Although I am a customer of some streaming services (they are convenient and have good and bad stuff), it is often nice to just get a file for a specific song or movie - and that is most convenient via torrenting.
People do sign up for streaming services, but not for like, 10. Furthermore torrenting got really convenient and is very fast with adequate Internet (let's say 10MByte/s), so you get a decent quality movie in under 5 minutes (obviously only if there are enough seeders - but the availability of torrents completely dwarfs the availability of streaming providers - if it's really unpopular and maybe a little bit older you just won't find it on streaming services).
Beside the fact that BitTorrent is an interesting protocol in itself, imagine just how much simpler Netflix or Spotify could be implemented, if we wouldn't stream DRM encrypted blobs, but download files? You just need many big fat file-servers and put your media there - if we wouldn't have DRM (AFAIK all streaming providers enforce DRM), this is technically a solved problem.
As a streaming industry software engineer: File based streaming is done not for DRM but because of distribution cost and user experience. A segmented ABR video delivery massively decreases CDN costs (which is why Youtube, which is drm free does it). Video startup times, seek times, thumbnail scrubbing, fast forward, clip previews, ad insertion and many other things don't work in a file based experience.
In addition subtitles, secondary audio, descriptive video, and multi-view video etc. are all things which we mandate by law which do not work well in a file base expierenced.
Peer to peer as a distribution method is not only know, but there are plenty of providers that use peer to peer like streaming setups (see https://streamroot.io/streamroot-dna/). You may be using something like BitTorrent and _not even know it_.
Distribution is 1/10th the story and DRM is only a small part of it as well. BitTorrent does nothing to solve the other 9/10ths and removing DRM doesn't either.
> Video startup times, seek times, thumbnail scrubbing, fast forward, clip previews, ad insertion and many other things don't work in a file based experience.
Not a single one of these things is true. In fact, file-based delivery offers a superior experience in several of them with proper implementation. Streaming is popular because it lowers distribution costs, decreases piracy, and allows rights holders to pull content whenever they want.
Personally, I hate streaming. Buffering sucks. Bitrates suck. Audio quality sucks. Never knowing how long something I like will actually be available sucks. It's just an all-around bad experience if you care about your media.
Video startup times are kept low in modern clients by starting at low bitrates and then seamless adaptation up. This is very important for advertising companies, social media, live streams, etc. Every second of startup time cost massive user loss in live streaming (this is well researched and documented). Additionally streaming protocols (HLS/DASH) force files to be encoded such that a full download is not required for a decode to happen. This is not a requirement (and pretty rare unless you know what you are doing with an encoder) for file based workflows.
Fast forward for low power clients relies on an "iframe only" track as there decoders can't do many x realtime decode. This is not present in modern file based work flows.
Seeks use the same startup/segmentation requirements as video startup.
Thumbnail scrubbing requires a thumbnail track and is not supported by file based workflows at all.
Clip previews on sites load at low resolution/bitrates and can be poped up to "full resolution" via ABR. Doing a preview of 10x 4k streams without abr wouldn't work even on a modern gaming rig.
I'd love to hear how you'd do SSAI on top of a file based workflow.
You could of course build a "file based" implementation that had all of these features, but you would just be rebuilding DASH or HLS.
I'd love to hear how you'd do SSAI
on top of a file based workflow.
Given that this is a discussion of Netflix and Bittorrent, and the popularity of ad blockers among HN readers, I think the answer to "How would you do server-side ad insertion" is "I would accept losing that feature"
Popular video file players have supported generating iframe tracks for fast forwarding and thumbnail scrubbing for many years now, is there something about the way eg MPCBE and PotPlayer operate that is somehow unreasonable?
It's terrible performance on a power limited devices. It either burns up your battery or is unreasonably slow. Particularly when the source stream is high resolution or complexity.
HLS and DASH, or any other protocol along their lines (like what youtube used long ago for own HTTP streaming) are still completely inferior to proper streaming protocol on latency and such. I'd say plain "seeking over http" with range requests does often work with lower latency than best HLS/DASH servers on SSDs.
A proper udp based streaming of course tears HLS to pieces
> In addition subtitles, secondary audio, descriptive video, and multi-view video etc. are all things which we mandate by law which do not work well in a file base expierenced.
That's just not true - VLC has many more features than all the web-based (or "app"-based) popular streaming players. Granted, I checked and my VLC does not have "thumbnail scrubbing", but although that is nice, I don't think this is a big deal and if it's really popular, it will be added to VLC (or it may already be there, I did not check).
I'm a big fan of torrents and would prefer them to streams! I'm a bit of a data hoarder. But there are clear reasons why Netflix et al don't simply have you downloading massive files. It would definitely be simpler, but that doesn't mean it's an adequate engineering choice. Lot of smart people working there and they don't jump through all those extra hoops just for fun.
1. You can't play a torrented file until the download is 100% complete. (Well, maybe 95% complete, depending on how tolerant you and your software are when it comes to malformed files)
That's the way it was designed to work. Otherwise, the bits at the beginning of the file would be much more common amongst your non-seeding peers and the bits at the end would be much rarer amongst your non-seeding peers. Your downloads would start crazy fast and would get progressively slower.
Some clients let you abuse the protocol and "stream" torrents sequentially, but if significant percentages of torrenters (such as literally every Netflix user, in an imaginary world where Netflix simply served everything via torrents) did that it would be an issue.
That's a great way to deliver big files in their entirety via P2P, but that is pretty much the pathological opposite of what is requred for streaming.
For streaming you obviously need that sequential access. You need to optimize for the beginning of the file, since people want to start watching right away. People do not want to wait 60 or 30 or even 10 seconds for a YouTube vid to start streaming.
2. Think about your actual viewing habits. How many times have you watched the first 1% of a video on YouTube or Netflix, and then decided to watch something else instead? Even if we (probably generously) assume most users watch an average of 50% of a given video (I suspect it's much less) that's still 2x wasted bandwidth per video, on average, if video providers blasted out entire files. Netflix's infrastructure (or rather, their AWS monthly bill) is massive already. Imagine it being asked to blast out 2 or 5 or 10x as much data per video as it's already doing.
3. There's also the rather important matter of many (most?) playback devices not having huge gobs of local storage with which to hold complete movie downloads. I've got probably 20TB of hard drives scattered around this place, but that's not the norm.
4. Can't adapt to changing bandwidth conditions by scaling video quality up and down midstream. Personally, I wish I had more control over this as a customer, as sometimes I'd rather just wait than watch a compromised stream, but Average Joe is not going to want to muck around with that sort of choice, or even understand what it means.
Of course you can. Every modern BitTorrent client allows you to download file pieces by their order. IIRC it has been a solved problem for at least 8 years.
That is just not true, ever since PopcornTime has shown us that getting pieces in order is a viable strategy, especially at relatively large scale (for the BitTorrent network). There hasn't been any significant shortage of availability linked specifically to that way of downloading.
You're the seeder. Initially you're the only one with all 100. And everybody's gonna download things sequentially.
Imagine 300 peers grab block 1 from you. Gonna be pretty slow, each peer gets 1/300th of your bandwidth.
Imagine those 300 peers finish block 1 and move onto block 2. Same bandwidth crunch. Although new peers can at least get block 1 from that initial cohort of 300 peers. But nobody can blocks 2 through 100 from anybody but you. Not ideal.
Now repeat the process for 3 through 100. You're gonna be the bottleneck for a loooooooong time for those remaining pieces.
...
...
...now imagine we do it differently. Those 300 peers each grab a random block. This part's just as slow.
But once they have their initial randomly-chosen blocks, our bandwidth explodes. Each of those 100 blocks is now available from ~4 sources (you, and roughly 3 others). And you could even log off at this point, since there is a complete (distributed) copy of your file out there.
As more blocks are exchanged, the effective aggregate bandwidth rapidly increases even farther.
You are assuming all the peers start at the same time. It would be more fair to assume that the peers start regularly. In this case, the order does not cause issue.
But then you are assuming that people will seed for an considerable time (more that a few minutes) after watching the stream. If as many people do they do not seed then the last block will forever only have one seeder. (which would at least be the case for the last scene of the last episode of the last season, a point where you might not like buffering)
There is a fundamental assumption underlying this topic, are the user expected to be on desktop or mobile (including many laptops)? If the objective is to provide high bandwidth then mobile users might see a significant increase in battery and disk usage.
not saying it would not work, I actually like the idea of more peer to peer networking. But as the market is clearly focused on low consumption user devices with commonly little drive capacity seeding would be a damage to UX.
Bittorrent tries to maximize the benefit of its P2P nature by not sending the same blocks to more than one peer.
i.e. I'll send block 1 to one peer, block 2 to another peer. Then I can send blocks 3 and 4 to them (respectively), while they each send each other blocks 1 and 2.
If the protocol does not require it to be downloaded in order (I don't know much about the protocol), then presumably you should also be allowed to disable that feature if you do not want to play back the file immediately.
"You can't play a torrented file until the download is 100% complete." Doesn't it depend on the file format in use? Some file formats are streamable, and in that case if the file is being downloaded in order then presumably it can be played (assuming the torrent software stores the file in a streamable way, and the playback software is capable of working with a file that is not yet complete but will get filled up over time).
(In the case of ZIP archives, 7-Zip can't open partial files, but bsdtar can. Although in my case it was from a damaged floppy disk rather than torrent, but the same thing would do, if you are downloading ZIP files from torrent. But if you are downloading music, then presumably bsdtar is irrelevant.)
> 1. You can't play a torrented file until the download is 100% complete. (Well, maybe 95% complete, depending on how tolerant you and your software are when it comes to malformed files)
Theoretically, yes. But in practice, especially with "modern"/high-speed internet, I can open my torrent in VLC after the first few MB are present on my computer and read the entire file as it comes in, without me the user encountering stuttering or buffering of any kind.
