this post was submitted on 21 Feb 2024
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

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[–] cabron_offsets@lemmy.world 243 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Make it easy for me to get the shit that I want and maybe I won’t pirate. It’s fucking easier to just pirate shit than to sign up for a bunch of services and deal with asscunt companies. Fuck you.

[–] LanternEverywhere@kbin.social 93 points 9 months ago (4 children)

Exactly. If there was a Spotify-like service for video where i could get 99.9% of all tv and movies of all time in one place without ads, then I'd be willing to pay like 40 bucks a month, maybe even 50. But since no video service is even remotely close to that, then i just pirate instead, which provides exactly that type of service, and costs zero dollars a month.

[–] rdyoung@lemmy.world 36 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Shit dude, give me access to most things I want to watch and most of the stuff I've forgotten about and that's worth $50/month as a minimum.

I've come full circle back to wearing an eye patch. I was using amazon, hulu, hbo and paramount, usually letting some lapse or pause to watch stuff on the other ones but they have all gone to shit. It's impossible to find what you might be interested because just like netflix they show the same shows/movies in multiple categories and their search sucks ass plus they are all missing a ton of good shows.

Now I am slowly downloading shows from the past that I don't already have in my library and haven't watched in years while I keep an eye out for new shows I might be interested in. I use showrss to auto download current shows that it has in its DB to a vps and I have sync setup to mirror it to my nas so I can stream it to my TV with vlc. So much easier than opening hulu, finding the show I want to catch up on, etc.

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[–] 018118055@sopuli.xyz 189 points 9 months ago (38 children)

If buying is not owning, copying is not stealing. Simple as that.

[–] ccdfa@lemm.ee 86 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I can't find it now, but there was that one text post that went something like "1. Copying a movie costs the studio money, 2. Download a movie, 3. Make 1000 copies, 4. Studio goes bankrupt"

[–] maynarkh@feddit.nl 46 points 9 months ago

I saw one where it went:

  • Publish a copyrighted work
  • Sell it for 10 bucks
  • Have a friend pirate it 100 million times
  • Declare bankruptcy
  • Have the friend delete his copies
  • You're a billionaire now
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[–] WaylandHater26@lemmy.zip 142 points 9 months ago (12 children)

Those Ads at the beginning of legitimate copies of DVDS and movies, really bugged me, like why are you annoying the people who actually bought the product!? Also the people downloading stuff online seemed cool in those videos so I think the ads had the opposite effect a lot of the time.

[–] Burn_The_Right@lemmy.world 33 points 9 months ago

That shit bothered me as far back as in the 80's on VHS rentals. They've never treated viewers as anything other than a sales opportunity. The motion picture industry has always been disgusting and dehumanizing.

[–] ShepherdPie@midwest.social 30 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Plus they come off like those ridiculous anti-drug ads that make it seem like a single puff of weed will make you shoot your friend in the face and run your dog over. They're just way over the top to the point that they're comical and easy to mock.

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[–] hperrin@lemmy.world 125 points 9 months ago (2 children)

I would gladly pay good money to just download an MP4, but they have never given me that option.

[–] femboy_bird@lemmy.blahaj.zone 72 points 9 months ago (12 children)

Hello, yes i would like to buy high res music files, please show me a store that has a large catalog that I can choose from. Oh there are non?

I guess I'll have to look else where

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[–] MonkderZweite@feddit.ch 108 points 9 months ago (3 children)

It poses a significant challenge to creative economies worldwide, costing industries billions annually.

Other studies found, that piracy actually increases sales, offsetting the (always oversestimated) loss of revenue.

So, no, that's a lie.

[–] jkrtn@lemmy.ml 87 points 9 months ago

The real challenge to creative economies are the billionaires sucking all the profit from album sales or deleting television shows from the face of the earth for a tax writeoff.

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[–] nutsack@lemmy.world 105 points 9 months ago (4 children)

i remember when valve's steam completely killed nearly all video game piracy just by existing

[–] Toribor@corndog.social 78 points 9 months ago (5 children)

There was a golden age of Netflix where I basically stopped pirating movies and TV too.

Now streaming is a fragmented ad-ridden nightmare and I pirate more than ever before. It's not like it's free either, I pay for a VPN, disk storage, let alone the time and maintenance.

If I could buy (and actually own) high quality digital copies of movies/tv with no bullshit at a reasonable price that would be a serious value proposition that would beat out the hassles that come along with piracy.

