this post was submitted on 11 Dec 2023
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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Do I like the lease model that we have been living with for the past 30-40 years? No. I can't argue it is fundamentally broken (see "30-40 years") but it does lead to corner cases like the insanity impacting all streaming services at this point. And that is why I love "physical media" that I can rip and put on a plex server.
But I hate this "argument" almost as much as I hate "There is no ethical consumption under capitalism". It has nothing to do with either a philosophical discussion or an attempt to make things better and is just a way for people to feel good about taking the easy way out.
Because, much like with "piracy is for preservation of video games", it begins with the false premise of what the media being consumed is. We aren't talking about a book (... except when we are). We are talking about something a lot closer to a stage show at a theatre. You don't own every production of Hamlet ever made just because you bought a ticket once. Hell, you don't even own every production by the 14th Street Acting Troupe. You own that night's production where Wendy's boob popped out of her top and Sean couldn't score any blow before the show and so forth.
This argument is basically saying that there are no moral or ethical* concerns with holding up a camcorder in a theatre or outright jumping the ticket stand because you wouldn't own it anyway.
And before people start claiming that it is digital media so it is always the same, it isn't. Remember how we apparently went from Game of Thrones being THE GREATEST HOUR OF TELEVISION EVER MADE during Battle of the Bastards to it being THE ABSOLUTE WORST PIECE OF DOGSHIT EVER CREATED when nobody could see what was going on because all the blacks of the ice zombie war were crushed worse than all the redshirts Jon-boy climbed on in the previous episode? HBO Max isn't (entirely) paying for the ability to rewatch a guy fuck his aunt any time we want (heh, who remembers all the sex shows on HBO?). It is about being part of that discussion. It is about "experiencing" people who have never seen a war movie that didn't star Channing Tatum lose their mind over horror. It is about being part of the discussion on what HDR even is. And that is why a lot of film makers really dislike how many people will never see a movie in theatres and instead watch it on a cell phone screen.
But also: If you want to pirate, just fucking pirate. I have a set of "rules" that I use to decide when I pirate versus buy stuff, but I am not going to pretend I am morally righteous for having the 90s Battletech cartoon on my plex server.
Which mostly speaks to people being REALLY immature and incapable of acknowledging they do good and bad. The discussion is always "this isn't piracy" rather than "Who fucking cares if it is piracy?". Because even thinking for a moment that you did a "bad" (and then not caring) is beyond people.
As for why I wish people would reassess and actually critically think? Mostly because the bog standard neckbeard "Achshually, I am morally righteous and smarter than you" is fucking annoying. But partly because that is how you actually get feedback out there. I've gotten the Netflix "sorry to see you go, can you tell us why?" card a few times. And every time I answer a variation of "You fund awesome shows that I want to watch and I have no problem paying 20 or even 40 bucks for a season of The Last Kingdom. But I am not going to pay that every month. Which puts me into the weird case of deciding I will buy a month of Hulu instead because, even if their shows aren't as good, they have enough of them to 'justify' the month.". Which probably goes in a bin, but hopefully leads to thoughts on whether Glass Onion should get a blu-ray release and so forth.
*: Remember kids, ethics are not morality. And if you do have an ethical system that justifies this, cool. But that is the kind of thing that takes serious thought and constant reevaluation.
There isn't any ethical consumption under capitalism though.
So you're saying you want one show, and you pay subscription to see it, but then, if you want to watch it again, you have to pay subscription again, and at that point the "paying subscription for a show" model kinda breaks.
I absolutely didn't get your argument on digital media. Film is not a stage performance - the former is recorded once, the latter needs to be manually recreated every time. Every performance is a lot of labor, and it needs to be paid. Every film view is literally nothing.
And yes, I personally have an ethical system strictly opposed to this, and, really, business/corporate greed in general, and I don't think I'm alone here. And in the digital space, we can pack a punch.
"Film" is "recorded once" (not really, but that gets into the editing side of things and is too in the weeds) but re-releases have been a thing for as long as there have been films. A couple years back I read a REALLY interesting (scholarly) article discussion how a lot of the early black and white movies were edited due to World War 1 and 2 and the politics surrounding that. In some cases by the theatre themselves, which led to unique versions.
I already referenced game of thrones which was 100% about "the experience". Much like Lost and How I Met Your Mother before it, a bad ending largely soured the entire fanbase on the show. Which is why it was so interesting to go from "This is the greatest tv show ever made" to "fuck this garbage" literally within a week. If you weren't watching it at the time (piracy or subscribed), you will never experience that. Same with How I Met Your Mother where "Robots vs Wrestlers" led to a lot of people realizing how the show would end and it recontextualizing all the flash forwards... to the actual ending where now everyone was angry and hated Ted more than we hate Ross. That was more like a year (two? I forget just how troubled the last season was) but it was fascinating to watch all the diehard fans realize that The Mother was going to die (and our hearts breaking for Ted when he gives that speech about wanting a few more months with her) to being immensely angry that The Mother died... in large part because Cristin Milioti managed to live up to all the hype and we grew to love her just as much as Ted did.