In effect, from the user's perspective, you're streaming the torrent - without running into the often present decrease in quality from the "traditional" stream's encoding.
Why do you say subtitles and secondary audio (I assume you mean multiple language tracks) don't work well? I've downloaded files with multiple subtitles and audio tracks, which VLC makes easy to switch between.
Admittedly, many/most torrents don't offer these but that doesn't mean they can't.
Subtitles are not a burden; downloading a single torrent with a dozen subtitle tracks adds negligible bytes to the overall download size. Audio tracks are a tad rougher; the good torrents come with multiple tracks, but you are downloading all audio tracks even if you only play a single language–and the size of those audio tracks is not as negligible. Most people with large or unlimited bandwidth simply don't care about "paying the price" for multiple audio tracks; it takes a few extra minutes, at $0 additional financial cost.
The rest is your parent justifying their job/industry as if they're a Godsend–perhaps as compared to cable? It's an indefensible position thus far. The streaming services are all trash with pathetic bitrates; all streams average the same ridiculously low bitrate over the entire stream, without accounting for dark scenes that require orders of magnitude more bandwidth. Every Netflix (and competitors') 1080p streams with dark scenes are unwatchable. It's highway robbery to deliver what looks like 180p frames for a 1080p stream. We're supposed to be at 4K these days, yet they can't even deliver acceptable 1080p. Until the streaming services are willing to stop compressing everything far beyond watchable levels, they don't deserve anyone's business. Netflix, I believe, averages ~3-5 GB for a 90-120 minute movie? That number should be, at least via opt-in to those with the bandwidth for it, 20-40+ GB.
I don't necessarily expect fully uncompressed Blu-ray quality, but the standard should be to deliver something watchable, without banding artifacts. At a minimum that would mean massively variable bitrates, where the highest bitrate of a stream should be allowed to be 10-20x+ its minimum bitrate. Compressing a 60+ GB original file into a download of than 5 GB is flat out unacceptable and unjustifiable.
Netflix and other (similar) streaming services which user per-title encoding technologies deliver a harmonic mean PSNR of greater than 45 and greater than 94 VMAF on their highest rendition, which most well connected users pull. This is visually indistinguishable from a lossless encode.
Complaining about the _size_ or _bitrate_ of encoded file isn't worthwhile. Encoding technology has advanced substantially since blue-ray days and we simply no longer needs the 40mbps bitrate.
Indeed HEVC can offer a mathematically lossless encode at around 90mbps for most content.
I'm sure you're very knowledgeable and correct about a lot of things, but where your argumentation falls down most is user experience.
A concrete example: You say here that what Netflix provides is "visually indistinguishable from a lossless encode". Try actually doing this with an open mind and then make this claim again. It was definitely not the case when I last tried it (very recently).
Argumentation of this nature is sort of endemic in the tech industry: "You think you see or experience this, but I know what you see and experience and you are wrong". It happens in discussions about battery life, visual appeal of different encoding options, basically anything which is at some point subjective and while the people claiming to see a difference could be (factually) wrong in a lot of cases (I often cannot tell), it is very arrogant to sit/stand there and tell them that you know better than them what they see.
But what about when it has been tested and proven that people cannot discern the difference? I don't know if this is what was done with the per-title encoding that the parent comment was referring to, but I know it is the situation with audio. So many audiophiles swear they can hear a difference between FLAC and high quality VBR MP3, but it has been repeatedly demonstrated that, when presented with both, humans cannot distinguish them better than chance.
> But what about when it has been tested and proven that people cannot discern the difference?
The way people perceive (and how to measure it) is in fact not a solved problem. There are studies done and we can often say with a high degree of certainty that something is probably not visible/distinguishable, but claiming something like that for everyone is too strong and also misrepresenting the state of our learning.
Huh? Open Netflix and play any recently added 1080p stream that contains dark scenes. Those scenes are literally unwatchable. I don't mean "not perfect". I mean they look like they were encoded with a 256 color palette. Bitrate is what matters–even with current codecs used by streaming services–and they do not provide something watchable.
VLC works for the subset of subtitles you, an English speaking user, uses. VLC subtitle support does not support things like ASA or EBU subtitles which are used in other parts of the world. In addition rendering of those subtitles is very constrained. These can be added or configured of course.
Secondary audio is not only additional languages but things like descriptive video services (narration for the blind). VLC does not generally support having multiple active audio tracks without flagging things on the command line.
Arabic/chinese/japanse subtitles work perfectly in VLC work perfectly and look much nicer tahn on Netflix for instance.
I have never seen descriptive video services in any streaming service so I very much doubt it is a major issue, and even in that case why wouldn't you be able to mix it with the main track in a separate channel (which is what is done on TV, as TV does not support multiple active tracks either) ?
Even so, being able to mix the premixed descriptive video track with the normal audio track may still be helpful to users who want different mixing levels than what they used (because sometimes the music is too quiet, for example). (I don't like descriptive video so much myself, but some people do use it, and so may wish to alter the setting.)
Subtitles, secondary audio, etc can work in files if those things are encoded in the file. Something like the television captions could be work and then the playback software can be configured what fonts and colours to use to display them, or to not display them at all, and possibly implement stuff such as caption scrollback that the provider did not put in, even.
Still, there is many reason for having the streaming, although it should be a open protocol and not too complicated. And then, if you write a client software and program it to save the file to disk, it can do that too, possibly during playback, and you can program in other stuff too if you want to do.
I thought of idea of Live Audio Video Protocol (but have not actually written any part of it yet, but have some ideas about it), that you can use Ogg streams and you can initiate with file selection, format/quality negotiation, etc, and then receive the stream but you can also send commands to select a channel or subchannel, pause, seek, request data, rate of keyframes (if the server supports changing this, which it might not), and change other settings.
(Actually, I find a few problems with Ogg, and everything else is too complicated, so I made up something which is slightly more complicated than Ogg but not too much, which is called GLOGG; it is mostly like Ogg, but uses UUIDs to identify codecs, allows identifying how individual streams are related (the relation codes are specific to the codec, and are not defined by the container format; you can also specify if a program that does not understand it should ignore it), and a few other things, but still simple compared to most other container formats.)
And about ad insertion, they do that on television without any problem, so I don't know how that is a problem any differences whether it is a stream or file. (Although sometimes they put stuff within the show itself and damaging the picture, they should not do, but that is only my opinion and is unrelated to the protocols.)
> In addition, subtitles, secondary audio, descriptive video, and multi-view video etc. are all things which we mandate by law which do not work well in a file base expierenced.
Since when are subtitles mandated by law? "Multi-view video"? Maybe I'm just missing something, but I've never heard of any law mandating any of the things you listed above (except maybe from a government-funded project, but I'm not sure either, that just seems more likely to require it).
That's pretty crazy. I understand "reasonable accommodation", but doing that for so much content is beyond. Better most of the population gets it that no one can because a few edge cases can't consume it normally. I understand the need for wheelchair ramps, but this is like saying that every building that doesn't have one must add one or be torn down.
P2P solves it. Just not the payment side. Only if one can pay.
I do not even mind it is drm as long as I can get a good quality one in 10 minutes. Even if I contribute bandwidth (as long as controller and during my download) and paid.
There is always someone not paid. But it is those who can and willingly do which oddly leave out. Like Mp3 in 1990s.
P2P could have totally transformed the industry if it had worked out a way to pay creators - especially niche creators and beginners.
It would have owned discovery, which would have badly damaged the big studios. And Netflix would probably have never happened.
It would have been a similar story in music.
But P2P was always about people who think a file is a file is a file, and creation costs are an externality, which can be ignored as irrelevant.
So now we have TPB limping along, and new creators are mostly owned by YT - which is legendary for draconian application of copyright in the favour of fellow corporates.
> Video startup times, seek times, thumbnail scrubbing, fast forward, clip previews, ad insertion and many other things don't work in a file based experience.
I use to believe that Netflix or a similar service could be a serious competitor to piratebay and other torrent sites. But :
- they all have rolling and incomplete catalogs. Pretty often I want to watch a duo or trilogy of movies. Only one of them is available on netflix, or I start watching a serie and it gets removed from their catalog.
- I saw the Lord of the Rings on Netflix. I thought it would be great since I had only watched it once in a theater. But the version that was there was just Netflix's version. Not extended cut, not director commentaries, not bonuses. Just what Netflix gives you and that's it.
- Maybe that's just me, but most of the new Netflix produced content seems to be of lower quality than what was launching 2 or 3 years ago. It seems that Netflix is focusing a lot more on delivering tons of original content even it means having duds.
Bitorrent does not have these issues. Pretty much all the movies are there, in whatever language and cut I would like to see.
The irony is that I am ready to pay for a streaming service, even more than what I pay Netflix if necessary but still, while it might be more convenient to just push the netflix button on my remote, it just not up to the task compared to torrenting.
Out of curiosity, who are the people who want DRM? I understand that big media producers want them, in some misguided attempt at protecting their IP, but is that it?
I guess people would even pay for Spotify, if it's DRM free (which means the stuff on it can be copied), but that is still considered "radical" (in the Overton window) for shareholders of media distributors.
That "Save your music offline" is a feature in 2019 is ridiculous.
Fuck yes I'd pay for a drm free audio service. Any competitor of Spotify's that offers this would instantly get me as a customer - assuming, of course, they have a similar offering to Spotify. Spotify is already mediocre compared to Grooveshark and YouTube, it really shouldn't get worse than that.