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[–] Evotech@lemmy.world 56 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

And Spotify pretty much killed music piracy . Although you could argue they just changed who did the robbing

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[–] isles@lemmy.world 54 points 9 months ago (2 children)

To the point where a lot of gamers have paid for more games than they'd ever have time to play.

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[–] bigfoot@lemm.ee 26 points 9 months ago

This is the truth man, I will even buy games on Steam that I've pirated in the past with no intention of playing them again. We all largely stopped pirating movies and TV for almost a decade when the streaming experience was superior.

If there was a steam like service for movies and tv and music that worked on all my platforms I would pay for it just like I paid for a home server running the *arrs.

[–] prime_number_314159@lemmy.world 102 points 9 months ago (5 children)

"You wouldn't put on a tricorn hat, would you?"

I actually would, if I could find a nice one...

"...and leave your job to sail the seas?"

... That's an option? I didn't even consider-

"And you certainly wouldn't drink rum, and fire cannons, and carry a saber and tell silly parrot related puns."

buys a tricorn hat

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[–] Wahots@pawb.social 99 points 9 months ago (2 children)

We only started pirating after Amazon refused to let us play movies we paid for because our hardware was too old for their DRM. It was a 2014 PC made of recycled parts. At the time, it was less than 10 years old. We pirated the same movie and realized it was easier to find, higher quality, and surprise, surprise, capable of playing on a PC we kept out of the landfill.

When I see anti piracy measures that punish people that don't pirate, such as massive performance hits or privacy violating features, it makes me want to pirate more.

[–] Krudler@lemmy.world 28 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

720 streams run from strange websites in timbucktoo have higher fidelity than the 4K stream I paid good money for.

Here's a great price and you can share it with your friends. Wait not those friends. Wait your phone isn't authorized anymore. Okay you authorized your phone but you need to authorize it again. Okay we just doubled the price and cut the quality again. Now you can't watch the movies that you downloaded for offline viewing without an internet connection. Now your ad-free service has ads.

Netflix can take a long hard suck on my pudding factory, they're never going to see another penny of my money again, and this is from somebody that goes back to the DVD days of Netflix.

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[–] Postreader2814@lemm.ee 98 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I love it when corpos remind us that there is an alternative to purchasing their add bloated products.

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[–] SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 92 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (9 children)

I don't really understand the gender difference thing, because I would think that in general it comes down to understanding what "ownership" is and that it has been taken from us, replaced with "licensing" where we have to buy the same movie every 10 years on a new format, and now that streaming is THE format, companies have made The Producers real, where they can make a whole movie, shitcan it, and get a tax break. We're dealing with items we've paid for being removed from our digital storage boxes, because the "rights ran out." It's wild, because it used to be that you bought a movie and it didn't matter that the rights ran out you could still watch your fucking movie in your own home. Same for old video games. If you have old copies of Grand Theft Auto, you can still listen to the great soundtrack, because they hadn't stripped the music they lost licensing for out of the new copies.

I mean, going back to when the music companies were suing music fans for downloading music, the RIAA sued Limewire for so much that if the max payout was given to every rightsholder for all the piracy going on, that it would be a bill larger than the amount of money that actually existed.[^1]

When the fines for all piracy that exists would be bigger than the amount of money that exists, its clear that the system is fucking broken and has been.

Nobody respects copyright, and that started when Disney fucked us all over with the Mickey Mouse Protection Act in the 1990's.

The rightsholders did this to themselves by making it increasingly draconian.

When cops are playing copyrighted music when they're being filmed so people can't post it online without it being auto-removed for having copyrighted music in it, things are flat out fucked and everybody knows it.

It's akin to living the end stages of the Soviet Union with Hypernormalization. Everything is totally fucked, but everyone is running around trying to pretend that nothing has changed and everything is fine.

For citizens who get nothing but working themselves to death and taxes that do nothing for them, piracy is one of those small "fuck you"'s that we can give to the rich.

[^1]: "The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) estimates that filesharing website LimeWire owes it over $72 trillion dollars (£46 trillion) in damages. ... Given that the combined wealth of the entire planet is around $60 trillion (£38 trillion), the RIAA likely has no hope of securing this in damages, but believe this is what it is owed, reports Computerworld.com."

[–] TheAmishMan@lemmy.world 44 points 9 months ago (3 children)

I think its simply, at least for a while, the tech space was male dominated. And depending on the type of piracy, it requires an amount of tech skills

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[–] Crow@lemmy.world 35 points 9 months ago (1 children)

As a woman into tech I’ll chime in. We seem to have a mild case of ignorant as shit. My friends are all completely blind to tech and piracy. Now I don’t blame them because they’ve been taught by capitalist culture to care about pointless things since birth, but god does it hurt sometimes and make me want to claw my eyes out. Patience and education will solve the gap.

