entire industry.
That's a company you support.
I'm so fucking glad Valve isn't beholden to shareholders.
This is dumb considering that these types of streaming sites are how I actually discover anime and become a fan enough that i want to purchase merch. I pay for Crunchy Roll, but sometimes I want to check out stuff from other services. If I had to rely sheerly on legal services I wouldn't watch or discover half of what I did.
Legal services are also pretty inferior. I wanted to watch A certain Scientific Railgun.. Season 1 was dubbed, but season 2 on the service wasn't... I literally had to track it down on some streaming site to get access to what I'm paying for.
I am quite fond of Nyaa :3
We only pirate TV because it's easier and cheaper. If you actually had a catch all service (like old Netflix) for a low price, people would stop. Oh wait, we had that but greed got in the way again...
I used to be perfectly happy with Netflix and Google music + YouTube Red, but corporations were too greedy
I now use a mix of free Kodi TV, patched YouTube apps, rip music off tidal, and self host media on a lifetime premium Plex server.
If you actually had a catch all service
I believe this used to be called cable tv.
But before you reply, yeah, I know cable didn't get everything. And you had to pay extra for Disney, HBO, etc. And on top of the exorbitant price there were always tons of commercials. That's all true.
But I do remember a time right around 2005, when everyone was saying "if only there were a-la-carte options, for people who only want sports, or only want movies". My point being, there's no winning and the grass is always greener somewhere.
And for what it's worth, I basically agree with you. I use Plex, I have a few friends who also run Plex servers and we all share content. That's the best catch all I've ever found.
Why just pay one service a small fee for ad free streaming, when you can pay a lot of services a large fee for ad supported streaming?
As has often been reiterated: piracy is a service problem. If what you get by paying more is an inferior service, then people don’t want to pay for that service.
100% true, haven't pirated a single game since I started using Steam and actually having a paycheck since about 10 years ago
They don’t care. They don’t want to innovate, they want to force you to pay them for nothing in return.
This falls under enshitification, no?
I miss my $8 a month google music + YouTube red… I wonder if people got to keep the legacy price for YouTube premium
Just you wait till you see the arr stack (radarr, sonarr, lidarr, etc.)
I tried Lidarr but I find that it is inconsistent enough that it is just a find-and-grab utility for me.
I much prefer ripping tidal tracks on my phone using a tidal-dl in termix and then just using a ftp to my Pi when I get home
... You know that feeling when you get nerd sniped. 😭
FWIW, Lidarr works the worst out of the arr stack for me too. I don't know if there's just not enough well indexed material in my sources or what, but yeah, not great.
If your entire experience with the arr stack has been Lidarr so far, give it another shot! Sonarr and Radarr work absolutely perfectly. It's just such a nice feeling to open Jellyfin (or I guess Plex) on the TV and go "oh nice new episode is out!"
If you're in a private tracker like RED or OPS it works very well, but I agree that public trackers are not well indexed enough
There's a part of me that has become annoyed that i'm forced to pay for a vpn to now access the entirety of the internet. I don't blame the vpn provider, though. --Nope, they are not the ones I blame...
Aren't most torrent sites not based in the US to begin with?
This is about foreign websites
It’s going after ISPs, Google, Cloudflare that allow access to them
Also it’s great to see the Democrats prioritizing this atm
Has never stopped the world bully from bullying others: https://legalnewsfeed.com/2024/07/09/z-library-administrators-flee-house-arrest-in-argentina-ahead-of-u-s-extradition/
True, but I think the world bully is about to find out that it isn't the world bully anymore now that it's bullying itself.
This is why you run servers outside of five eye countries
It is impossible to ban piracy. The whole concept is that it's not legal to begin with.
I bet Lars Ulrich is so proud that he killed music piracy back when he killed napster.
Except wait.....no he didn't he killed A service. Meaning singular. The concept of piracy moved on. We got limewire and torrents.
The ONLY thing that has slowed (if not stopped) music piracy is making the content readily and easily available in a convienent consumption method at a reasonable price.
Shocking, I know.
The invention of iTunes CHARGING money for music in a (at the time) new more convienent method of music consumption at a reasonable price did leaps and bounds more to destroy piracy than Napsters downfall ever could.