Yes but protecting their IP is futile, therefore DRM primarily targets legitimate users. The idea is to have complete control over the user experience. You can only watch movies on approved device X in approved app Y. The media companies can then use DRM to put hardware manufacturers and software developers under pressure and order them to do whatever they want.
>Furthermore torrenting got really convenient and is very fast with adequate Internet (let's say 10MByte/s), so you get a decent quality movie in under 5 minutes (obviously only if there are enough seeders - but the availability of torrents completely dwarfs the availability of streaming providers - if it's really unpopular and maybe a little bit older you just won't find it on streaming services).
Small nit: with that Internet speed you could only download a 3 GB file, which is definitely not enough for a quality film. Even iTunes, which is kind of infamous for how badly their films are encoded, is usually bigger than that.
The big picture though is that it really doesn't matter anymore because quite a few clients now allow you to download the first 10% or so of the file first, so you can start streaming it instantly. There's no reason a for-pay streaming service built on to of bittorrent wouldn't do the same.
You need 4GB/hour, to achieve NTSC quality (640x480@32bit video + 44Khz audio) DVD bandwidth.
A DVD ISO rip of a 2 hour movie usually clocks in at 8GB, since a dual layer disc can store 4GB per layer.
The expanded LOTR trilogy needs 2 discs per movie, no matter what definition because each break the two hour mark, and even blu-ray can't fit long movies onto a dual layer disc for its format in HD.
>You need 4GB/hour, to achieve NTSC quality (640x480@32bit video + 44Khz audio) DVD bandwidth.
That's going to depend entirely on the codec. MPEG2? Sure. With H.264 a 4GB 720p rip from a Bluray is going to be much better than anything you can get on a DVD.
>The expanded LOTR trilogy needs 2 discs per movie, no matter what definition because each break the two hour mark, and even blu-ray can't fit long movies onto a dual layer disc for its format in HD.
I'm pretty skeptical of that. Regardless of what media LOTR actually comes on, the extended cut of Fellowship would have a bitrate of ~29 Mbits/sec on a dual-layer disc. That's entirely acceptable, if not exactly ideal. And I'm not sure what the "two hour mark" has to do with it: Fellowship is closer to 4 hours than 3, and there are tons of two hour long films that come on a single Bluray disc.
Yify 1080p rips offer great quality for 99% of the folks out there (ie 55" screen with nice B&W speakers) and yet they are usually under 2GB. No disturbing encoding artifacts, pixelation in fast scenes etc.
You really don't need more. And if you do and have enough computing power, h.265 goes even further in smaller package.
They achieve that by discarding huge amounts of detail from the image, compare a yify 1080p to a well made 576p encode and you may find them less acceptable. They look terrible to me.
honestly if Yify is transparent to you, more power to ya. you'll save a lot of disk space. I wouldn't watch a Yify encode on anything larger than my 13" laptop.
if you want to ruin yourself, try grabbing a Sparks and a Yify encode of your favorite movie and try watching one of the dark scenes in both files. the difference is plain as day on my 27" ips panel.
Honestly I think the situation is even worse on a laptop. Unless you're pretty wealthy, you and probably most people you know have a TV screen that's small enough and far enough away from your couch that your laptop sitting in your lap actually beats it in pixels / degree. I've got a (old) 50 inch plasma set, and since I'm not sitting 4 feet away from it my laptop easily beats it.
On the other hand if you really can't tell the difference between a 2 GB encode and an average sized encode, say 16 GB, it's a good hint to make an appointment with your eye doctor. (I'm nearsighted, so I can't even tell 576p from 1080p on my TV without glasses.)
Maybe the society has to finally adapt & embrace to the way things are going in the last 20 years: music stars to earn their money in the concerts they sold out due to "piracy" and not from selling CDs, movie stars from royalties paid by subscribers of Netflix and HBO and other such services, or even monetize their popularity directly from endorsing products.
Software developers seem to be the first to adapt: you can't pirate a SaaS or a cloud. One can try and copy it, but will be always behind the first moved and the original creator, because they always seem to have good ideas.
Equating IP with real estate is bad for the society: why would someone keep producing and keep performing if they made a hit with a song, or a movie, or a game?
It's not as if Netflix isn't trying, it's just that the movie industry as a whole is determined not to cooperate.
Can you imagine a music industry where, in order to listen to new releases, you are required to go to "listening parlours", or wait for radio, CD, streaming release|?
Honestly I feel like Netflix has given up and just joined the crowd. As they lose non-original content they're slowly morphing into a cable channel like Bravo.
They no longer listen to customer feedback. Their categorization and search get worse by the day. They refuse to add an option to disable the autoplay previews that no one likes.
That'd all be ok, albeit disappointing, if they were still charging $8 a month. But they keep raising prices like Comcast or AT&T each year while the quality declines or stagnates.
They're running the Amazon / Apple playbook in media.
(1) Start as a service provider, brokering sales from legacy producers who don't yet have distribution through this new market, (2) pivot to original supply, as legacy producers recognize how much money stands to be made and stand up their own distribution channels, (3, optimistic case) become so large that producers are forced to renegotiate with you, from a weaker position, because they must have distribution on your platform.
I don't think they're going to corner the market like Amazon or Apple did, as they lack the moats (respectively a hyperscale logistics system and first party hardware).
I'm kind of surprised Netflix isn't cross-licensing their back catalog to alternate channels. E.g. trading rebroadcast rights to the first season of Stranger Things to Comcast or a cable network in exchange for {insert popular program}.
That feels the most like an analog to Amazon Marketplace (context: remember, there was once an Amazon without third-party sellers).
That doesn't excuse the decline of their UX. They are adoptingany of the tactics and antipatterns used by other media companies that sow the seeds of discontent with their product.
Netflix's goal with entertainment is to monopolize your free time. Its why they are willing to promote binge-watching, its why they consider games like Fortnite to be competitors in addition to (and in some cases more than) HBO and Hulu.
Their UI is now meant to hide their complete lack of content.
They lost all the big catalogs and deals as Fox, Disney etc. ended their licensing deals. And even though they’ve pumped billions into original content, this can’t make up for the hundreds of titles they lost.
So, the new UI is meant to make you overlook all that and make you watch Netflix original content. To quote myself [1] their selection is ridiculously tragically bad.
> They're running the Amazon / Apple playbook in media.
I'm not sure how this is the Apple playbook, unless you count podcasts (which they've never had an option to charge for) as Apple original audio content, or the upcoming Apple TV+ as a 15 year gap between selling third party video content and providing their own.
The problem for me isn't the old ones - is the new ones. I want to see the new movies at my house. Yeah, there are films that I'd like to see at the cinema, but those are less than 5 per year. But if I could pay to watch a new film in the comfort of my home, I'd do it. As I can't, I'll probably download it for free.
At this point is feels like their goal is to get me to pirate as much as possible, lets see my anecdotal data point:
Music - Tidal covers about >95% of my music consumption.
TV shows - I have netflix and and prime, these cover maybe 75% of my tv consumption.
Films - Going to the cinema covers 10-20% maybe? I go to the cinema about 5-10 times a year and I pirate the rest because I don't have a good enough service to get those from legally.
Criterion’s streaming service covers this pretty well. Kanopy — if you have access via your local library — also has a large selection of lesser-known and older films.
> Spotify did it right; they managed to put together a service that is actually better than piracy in the ways that matter to a typical consumer.
I disagree. As a listener, Bandcamp and Soundcloud fulfill my needs better. Artists are more willing to put their work on those services than they are with Spotify, and it's entirely understandable. With Bandcamp, there is a link to buy albums at their asking price while listening. Spotify listens will pay out fractions of a penny. The result is that other platforms will have new music that suits my tastes, and I will be lucky if rights holders will put the same content on Spotify within the next 5 years.
NO, Spotify is a radio service with 0 promise to save your music over time. I use streaming services and have been hit by this issue frequently. It's tragic.
Now I'm stuck paying for all the music I've been paying for again. Or something else...
I disagree with your second assertion: if the streaming services go bad, the alternative isn't paying for all the music you've been paying for again; the alternative is pirating it all of it for free.
That's the beauty of the services: they have to compete with free and to do that they have to provide a superior enough experience to the user. If that ends, the music industry is the loser.
If ytdl-ing playlists is considered pirating - yep, for sure. Personally, I do it because youtube has the most complete, without any close competition, music collection (in varying quality).
Playing music off youtube is now the norm in my circle. It's definitely going to dent sales.
I don't like spotify and similar services, and try to buy my favorite music online if I can, but invariably am forced to torrents because it's hard to get where I am.
I'm amazed the music and movie business is finding it so hard to adapt.
Yes, pirated music doesn't waste mobile bandwidth, doesn't get interrupted when I lose my mobile collection, is much quicker to copy between devices, integrates better with music from local artists and gives me many much better music players to choose from.
Most streaming services let you download the media to save on bandwidth. My entire music library on Spotify is downloaded so I don't have to worry about connectivity issues. You can do similar things with Netflix.
It's also easier for me to move to different devices, because all I have to do is sign into Spotify. Manually transferring songs like I used to with an iPod is something I don't want to have to go back to.
I can't speak for spotify, but last time I tried with google music the player still used a lot of bandwidth for whatever reason when playing only cached songs. There were also bugs like pressing next twice in quick succession having non-deterministic behavior, possibly due to network requests.
> Manually transferring songs like I used to with an iPod is something I don't want to have to go back to.
A minor price to pay for not being tethered to an inferior proprietary music player.
Buying a t-shirt gives more money to an artist than several years' worth of you streaming their music online.
Spotify started off great but is now a total ripoff to artists since it got in bed with the major labels, trading stock for a larger cut of ad and subscription revenue.
You aren't any better for using Spotify and not torrenting. Make sure to support your favorite artists when they perform near you, and buy merch. Support small-time and local artists. That is the best thing you can do for the music industry.