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[–] dangblingus@lemmy.dbzer0.com 90 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

Piracy is a service issue. Give people the option to stream all of their media with an option to download for the nerds, and sell it at a reasonable price, you will hurt piracy. Splintering all media up into a thousand streaming services and implementing black box licensing agreements is what pushes people to piracy.

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[–] badbrainstorm@lemmy.today 74 points 9 months ago (2 children)

I remember the commercials "Piracy is not a victimless crime" pissed me off so hard, and drove me to download much more than I otherwise would have

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[–] AFC1886VCC@reddthat.com 74 points 9 months ago (1 children)

People who bought the movie seeing anti-piracy ads: 🤡

People who pirated the movie not seeing anti-piracy ads because they've been cut out: 😎

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[–] WeirdGoesPro@lemmy.dbzer0.com 70 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (11 children)

I’m suspicious of the idea that women respond favorably to those notices.

“You wouldn’t download a car…”
Women: Gee, officer, that’s a good point.

Riiiiiiight…

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[–] BrianTheeBiscuiteer@lemmy.world 67 points 9 months ago (1 children)

You wouldn't break into someone's house and smash the DVDs they legally bought over the years would you?

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[–] reverendz@hexbear.net 61 points 9 months ago (1 children)

You know what reduces copyright infringement? Making content available, affordable and accessible.

In the golden days of Netflix, I hardly torrented anything.

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[–] 01189998819991197253@infosec.pub 61 points 9 months ago (5 children)

You wouldn't shoot a policeman. And then steal his helmet. You wouldn't go to the toilet in his helmet. And then send it to the policeman's grieving widow. And then STEAL IT AGAIN!

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[–] lightnsfw@reddthat.com 54 points 9 months ago (3 children)

"oh, right. If I had just pirated this my content wouldn't be delayed by these stupid piracy warnings."

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[–] lvxferre@mander.xyz 52 points 9 months ago (5 children)

I have two hypotheses to explain the gender gap.

1. The effectiveness of the threats is inversely proportional to the tech expertise of the person being threatened. And your typical woman knows less about files, piracy, internet and the likes than your typical man.

If this hypothesis is true, then splitting cohorts based on tech expertise should show a smaller gap between men and women.

2. Society trains women and men to react differently to threat. In simple words: men are expected by society to fight back, while women are expected to passively accept the threat and play along.

If this hypothesis is true, you should be able to see and measure the different answers in other situations that don't involve piracy.


With that said, "perhaps" those anti-piracy messages would be more effective if they didn't rely on bullshit, to the point that sounds a lot like "I expect the viewers of this message to be both tech-illiterate and gullible".

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[–] rainynight65@feddit.de 46 points 9 months ago (1 children)

No shit. How have they not figured this out 15 years ago when every DVD had non-skippable anti-piracy messages?

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[–] Allero@lemmy.today 40 points 9 months ago (11 children)

The conclusion doesn't follow the study.

Threatening messages decrease piracy by women by over 50%, while increasing piracy by men by 18%.

So, unless there are three times as many male pirates as female, those messages are effective at reducing piracy.

[–] Sir_Kevin@lemmy.dbzer0.com 41 points 9 months ago (8 children)

I would suspect there are many times more male pirates than female.

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[–] Aggravationstation@lemmy.world 40 points 9 months ago (4 children)

We had an ad that actually said "piracy funds terrorism" here in the UK. Made me laugh my arse off.

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[–] medium_adult_son@hexbear.net 34 points 9 months ago (3 children)

Men would literally rather maintain a seed ratio for private trackers and operate a seedbox than pay for movies.

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[–] setsneedtofeed@lemmy.world 34 points 9 months ago (3 children)

You wouldn’t download an anti-piracy message.

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[–] WatDabney@sopuli.xyz 33 points 9 months ago (4 children)

Fuck you I won't do what you tell me.

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[–] TakiMinase@slrpnk.net 30 points 9 months ago

It's actually advertising. "Ha, that's right, I can just clone the files."

[–] TankovayaDiviziya@lemmy.world 30 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (2 children)

You mean to tell me, people have "you can't tell me what to do" attitude, especially among men?

I only torrent if the show or movie I want to watch is unavailable on Netflix, and I don't want to pay for subscription to another streaming service if such shows are available in those. I'm not made of money.

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