Now if only video services would learn this lession. Because it's the same lession. I don't know how they missed the memo on this.
Put your video in one centralized place. Make it hassle free to watch. Charge a reasonable price. Piracy dies overnight.
And just to prove it, show of hands. Who here would go through the effort and risk of pirating, if Netflix had everything you wanted to watch, for $5 a month? Who here would say no, and still pirate? Reply below and tell me if you would still pirate with those conditions?
But instead, netflix is pushing $20 a month, and the video hosting is fractured among multiple hosts, all of which overcharge, AND want to serve ads.
Oh hey, right on cue. It's a skull and bones flag approaching.
I would still pirate — but most normie pirates wouldn’t.
About 10 years ago, I signed up for a seedbox for torrenting purposes. USD 15/month, which was roughly the same as Netflix at the time. Since then, Netflix has repeatedly raised prices, dropped content, and added ads. On the other hand, I'm still paying $15/month for that seedbox, and they've upgraded my storage capacity and bandwidth allotment multiple times.
I would still pirate. I like to have the files instead of proprietary apps
What if they gave you the files, with an easy download button ( with rate limits on downloads per user to avoid mass abuse )? Then, Netflix is basically providing a debrid service, which many people who pirate already pay more than 5$ for. Your VPN for torrenting is likely more than 5$. It's already trivially easy to rip a movie off a website ( even with DRM ), so this is not a real content control loss for them.
If they offered a service like GOG for movies I think it would be worth it. I don't have much time for movies though so I actually will buy several films a year on UHD Blu-ray. I only really pirate films that are either out of print or not available in my country on disc.
Funilly enough as somebody who has been using the Internet since being a working class teen in a poor European nation in the early 90s and thus knowing all about pirating, GoG is what made me stop pirating games (and even after they came up with GoG Galaxy I still kept downloading offline installers, plus my purchases in Steam have always been pretty limited in comparison to those in GoG exactly because in Steam my access to install a game can be removed at any time) whilst things like Netflix never stopped my pirating of Movies and TV-Series exactly because it was a streaming service which I would have to pay forever to maintain access to the Films and Series I liked rather than a Film and Series store were I could buy to keep (and, adding to this, during the peak period of VHS tapes and DVDs I actually did buy a lot of physical media).
Anecdotal, I know, but it's funny that my behaviour over the years almost perfect matches what you describe.
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Yep exactly.
They've pushed 6+ services now so it cost that cable used to so people are unsubbing and "cutting the cord" again
Video services involve bigger files, subtitles availability, streaming load less evenly spread over hours.
But I personally think there are ways involving chunk encryption (one key for many users for the same chunk, but not the same key for everyone ; obviously in the end it's decrypted and decoded at user's machine, so opportunity for piracy is not avoidable) and something like bittorrent to make commercial video streaming both convenient for users and not such a technical challenge for distributors.
Just a subscription that had most of the things and wasn’t a straight up abusive experience would be worth a hell of a lot more than $5. Too bad it will never happen.
You mean it won't happen again. Netflix's goal was never to be good. It was to disrupt the industry. And they've succeeded; which is why everything sucks and piracy is a better option once again.
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"Effectively kill piracy" - Sure guys, this time it'll work.
Yeah because pirates are notorious for giving up immediately when you make their jobs a little harder.
Make something people want to buy. That will help more.
EDIT On the anime and manga. Quite a few Japanese companies don't or refuse to officially release stuff in the west. Most of the ones who do, get fucked with by bad localizers.
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Been sailing the seas since 98. No intention of stopping. One thing I can promise is that you can't stop it.
Pirates always...uh...find a way.
In fact, when streaming services came out and were super affordable, it actually became a bit harder to find pirated movies/shows because people actually opted for the legal option. If the government wants to pull this garbage, it'll just bring many back into the fold and make it easier for me to sail the seas.
Sounds like their strategy is to force US companies to block access to piracy sites.
I already run my torrent client through a non-US VPN so this can literally be bypassed by adding this to my prowlarr docker compose:
network_mode: service:gluetun
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