If you deeply care about music and are an audiophile you do. I was on what.cd before it closed are really appreciated being able to get flac rips of original release vinyl, sometimes dating back 60-70 years.
Example first pressings I have in flac: velvet underground, the doors, led zeppelin, etc
Like Spotify, is their catalog often arbitrarily populated with whatever the most recent remaster is, or some other random release? There is value to having a lossless rip of a specific pressing of a given album. Especially with the case of albums that were mangled with limiters etc during their "remasters."
The number of albums I cannot find un-remastered is infuriating. I want the version I remember, not this years overcompressed mixing style squashing the dynamics while the singer autotunes out those 'bad notes'.
>FLAC has no benefit over traditional 16/24 encoded content.
You seem to have misunderstood FLAC with the sample rate / bit depth of a file. The vast majority of FLAC files are regular old 16 bit 44.1 kHz, and nobody is claiming that 24 bit 192 kHz (or whatever) files are better.
FLAC is a codec: simply a way to take all the audio on a CD and have it preserved indefinitely, without "generational" loss (where a mp3 is encoded from another mp3, and so on).
You're totally right. Complete brain blank. I don't know what I was thinking - think I subconsciously mixed my frustration over Tidal's 192/24 marketing with the concept of FLAC.
Yes it will, assuming the FLAC one makes sense to begin with. FLAC is a specialty codec tuned for compressing audio in the same way that DEFLATE is tuned for general (mostly text) files. Both of them are lossless, which means when you decompress the file you get exactly the same bits back as you started with.
So a correctly encoded FLAC file will be using CD quality audio or better. (CD audio is transparent when correctly encoded in 100% of cases.) FLAC is just a way to reduce the file size of that raw CD data by about 50%.
Lossy codecs like mp3 and AAC (the codec usually found in the m4a container) are also tuned to compress music, but they do so by throwing away a some of the original information. When this is done correctly it should still be transparent to the original the vast majority of the time. No one, not even an "audiophile", can tell the difference under any listening conditions. For mp3 (depending on encoder), the bitrate that achieves transparency is about 256 kbits/sec, though there are so-called "killer samples" that can break certain encoders at that bitrate. AAC (again, depending on encoder) is transparent closer to 192 kbits/sec. The state of the art has advanced remarkably since either were released: Opus is transparent in the vast majority of cases all the way down to 128 kbits / sec, and still sounds great at bitrates below that.
The problem is that just seeing the file extension gives you no guarantees about what the bitrate is. A 128 kbits/sec mp3 is going to sound like mush on a good system. If you convert that mp3 to FLAC it's still going to sound like mush, because you're using a lossy source. But a FLAC made from a CD will sound much better, as will a 320 kbits/sec mp3.
So if all you care about is transparency, getting 320 kbits/sec mp3s or 128 kbits/sec Opus files is probably good enough for you. The issue with "generational loss" I was referring to is when a lossy file is used as a source for another lossy encode. This is kind of like saving a file as a jpeg twice: you always lose more than just saving it once, even if the "quality" setting in the encoder is the same. Plus if you convert an AAC file to mp3, there's an even worse problem, which is that the different codecs try to compress the file in slightly different ways, which can lead to unexpected interactions and sometimes end up sounding like crap.
The point of keeping around a FLAC file is that you have a permanent archive of what was on the CD, and you have a source that you can use to make future lossy encodes from without the generational loss problem. All my albums are ripped to FLAC, but from those FLAC files I encode Opus files that are small enough to take with me on my phone.
.Zip also has no benefit over .exe, .dmg none over .app.
It’s just a codec. It makes it smaller.
Unless you mean “lossy” by “traditional”, in which case, yes, lossless codecs have a lot of benefit over lossy ones.
A perfect example is when sampling or beatmixing; if the final product will be played on youtube or streamed on digital radio or compressed lossily in any form, you will have incurred two lossy compression steps if your source material is lossy. This is akin to subsequent generations of dubbing analog media; the quality degrades quickly with each generation.
How do you convert lossy music to another lossy format? I'm having my music encoded in 96kbps opus in my phone and it is much more convenient to encode them from flac than another lossy format.
I have hundreds of albums bought and ripped to flac on my NAS server. They take about 300 GB out of the 40something terabytes available. I have real rarities stored in there and I pay about 1 euro a month for the cloud backup.
FLAC is an archival format. It's valuable because you can use whatever codec you like to stream the audio or store it on a device with limited space, including future codecs that haven't been developed yet. Lossy-to-lossy encoding is bad.
I don't think you understand what FLAC is. FLAC is a lossless compression format, that's it. FLAC also can be encoded in 16/24 or other bitrates like 24/192. Moreover, you can't (or shouldn't) do lossy to lossy encoding, so if you want to future proof your collection, you should store it FLAC or another lossless format because when/if mp3's go obsolete, you'll be stuck with it.
I do pirate movies. Old ones I can't find in any vendor, e.g. old Woody Allen movies. I also realized that some titles do exist in vendor's catalog, but are not available in my region for some reason.
I have terabytes of pirated music....that I hardly ever listen to because it's too much work to load up the player and find something to play. I much prefer google play, with their algorithms for finding new music for me, instead of me having to hunt for it. Looking at multi-terabyte directories and trying to decide what to listen to is just overwhelming. Google Play has introduced me to several new artists and a couple entire genre's of music that I would have never otherwise found, and $15/mo is well worth it.
exactly. Before I had google play I'd end up playing from the same set or leaving off with the same directory that I had listened to before. I'm also a fan of XM radio because while driving it's too much work to pull up the phone and start a playlist, and to an extent I do like the (one-sided) human "contact" of having the DJ announce the songs and make occasional chatter (even if I begrudgingly complain about it sometimes). I tried Radio Garden [1] but found myself still listening to top-40 adult contemporary crap.
It's a pain if it isn't organized well. When it is organized well, it's the best.
I have mpd+emms set up with an always on emms playlist window and dedicated dired window for my music collection.
I can't say the same for my book collection though. I tried calibre but didn't like it. Been experimenting with some custom scripts that work but are in dire need of indexing and optimization.
I had this problem, but then I just installed foobar2000 and quicksearch plugin, point it at my p2p disk root, exclude video files. Fast start-up and instant tag search through hundreds of gigs of flac. If you're in the Ts of MP3s range then YMMV, I've never had that many files.
Run a Plex server, and you can stream your own library of music from anywhere (one-time $5 purchase for your mobile app). Of course, this doesn't solve the issue of recommendations, but I personally see discovery and collection as two different roles which can be filled by two different models/services.
I personally am not a big music listener, but when I want music, I start YouTube and do it there, for free, with uBlok installed, which is the same thing. And that seems to work for artists and YouTube too.
When I was a teenager (20 years ago), this wasn't possible and we torrented whole albums like hell. Some people got in jail back then, or had to pay huge fines for "unrealized profits", which was absurd.
As an artist, who collects royalties, go on and torrent it. We see virtually nothing from the likes of spotify thanks to backroom deals selling us out. Come see the show, buy merch, the music is for better or worse, free.
> We see virtually nothing from the likes of spotify thanks to backroom deals selling us out.
Blame your publishers and companies you sell your rights to: Warner Music, Sony etc. They demand up to 70% of revenue from “the likes of Spotify” in royalties.
I have a Spotify subscription but still download music because I prefer owning a library instead of just renting it. However, pirating is becoming harder and harder. Because of Spotify and other service participaton in piracy has declined substantially. File hosting is almost gone, all I see is dead links. What.cd, the greatest archive in the world has been taken down, such a pity. I think a lot of people have moved to soulseek or rutracker, but in general the Internet seems to be cleaning up.
I tend to just listen to music on YouTube these days. For the most part, what I want to listen to is available on there, albeit probably not with the consent of the copyright holder.
That's what I do. It's absolutely stellar that there are so many live concerts, old TV shows, etc. of things that I'm interested in. Maybe if you have interests outside of the mainstream it's safe for now, but sometimes I wonder if I shouldn't download absolutely everything I like in order to avoid a future where more copyright detectin' software and lawyers get involved.
Another angle that's nice about youtube are all the digitized LPs. An awful lot of music never made the jump to CD, I remember how huge the jazz album bins used to be at some record stores.
Many songs are sped up, and the discovery that this often has the effect of making them sound better than the original may have created a whole new "genre" of music --- nightcore. I've come across some very pleasing "nightcore'd" songs, and listened to the original, but still think the sped-up and higher-pitched version sounds better. It's an interesting psychological effect.
...and I've also noticed the content ID system still detects them, but they probably remain because the IP holders are content to monetise those videos and reap the profits rather than getting them taken down (and earning nothing.) That turns the question into "is adblocking piracy?" and that's a whole different can of worms...
If I wanted mp3s I'd just torrent them, though. The whole point of YouTube is I can stream them easily and not have to worry about moving files around, and especially, not deal with anything not above-the-board on work-owned computers.
Pay for the hbo mobile version but can’t watch GoT you know. I think music well pass the stage - got both itune music and spotify. But what they should do is to have a non-Priatebay p2p services. Would pay. Really. Have paid in fact. just the broadcasting model is not working. Many got GBit network at home. Cover those first. Not give them dark screen is a good start.
> music stars to earn their money in the concerts they sold out due to "piracy" and not from selling CDs
this is not entirely true; musicians also earn a significant amount of money based on how many times their songs are played on streaming services like Spotify.
Hasan Minhaj had a bit about this in Patriot Act, explaining that this is the reason artists like Li'l Pump are releasing albums with dozens of two-minute songs—shorter tracks means more plays means more $$.