Which... is theatre. We forget it, but the Shakespeare that we read in high school was actually about contemporary events of the early 1600s. So much of media is a product of its time (even most books). "Historically", this was "handled" through new releases. Maybe you first watched it as a VHS. Then you bought the DVD five years later and suddenly decided that Revenge of the Sith was actually a good movie. Then you bought the blu-ray another ten years later and question your own intelligence. And, if I hadn't picked a Disney movie as my example, you would buy the Criterion Collection in a few years and have a new experience with it. And you would be "okay" with that because you are getting different extras or visual quality and so forth.
So that is why I don't think the "lease" model precludes paying for content. Buying the VHS of Ep1 doesn't mean you own the UHD of it (damn, that is what I could have used to avoid needing to Criterion this tortured metaphor).
Where this DOES break down is with the online services either shuttering or losing the rights to stuff (see Sony and Discovery). But... even that is kind of comparable to the media formats. Who actually still owns a working VCR (that doesn't watch OAN all day...)? And, even though I can just as easily watch a DVD as a UHD, I am generally going to re-purchase "physical" media because watching upscaled 480i is not my idea of a good time and I would rather it be based off of the original film than whatever DLSS feels like doing.
Which all gets back to making things better. Rather than just say "I can't play my VHS on my playstation so I am morally righteous to pirate everything", we need to have these discussions as a society. Because the 1080p copy of Powers Season 1 that I have on my sony account is probably never going to get any better, but it is still an ongoing resource drain for Sony. And the old model of "upscale it or release new BTS footage" doesn't make a lot of sense... as we move all BTS footage to youtube anyway.
As for ethics: Lemmy is a horrible venue for it. But I will still assert that anyone whose ethical outcome is "it is good for me to pirate anything I want" that doesn't also include "because nothing I create is my own" (which actually negates this entire argument to begin with...), at best, has a low amount of ethical maturity. And those people would benefit from actually studying the various philosophies to better themselves.
I still don't get where you're going with that. Pointing out that in the past physical media did a little bit of the same, draining fans of money with re-releases that just added what's been cut or were enhanced in other ways? Then that's same as, say, DLCs: a small amount of work draining much more money than it's worth, just as means of squeezing more cash from fans while making the base thing affordable for a wide audience. It's just about maximizing profit way beyond the point of payback. Greed, essentially, and nothing else.
As per How I Met Your Mother, I kinda felt the ending to be somewhat natural, even though it seems like they didn't think it through well to begin with. And yes, it's super cruel to kill Ted's wife - she's extremely nice and suits him better and I get your feelings. But this is also a very logical plot twist, and the ending feels...like it should've been. I just knew it'd end up there.
And as per ethics, everything I produce (I work in scientific field) I hold no rights to, and they either belong to a company, sadly (on one job that actually pays me enough to survive), or are in the public domain (open access scientific articles, available for everyone in full text). I wish it would all be the latter. I do not want to retain copyright on anything I make, and I wish for it in general to be abolished. And until that's not the case, I'm comfortable breaching it forcefully.
The point is that all media is transient. Whether it is a book you own (that may have yellowed because even the hardcovers used the shitty paper) or a movie you are watching.
To put it more personally: Let's pretend that you get paid for journal publications (because it is the easiest to abstract. For something more realistic imagine I am talking about your field's equivalent of processes, equipment, etc). Your employer paid you to get four papers published last year, and you did. Awesome. Except now we are ten years in the future, you work somewhere else, and that same boss wants you to futz with the latex to change the format for a book someone is writing or update them to the web format for the journal or whatever.
You, rightfully, tell your former boss to go fuck himself and that if he wants you to do it he can pay you for it.
Except... if there is no expectation that you are going to provide lifetime support for those papers, why would he have paid you in the first place? Should have just stolen your work and stiffed you on the bill.
Same here. There is this expectation of a lifetime license of something that we have more or less never had. Even when it was just fat white dudes in wigs using a printing press.
Your analogy is not entirely correct.
As a viewer, I do not demand producers to create remakes or enhanced versions. They do it themselves - to take profits off relatively easy work, compared to, you know, producing a new great film or whatnot.
The correct comparison would be me writing a book and selling it, and then writing an appendix to this book and selling it separately with a solid price tag.
If I'm an honest author, I'd post updates freely, so that people who already own the book would have important data and wouldn't use incorrect results from there. It would affect my reputation if I'd do otherwise, too.
In my real case, I can publish an update, and yes, it will be free. This is a standard for scientific articles, open or not, and many even have easy links for version updates, containing all corrections.
And my boss pays me because otherwise I wouldn't be able to produce the first result to begin with.
Also, the very idea of digital media is to be accessible and not transient. You can save and backup data and it will be there, in its original form, forever. Updates in art are entirely optional and often unasked for.
Sorry dude, your analogy makes no sense. You're the one saying you owe lifetime support.
Sorry dude, your analogy makes no sense. You're the one saying you owe lifetime support.