What this means, and what trips me out about using Spotify (or even YouTube), is that I literally can't listen to music on their platform without putting money in someone's pocket. Great for artists I love, sad for cultural curiosities I want to understand but decidedly don't want to support, like Li'l Pump or Chris Brown.
You don't need to make a ton of money to live of your music.
make 60k/year in concerts and you'll live without problems in a country like Italy.
It looks like a lot, but it means 150 shows/year at around 400 euros each + expenses (mainly gas, road tolls, some lunch on the road - sleeping, eating and drinking are provided by the promoter or the venue).
I've worked with bands that played more than 200 shows/year that earned around 5k + merchandise per show.
They payed me 100 bucks per gig, just to sell their merchandise.
Provided it becomes a real job and you have to work hard to keep it going, it's totally doable.
This is a funny topic for me, I've always been a super music fan, but never played any instrument.
I've been more a "roadie" than just a merchandiser, I mean that I was with them all the time, loading, unloading, driving and helping out.
Sometimes I've also acted as tour manager, but only in venues we already knew.
Most of the largest shows have been with an Italian band throughout Italy, production was in the medium range, going between a few hundreds to thousands of people (less than 5 thousands).
Many of the smaller ones were in Europe, with american bands, where it usually was in the hundreds in undeground clubs - there 's a large variety of them in Europe, you can find the youth center in Switzerland that has hotel's level accomodations and the squat in east Germany where you sleep on the floor in the cold.
But it's a good network to get a lot of shows close to each other, so you don't have to drive much and everyone is kind.
We've also been playing to many festivals: from desert fest to duna jam, from freak valley to roadburn, from up in smoke to hellfest. It's another great way to make connections and meet the bands.
I'm especially fond of what's called stoner rock (I prefer the name desert rock though) and I've toured a lot with bands from the Rome based Heavy Psych Sounds label.
I've been doing it for about 5 years, then the main band I was following took a sabbatical and I went back into tech as a programmer (my day to day job since 1997)
It's been the best part of my life, and, as crazy it might sound, the time of my life when I saved the most: I didn't have to pay for food, drinks, traveling or going to concerts, which basically is where most of my finances went anyway...
I had to pay the mortgage on my house, but if I was renting, I could have saved on that as well.
Best and worst memory is opening to Eagles of Death Metal in Milan, where I've spent the night smoking pot with Dave Catching, founder of Rancho de La Luna and one of my heroes.
I've also shared the merch booth with Nic, their merchandiser, that few days later was tragically killed in the
Bataclan massacre.
TL;DR: I got to do it as a job just by answering "yes" to "we need a driver for this one date, are you interested?". I've been reliable so they kept calling me and I ended up being part of the crew, without even noticing.
I like some stoner metal. Really fond of Sleep. I'll check out Heavy Psych Sounds.
And a night with Dave Catching sounds rad. I don't know how that could be a worst memory.
Is your estimate of ~150 annual shows being enough for a comfortable lifestyle meant to generally apply to overseas shows for American bands, or do you think the payout is more or less on par with ~150 domestic shows?
Sorry, I've haven't been clear, the worst was knowing a guy that a few days later was killed while working at Bataclan in Paris.
Many bands I know come here touring for at least a month, and when they're away rent their apartments or rooms back home because life here in Europe is cheaper, especially when touring, especially south or east.
Some of them moved here, to Berlin or Barcelona, some even moved here in Italy, I know of a band that moved in Sicily, on the Ortigia peninsula in Syracuse.
Depending on the cachet, 150 shows are enough to make a living and generally an overseas band have that exotic vibe that brings more people to the shows.
I can't make a comparison with the same number of shows in US, I've never toured that much in the States, but according to what bands said to me, touring US is harder, you have to drive a lot more and accommodations are usually worse (no food or drinks, sleep on a floor or in the van, hundreds of miles before reaching the next city) while Europe is easier.
if you plan your tours carefully and make the right connection, there's a good number of clubs that can guarantee packed shows and/or just a place to play and sleep on slow work days.
For stoner Germany, Sweden and somewhat Switzerland (they offer more than the average, be aware there's still customs in and out) are the best places in continental Europe.
A good way to do it is contact an european band or label and ask for advices. There are services that rent you the van for cheap directly in the airport, a good place is Belgium because it's exactly in the middle of EU, or they can provide you a communication channel with venues and/or services that rent backlines and stuff.
Last, but not least: be very careful with the gear, there have been numerous cases of stolen backlines, it would completely ruin the hard work (and the fun) you were putting in the tour.
The reason for short songs also applies to other services like YouTube.
Spotify is different however in that the cut artists get out of their streaming revenue is very insignificant compared to the slice that their record labels and Spotify are getting. I think it's important to keep this in mind. Spotify is negative force in the industry.
> sad for cultural curiosities I want to understand but decidedly don't want to support, like Li'l Pump or Chris Brown.
I don't think you should be concerned over the fraction of a cent you helped generate for Lil Pump.
It is not that simple. There are artists for example who are disabled and it is difficult to do concerts, but I agree with you. Just wanted to point that out as some people think of artists as dancing monkeys and not humans like everyone else.
> There are artists for example who are disabled and it is difficult to do concerts,
That's not the case. Dead artists do concerts. Artists that never physically existed do concerts. You could have a Steven Hawking concert now and people would pay for the tickets if music was good.
I’d love to know of a disabled musician who fits the archetype which is typically thrown around in this discussion. It seems to be purely hypothetical.
Also, this argument discounts second order effects. Who knows what new innovations might be brought on by the need to find an alternate revenue source.
I was looking on how to legally watch Game of Thrones here in Belgium.
It's pretty complex to figure this all out.
Basically you got to have a set-top box of at least 54 euros/month, and add 12 euro's extra to watch certain extra shows and movies (which includes Game of Thrones).
I found a solution without set-top box, but then you stream it on your mobile phone, and somehow need to remotely show it on your TV. This solution is 100 euros/month since it includes internet, tv, mobile provider, etc.
So yeah... I have Netflix, I have Spotify. I never need to download MP3's since they are all available on Spotify.
For movies and tv.... yeah...
And then people wonder why torrents are still so popular? Because it's the most convenient, not because it's free.
There is another option available for that I've moved towards. You can obviously purchase content on a digital library. Amazon, Microsoft, and Google Play are my 3 favorite (in no particular order) since a lot of the content syncs with the new-ish Movies Anywhere digital locker. If Movies Anywhere includes your show or movie then it syncs across all your accounts and is available everywhere. So if Google decides to stop selling movies, you can easily just switch over to Amazon, or whatever, without losing your content that you purchased.
Basically, I buy good movies and shows that I actually enjoy rather than subscribing to crappy services that rotate through a dozen or so good movies and a mountain of complete crap. I also don't have to watch commercials, and I can watch my movies on my phone or through a chromecast/fire tv/roku whenever and wherever (as long as I have internet). Also, most of these platforms allow you to download to a mobile/tablet device for streaming on a flight or train or whatever.
This can get expensive, of course, doesn't work for live events and you're still relying on all these systems staying active, but I don't like the societal move away from ownership and towards renting. If I know I love Back to the Future, why do I need to pay Netflix/HBO/cable/etc subscription so that I can hope that they add it to their library on the days that I feel interested in watching it again.
Game of Thrones Season 8 is $27 on Google Play. And if it takes you more than a month to get around to watching it, or if you ever want to watch it again ever, it won't cost you more than that. I think that's pretty nice
It used to be that more internet/TV providers offered HBO, but apparently one bought exclusive rights hoping everybody would switch to them. I certainly didn't.
As for Pirate Buy, it's blocked in Netherland, so Kickass Torrents seems to be the place to go these days.
Pirate bay is blocked in the Netherlands, but just Google "pirate proxy" to see about two dozen sites that give you access to the pirate bay. These sites make money from inserting ads into the page while you view the pirate bay through their proxy, but you can access it just fine. (Some of them do insert a ridiculous number of ads, mostly for adult content)
I recently went all in- I cancelled Spotify and bought premium YouTube and YouTube music. The music discovery system in YouTube music is far far better than anything Spotify have. I suppose it's due to YouTube already knowing what music I listen to when I can't find it on Spotify.
You mean you don't want to sign up for 15 different services, essentially paying more than you used to for cable, just to see all the things you used to see on cable?
I'm not interested in Belgian cable: old shows, interrupted with commercials, and not on demand. The world has moved on.
But it seems the content owners haven't moved on, and so there is no legal way for me to get HBO. So even signing up is already the problem. I wish I had the problem of having 15 different services.
Also living in Belgium and I have a Telenet internet subscription, but without a the cable-TV option. I don't watch any traditional TV, but if I want to legally see GoT, I would have no other option than to take the normal TV subscription just to be able to take the "extra shows & movies" option. I stream everything and have no problem paying for streaming services, but that I will not do.
An HBO streaming service is on my wish-list since they consistently offer quality content. However, this is not easily possible, torrenting is quicker and more practical - so yeah...
Can't you subscribe to NowTV in the UK for about €10 a month? I thought that country-by-country restrictions had been removed inside the EU by law (single digital market)
No you can't. You can't even watch BBC documentaries from the official web player here in Ireland unless you use a vpn. They are only licensed for the UK and a handful other countries. Very sad situation.
I don't know about HBO, but Netflix has spent a lot of effort building quite sophisticated methods for detecting and blocking people trying to connect via VPN
In my experience, it varies... I had one VPN service start to get blocked consistently, so I switched to another, and that's been going smoothly for two years. And I'm sure Netflix can put cookies on my machine and know what's up... I'll be in Japan and then minutes later I'm in the US again with the same computer.
I once attended a SMPTE meeting at the Directors Guild building, where the wifi ssid was "MPAA". I took out my laptop to follow along with the specs under discussion and half way through the meeting I noticed that I had accidentally left my torrent app open and was seeding movie torrents. Whoops! :-)
It is worse in India.
You see a lot of popular and lesser known titles on Prime and Netflix, and buy subscriptions to those only to realise the content isn't available in your country.
I basically feel Netflix to be a rip off, and Prime's value proposition is faster deliveries, better discounts and a few free Kindle books.
And despite trying to use these services for a long time, I am still a fan and a proponent of torrents for such consumption as I get all the content, on time, on my terms and can consume it in a way I like.
I subscribed to prime once here in New Zealand and discovered that the UI (at least on PS4) displays everything, and only tells you that it's not available in your country when you try to play something.
As a pretty large portion of the stuff seemed to not be available here this made it basically unusable.
I just got Prime free with a new 2Degrees account, I haven’t struck that so maybe they’re hiding the inaccessible content now. In saying that though, the content that is accessible is fairly terrible compared to Netflix’s offerings.
Did you know that you cannot legally stream My Fair Lady?
I found this out when I tried to show it to my daughters.
Apparently the copyright agreements don't cover how to split the proceeds from streaming, so nobody can sell Amazon, Netflix, etc the right to stream it.
...and also for WKRP In Cincinnati. Anywhere you do see it, it's not with the original music. They stripped out all the old radio tracks and replaced it with crap.
What a shame that the rights holders are so short sighted. The nostalgia those old tracks would create would surely sell more records. And it's not like anybody is going to be satisfied with replaying the video when they want the song, with the characters talking over the top of it.
It's a shame as that cartoon was, and still is,
A classic.
I remember trying to find torrents back in the day.
It's all on Hulu now.
A little off topic- I apologize
Oh I wondered what happened there. I was thinking that maybe they had changed it in the later seasons but I was sure I’d never heard that version of it before.
I actually watched My Fair Lady recently ... on YouTube TV. I couldn't find it anywhere, saw it coming up in a month or three in the search box, set it to "record", watched it in a streaming-like way later.
It's weird; you can't watch it on demand, but you can virtually DVR it when it is "broadcast" at an arbitrary time.
As an American in Europe last month, I experienced:
Watching Showtime through Playstation Vue was impossible from European IP, and impossible through US VPN. So I torrented Billions instead of trying a redundant unportable Showtime through Amazon Video subscription, or instead of trying a redundant Showtime subscription through their native app assuming they have one.
Watching Game of Thrones through HBO Now also had the same issues. But downloading torrents over VPN worked really fast. I only used VPNs partially out of habit, and partially not to get my host (hotel/airbnb) in trouble.
Because VPNs were so readily detected and blocked, it reminded me to consider buying a dedicated IP address in a few different countries for VPN, instead of having IP addresses that all the VPN users use. I have not done this yet, as I also heard that another way to detect VPNs is by knowing if the IP block is associated with a data center. I wonder if this is really done by the services I use.
Final note is that I did notice that alot of the torrent providers are doing "webrips" now instead of ripping in the highest quality their TV provides applying compression. The webrips are noticeable worse as the streaming service already is using compression.
Yeah, it's a B*tch, wished they'd interop more. I wanted to see if I could watch Power somewhere; I have HBO, Prime Video, YouTube Premium and Netflix... but nope, none of the four have it here in .nl. Usually, between the three I can find the things that I want to watch, but it's starting to get absurd with all the subscriptions...
It's planned obsolescence for media, remove the older media and people "have" to watch the new stuff: "you pay more because it's new" and "production of all this new stuff everyone is watching costs more, so we have to put the price up", etc..
Which ironically is what caused me to cancel my Netflix subscription. I initially subscribed mainly for the older movies & B movies that were abundant, but as other streaming services have started many of these have fragmented (and many of them just aren't available). About 3 months ago I cancelled Netflix (kept prime for shipping, Youtube premium for ad-free) when I realized that between the 3 services I couldn't even find The Maltese Falcon on 2 of them, and amazon wanted something ludicrous like $13 to rent it. Not exactly an unknown movie.
I had zero problems torrenting it, and no no moral qualms about it; I'm pretty sure all the actors & crew are dead by now and not recieving any more royalties, plus I have it on DVD but I hadn't ripped it to my NAS & don't have anything that can play DVD's connected to the TV.
In case you already know, feel free to ignore my comment, but with your Youtube premium subscription, you also get a subscription to Google Play Music (aka Spotify competitor from Google). I wish they advertised it better, because half the people I know irl who have a sub to either of them, don't realize that they get the other one for free.
i used three gmail addresses for one month trials of google play music before keeping it properly, and more recently answering dumb personal questions on the google rewards app has paid half of the monthly fee for it. i think the nicest thing about the youtube premium (if wanting to pay a bit extra than just google play music) is being able to have youtube play in the background on the phone.
I came back here just to thank you for that. For others interested, newpipe is available on F-Droid. It has options for pop over video playback as well as background audio playback. Sure beats the always on Youtube app.
It supports the importing of subscriptions but doesn't seem to handle playlist import currently.
It feels like we're probably in, or just over, a local maxima as far as getting content at a reasonable price goes. This has obviously been a reflection of the ease of duplication and acquisition of works for free (gratis) that the internet has brought about.
Now we seem to be entering a time where, as media mega-corps have appeared and won us back to paying for content and having content easily accessible, they're starting to think they can ramp up the prices and lock away "their" content in a silo with a hefty price-tag for entry.
It seems as if we're going to move back towards a much higher price for taking part in the culture that surrounds current media; and that in turn is going to lead to more copyright infringement. Only this time the media corps have got the internet sewn up pretty well
It would be ideal if the reaction were to rest control of culture from the hands of big business a little with some statutory reform. But that in turn rests on whether countries get democratic reform to proportionalise representation and enable the tackling of smaller issues like disenfranchisement from culture and locking away of works so they can't ever enter the public domain.
I have netflix, hulu, hbogo, and prime, and I pirate stuff that's in the catalog right now as there is no guarentee it will stay in the catalog. Netflix in particular lost a ton of content over the years. Ironically, I even get better quality streaming with piracy over legal channels.
It's not even being an enthusiast. I'll search netflix for "popular movie I watched on netflix three years ago" and it will be removed from the catalog. I don't pass go, I don't pay amazon $5 or whatever to rent, I pirate the movie.
This is in some ways good for piracy. During the 2000s the MAFIAA was heavily invested in their war on sharing sites and protocols because of how popular they were, but now with streaming taking a substantial chunk of that casual pirate audience theres less profit incentive in pushing a lot of prosecution.
It seems like the courts eventually came around to a more just way of thinking too, for example, they stopped treating the partial uploading of a single song as if the person had stolen the entire value of that song from the publishers.
Agreed. Piracy seems to have filtered into being an enthusiast thing ... or at least that perception has held off the more rabid prosecution of it, mostly.
Which, I believe, is happening, right? With new players starting their streaming services in next 1-2 years, the content will become sharded even more.
We circled. Streaming services partially were about to solve the problem of not paying serious $$$ for a cable subscription (lots of programming that people don't care about/watch) by providing a cheap, affordable service with lost of content that is interesting and worth to watch. Today, streaming services are creating the very same problem they were trying to solve.
Yes, it feels like it would be a fairly straightforward econ model actually. If the combined price for all the platforms gets too high and the user experience too terrible, then it's an easy flip to piracy. I get that all these publishing companies are trying to get as close to that line as possible, but as they're (naturally) all interested in maximizing their own profits rather than thinking about the collective industry profit, I don't doubt we'll cross that line before too long
If the media streaming market reaches a price I'm willing to pay, I might stop torrenting and streaming from other sources for the very limited non-free media I want to see or hear.
It is special, because when you steal a physical thing, the owner doesn't have that physical thing anymore. If you pirate something that you weren't gonna buy anyways, the owner still has the digital file in the exact same way they had it before you pirated. I cannot even call pirating "stealing" in good conscious tbh.
Legally, copyright infringement (and IP infringement in general) is treated more like trespassing than theft, in that you may be infringing on the owners enjoyments, rather than depriving them of property.
As an inveterate and unrepentant pirate, I can tell you that I would not. It is depriving someone else who deserves a thing just as much as I do. I am not paying my grocer for today's goods that I buy, I'm paying him to keep bringing goods in and having stocked shelves for myself and others. I have no such compunction toward any particular artist in any medium. If they keep creating stuff I like, good on them. If they do not, I'm totally unconcerned; because there will be others along to create something new.
Stealing implies deprivation, not duplication. Digital copying is entirely the latter. And very few physical goods are part and parcel to culture - which should be free in any event. We are losing our ability to create mythology, because it's all being crafted for money and shoved out from corporations. Consider the case of Don Quixote - the author felt he had to write a sequel and a "closing" of the story because so many others wrote their own stories of the Man of La Mancha. Bacon pirated from Goethe, Shakespeare from a score of others. Without free duplication and access to media, there is no common conversation - we'd each be trapped in our paywalls. I refuse to accept that; and I believe that culture is more important than money ever will be. A person who creates a seminal work that gets pirated far and wide would be better off accepting it and creating another work to make something off. Either that or having a real living while he creates. The idea of "artist" as a career, especially a prestigious and high-paying career, is one of many missteps of our modern world.
> The idea of "artist" as a career, especially a prestigious and high-paying career, is one of many missteps of our modern world.
So you don't think there is anyone who is accomplished enough at being an artist that they should be able to make it a profession?
I want to experience the best artists being able to spend the time doing the best work they can possibly do, not a generation of office workers who can only afford to produce mediocre art for a maximum of a couple of hours per day, like me. :(
We need to try some different economic models for information. Is there any reason to think that treating it as private property, with artificial scarcity, is the only way that things can be organized? The laws of physics don't require it.
I agree in principle, but what are some other economic models that can work in the real world? Artists need to pay their bills, so the way I see it, they need to be paid by some mechanism.
You want the government to decide what arts get funded?
I'll take the world where I can direct my funds to the projects I like, thanks. The price mechanism strictly dominates central planning in terms of welfare generation. This has been proven over and over again.
That's where the funding would come from, how it would be allocated is also a big question. If you want to apply the price mechanism to information, then you also accept copyright, artificial scarcity, and the enforcement mechanisms that go with it.
I'm more than willing to accept that until someone comes up with a better solution. I think it extremely unlikely that a centrally planned solution will ever be superior.
> I'll take the world where I can direct my funds to the projects I like, thanks.
Sure. And the government decides how many funds you direct to them to prevent freeloading. Basically Flattr, but mandatory.
> The price mechanism strictly dominates central planning in terms of welfare generation. This has been proven over and over again.
Interesting. Can you direct me to that proof? I'd love to see the math. I do know that there is empirical evidence that a dictatorship making 4 year plans does not generate much welfare if it has, at best, 1980s computing power available that is not sufficient to finish even a simplified plan within 4 years.
So you really shouldn't put people in charge whose ideology revolves around creating a planned economy as opposed to something reasonable like freedom, solidarity and democracy (including public ownership of the means of production).
> Sure. And the government decides how many funds you direct to them to prevent freeloading. Basically Flattr, but mandatory.
Uhhh got it, so the government decides how much of my money I need to direct to arts/digital goods? I have no choice in that? You want to replace a world where I can freely allocate my capital to goods that are artificially scarce (presumably you are morally opposed to this enforcement) with one where I'm forced to allocate my capital goods to $0 marginal cost goods (you aren't opposed to this enforcement, though?). I'll take the one where I have fuller choice if in either circumstance I lose some freedom. This also doesn't address issues that would certainly arise from the cost of enforcement, the likelihood of fraud, etc. and the relative cost between that and what we have today.
You should take a basic economics class if you want to fully understand how markets succeed vs centrally planned mechanisms.
However, the basics would be the following:
1) Every individual is unique and has unique preferences.
2) These preferences are private and non-discoverable by external parties but are well-known, to a point, to the individual. (Proof: see the INCREDIBLY NARROW worlds of recommendation systems where even though Netflix or Amazon or Google have massive amounts of information about your historical preferences in VERY NARROW circumstances, they still fail to provide truly great recommendations)
3) Since a central planning entity cannot know every individual's preferences but every individual can (think of market economies as distributed systems), overall welfare is maximized by individuals autonomously and freely allocating their personal capital to the goods/services/etc. that they see fit.
4) As more and more individuals bid with their capital, up to the point of negative returns for them, for goods/services/etc., producers react to produce more of these, and ideally at lower costs and higher quantities to maximize their gains and demand, in order to capture more capital for them to purchase their preferences with. This is the price mechanism and it CANNOT be replicated centrally given the unknowability of a central entity to understand preferences. NO AMOUNT of today's computing power could possibly come close. Think about how much compute goes into the shitty recommendations you get from Google/NFLX/et al. and for how narrow that realm is. You want production to be based on something like that?
Now, there are failures of market mechanisms. What happens when there are external social costs (ie C02 production from fossil fuels), or the tragedies of the commons, etc. that require central intervention to the best of its ability. Hence IP/Copyright where in a world where without it, creators have no reasonable means of capturing returns on their efforts, we must implement property rights. There is of course a great argument for much better refinement of IP laws, but they are not arguments against them.
I think the biggest problem with the information-as-property model is that it only works if its vigorously enforced world-wide. There's little or no room for even a single country to experiment with a copyright-free system. They'll be pounded into submission with the threat of trade tariffs. Even "communist" states like North Korea have signed up to the copyright system.
I think this also leaves the system somewhat unstable; all it needs is a rogue government in some place like Iceland and the likes of sci—hub and pirate bay will have a safe haven. If one country gets away with it, others would probably jump on the bandwagon, because they have little to gain by sending money to rich countries for information they could download for free.
> Uhhh got it, so the government decides how much of my money I need to direct to arts/digital goods?
Yes. It's not too different from taxes, but you have more choice. We could also include other projects like research, public parks, etc. The point is not to centralize control but to avoid artificial and unnecessary scarcity.
> You want to replace a world where I can freely allocate my capital to goods that are artificially scarce [...] with one where I'm forced to allocate my capital goods to $0 marginal cost goods (you aren't opposed to this enforcement, though?).
Yes, I want to replace a world where things are artificially scarce with one where they are not.
> presumably you are morally opposed to this enforcement
It's a question of efficiency. Limiting access to goods with zero marginal cost is just a waste.
But yes, I'm morally opposed to reducing the general welfare.
> I'll take the one where I have fuller choice if in either circumstance I lose some freedom.
Then you should be in favor of removing artificial scarcity. It removes people's freedom to use media for no good reason. Of course, if you're wealthy enough that this does not restrict you, you may benefit. But don't forget that in that case, you defend your privileges at the expense of others' freedom.
> This also doesn't address issues that would certainly arise from the cost of enforcement, the likelihood of fraud, etc.
Sorry for not writing a fully fleshed out bill ready to be passed into law.
> You should take a basic economics class if you want to fully understand how markets succeed vs centrally planned mechanisms.
No thanks, I already know the crude model of the economy a basic economics class teaches.
> 1) Every individual is unique and has unique preferences.
> 2) These preferences are private and non-discoverable by external parties but are well-known, to a point, to the individual.
The need of companies for input products, however, is discoverable.
> Proof
No, evidence. This isn't math.
> 3) Since a central planning entity cannot know every individual's preferences
Correct.
> but every individual can
I don't think a psychologist would agree with that statement. But there are good reasons to pretend it's true anyway.
> (think of market economies as distributed systems), overall welfare is maximized by individuals autonomously and freely allocating their personal capital to the goods/services/etc. that they see fit.
Only assuming everyone has the same income or at least the same earning power (working less in exchange for earning less is a valid choice). Otherwise, some peoples' welfare is weighted higher than others'.
> 4) As more and more individuals bid with their capital, up to the point of negative returns for them, for goods/services/etc., producers react to produce more of these,
Of course. If people buy more or less of something than was predicted, you have to change the plan. Central planning can reduce this issue compared to a pile of uncoordinated competing capitalists, but it cannot eliminate it.
That's a problem if calculating a plan takes years. With today's technology, it isn't.
> Think about how much compute goes into the shitty recommendations you get from Google/NFLX/et al. and for how narrow that realm is.
Incompetence isn't the only reason why those recommendations are so shitty. Netflix, at least, tries to push their "originals" and other films and series that are cheap for them. They also try to hide how limited their catalog is, due to intellectual property. They use DRM because their aim is not to provide a good service, but to make a profit. By using DRM they force you to use their client. Capitalism is actually reducing choice and competition here.
The unending walled gardens that the streaming service landscape is becoming is the main driver for torrent usage increasing. The more content becomes exclusive to single streaming services, the less consumers benefit from the convenience that the services originally provided.
streaming services lack a lot of content I love to watch.
I was trying to show a tv show to my girlfriend last week, it was from 2007, not crazy long time ago, it's just 12 years ago and there was no way to find it legally.
Teh only place where I found it was Amazon prime video, as a per episode paid download, not in streaming, but it wasn't available in my country, even though I'm a primenow subscriber.
I ended up torrenting it (and the only torrent site where I found it was thepiratebay, nobody else had it)
I use torrents a lot, but it's not a perfect solution.
For one, P2P is mostly a myth — most people (myself included, I will admit) are pure leechers that only seed at very low bandwidth while downloading. Seeders are either altruistic downloaders who rent a dedicated seedbox, or some servers in Russia whose incentive structure I fail to comprehend (or more honestly: haven't looked into).
Number two: because of this, the catalog is not amazing. Even popular recent shows have issues. Case from very recently: I gave up on finding 1080p versions of The Good Place season 1 & 2 (on public trackers at least). Anything not in English? Try your luck but mostly forget it.
It's worse for music — the system doesn't incentivize a lot of small uploads but rather grouping them. So finding rare tracks/b-sides is very hard. Back in the day, Kazaa and eMule were vastly better with rarities.
This is not an indictment of BitTorrent — it's still the best we have. But I wish we had better.
Isn't Usenet even more fragile in terms of centralization and legality? I actually wonder why it hasn't been targeted more? Is there any reason? Or is it just that it is relatively obscure compared to BitTorrent?
and it, and others like it, will continue to live forever. Before TPB, when I was in college, I used to hang out on #warez on EFNet's IRC servers... Before 1996, I used to dial in to BBS' that would host these. The tech doesn't matter when the problem is entirely ethical. Pirates, like porn peddlers, are the first to adapt and adopt new tech to perpetuate their ideology. No amount of tech, or even legal action is going to address issues of ethics.
With that said, how do you address it? Probably by making software more affordable for those who pirate it, wish to buy it but cannot. Offering low cost subscriptions, e.g. instead of exorbitant one time fees. I don't necessarily want to buy a game.. I dont play games that much anymore, but I wouldn't mind subscribing to a service that offered it for a month or two, get my jollies and then leave when I'm not using it.
So rather than try to defeat it - and ideas are notoriously hard to defeat... try to "compete" with it and pray that people's conscience kicks in at some point.
>Offering low cost subscriptions, e.g. instead of exorbitant one time fees.
I couldn't disagree more. I pirated Adobe's products many years ago when I was a poor student who couldn't afford the price. I also wouldn't have been able to justify the price of a monthly subscription back then. Now though, I would pay any price up to a couple thousand dollars for a one-time purchase of CS6 Photoshop and Illustrator, but it's literally impossible to do this now.
This. As a student I couldn't afford it, but as an adult I would pay for Premier and Photoshop. I don't use them enough to justify the outrageous monthly price to use the two. So instead of getting some money from me now, Adobe will never get any.
Setting aside other circumstances, IMO student pricing is usually dealt with pretty well overall. I think I paid $10 apiece for several different cutting-edge niche software packages with four to five figure commercial license costs, and various software from Microsoft was free.
I have a netflix subscription but I torrent all my movies/series for the convenience of the player.
I want to put the subtitles where I want and pick the font, I want to be able to apply image filters to my movie (I use a monitor calibrated for photo, and it is not ideal for movies, it is much easier to apply a filter than to switch my monitor calibration), also I watch things while working and mpv is much lighter than any browser, I love to be able to seek with the mouse wheel, the stereo mixing on netflix is often horrible and I can't hear the dialogues... There are tons of argument in favor of a real video player.
Streaming audio services decimated private trackers like What and Waffles. Anecdotally, I know a number of people who passed up torrenting GoT this year to just stream from HBO Go for the first time.
The French government decimated What. It had nothing but growth even long after Spotify. It was a music fan's heaven; it had virtually every version of every record ever released. You can't put a price on that. Also, as a musician of nearly 20 years, I would 100% absolutely rather have a person pirate my music than pay $10/mo to play it on Spotify.
Waffles didn't innovate. The site that launched after Oink shutdown is largely the same site that is up today (figuratively, I'm sure it'll be back at some point).
I would absolutely rather pay $100/month for a legal version of What.cd than use Spotify :/
The worst part isn't that What is gone, it's that What is gone and nothing can replace it. Like with older games that can't be purchased legally online, the rightsholders have kept us from consuming that content at all. In order to preserve their absolute right to distribute it for money!
The number of people here suggesting Apple Music would have killed it anyway or that Tidal etc is an adequate replacement shows just how effectively the rightsholders have deluded us all again. The currently available streaming services are almost entirely incomparable to the collection once available at What, it's like comparing your local library to the statewide database.
I think ultimately it would have suffered from Spotify and Apple Music. Both them have grown an enormous amount since What went away.
That said, I agree it was a music fan's heaven. Just as Oink was before it. It is sad how badly Apple Music's recommendation system is, how bloated it is with recording industry pushed crap.
Really? HBO got a lot of pushback in Norway this year for the crappy video quality they deliver. A lot of people opted to download the torrent releases based on Amazon has much better quality, even though they had a HBO subscription
I was somewhat surprised also. I think many people can't distinguish video compression and how much impact it has. I've seen people watch live sports on incredible home entertainment systems paying high fees for HD TV and it is just blurry pixels.
what.cd still had some of the best organization of any site, ever. It's hilarious that a company as big as Amazon has such a horrendous UI for browsing music, but lil what.cd had such a comprehensive and slick design
the thing too is ACTUALLY being able to see what is new and active and going on overall.
the recommendations were pretty well thought out even if not my cup of tea, and you could actually see what was new or active without having to worry about the piper being paid.
if you wanted to listen to your weirdly specific music tastes, it was perfect for that.
Coincidentally, I've been thinking a bit about what it would take to create censorship-resistant websites. I concluded that you need trusted people to host the site, a database cluster and a bunch of workers to connect to the DB (with local caches). Then you could use Tor and publish a list of worker addresses/hidden sites for people to use.
Taking this setup down would require someone to take every single person/node down, although it might have more issues with availability.
>Streaming audio services decimated private trackers like What and Waffles
Citation needed.
Private trackers are and were always for data hoarders and bitrate freaks. The average Spotify subscriber was never the target audience of private trackers.
Data hoarders are certainly a segment but as a long time what.cd member I completely stopped downloading music once I had a spotify subscription. For me, torrenting was an inconvenient means to an ends (low cost unlimited access to music)
Yep! Was a semi-dedicated what user (hosted a certain rather large language learning collection on a seedbox for the ratio, used daily). Spotify/others handle the 90% case for me, though I do miss the curation. Also the security that comes with "no matter what happens, at least I've got the files I care about on hard drives I control"
I too dealt with a lot of audio torrents prior to streaming services.
Another big change for me was the industry got wise to leaks. Now when an album leaks, the labels have a plan to immediately offer it for streaming on a major service or even media partner like NPR.
One of the major values of private Audio trackers was you got to hear stuff way before other people. Even this has been largely taken away. (Though sometimes the previews are now only a few songs)
honestly so crazy. I, like many others, dedicated so much time to what and was truly heart broken when it disappeared. Spent countless hours, days, weeks interviewing people. Countless hours, days, weeks rippings and uploading to reach TM. Made some good friends and some I'll never cross paths with again. A true shame. Sadly what came next, although good, will never be the same and I do think it's because of how easy it is so stream music.
EDIT: the loss of the forums, knowledge, metadata is truly heartbreaking... i really can't think about it too much
Yep that’s me. I use private trackers to watch cable shows without commercials but still pay for an HBO Now subscription for GoT because it was just easier and $15/month for two months is really not a big deal.
And I am probably going to vote pirate party this weekend at the EU election. Because the industry still hasn't acknowledged the shift in culture. Societies move so slowly...
Consider that they placed Gilles Bordelais, a man who as an EU parliament committee determined sexually harassed women in multiple cases, on their list in Germany before voting for the German pirate party:
Can you state openly what did he exactly do, or at least link to somewhere where its stated?
Ill bet it amounts to 'inappropriate remarks' and that not stating exactly what it is, instead using the 'sexual harassment' doublespeak is just a FUD tool to attempt to sabotage the Pirate Party.
Here's a link to what seems to be the party's response. From my reading, possibly tainted by translation, he agreed to step down if the European Parliament's Consultative Committee on Harassment at Work found that he had engaged in harassment, they did, and he resigned, but they were unable to remove him from the list due to regulations.
While I can't seem to find an account of what exactly transpired, it does appear that the European Parliament's Consultative Committee on Harassment at Work concluded that something did indeed transpire that falls under sexual harassment.
It’s hard to find official details (I guess they keep them private to protect the victims?) but this looks like reasonably trustworthy source: http://mab.nu/2018/11/16/a-friend-called-niles/
But even without details looking at Julia Redas track record and the fact that the German pirate party and European pirate party distanced themselves from him suggests more than a minor error in judgement. It’s unbelievable that he could successfully trick his party so he could get on the candidates list as number 2. And he will be there on election day! This is no FUD but something they have to blame on themselves.
Why? That wasn't known when the voting lists were made, and when it came out, they weren't able to remove him, because lists cannot be changed once finalized. There's just nothing they can do because that's the law.
I mean, I'm certainly not going to vote for them because they are far, far away from me politically, but imho their reaction to the whole affair was correct and shouldn't be held against them.
To be perfectly honest- i do not look at the person any more. I only look at promises and outcomes. Power and Money corrupt absolutly, so i dont even want to waste time on the displays of those with rigid morals. They usually do not accomplish anything, cause any move could bring down the little statue of themselves they put up as example.
I rather have a rupt to the core bastard, which still prevents a catastrophic climate change, because he game of thrones whole industries.
The Australian system works a lot better. There are still the main 2 but there are a huge number of minor parties that actually have a meaningful impact. The minor parties are usually dedicated to single issues. The biggest minor party being The Greens who are about the environment. No one votes for a minor party because they want them to run the government but you vote for them to send a message to the major 2 about what issues you care about and then use your lower preference vote to pick the major party you like more.
This is a shame, but if you're in a big coastal US city take a look for them. They're around, sometimes!
Mostly, they campaign for things like police accountability and run candidates to force focus on certain issues like surveillance and net neutrality. They don't win, in those cases, but it's a good way to keep solidly-Democratic candidates from letting the issues slide. But there are some Pirates holding offices like town council seats, which is inspiring to me.
(And on a practical level, they seem to be way better at recognizing their position and making an impact than much bigger factions like the Libertarian Party. Perhaps ironically, they've got some great organization.)
Maybe the Pirate Party could organise themselves around being factions in the Democratic and Republican parties, trying to ensure those parties elect Pirate-friendly candidates.
Both parties have strong top down control over their respective primaries. Both in terms of direct influence and manipulation. For the Democrats you could observe this during Bernie's campaign for president. For republicans you could see it during Ron Paul's. Both had the majority in the primaries in terms of popular support but primary regulations were such that it didn't matter. Local and state factions were just overruled.
Neither one of those candidates had anywhere near majority support. The Democratic party made some changes since 2016 to make it harder for a Bernie-like candidate to be elected, but will still allow for any candidate with a majority of primary votes to be selected over the party's direct influence.
I don't think any pirate party really had the numbers to make that happen. Usually a faction represents some larger group of people. The only way I see that happening is by unionizing tech. But that would be incredibly hard exactly because it would create a political force.
> This is a shame, but if you're in a big coastal US city take a look for them. They're around, sometimes!
They have effectively zero presence in New York City, Los Angeles, Houston, or Philadelphia
> But there are some Pirates holding offices like town council seats
Where? How many?
> And on a practical level, they seem to be way better at recognizing their position and making an impact than much bigger factions like the Libertarian Party.
As someone who's pretty tuned in to US politics, including local politics, I can't identify any impact that the Pirate Party has had. In fact, it's almost impossible to tell that they even exist, in 2019.
There are many other voting systems that are better than the current first past the post (FPTP) voting system that the US currently uses. None are perfect, but pretty much every single one is better than FPTP.
A ranked-choice voting system would encourage the existence of more parties. Even a run off voting would help with the existence of more parties, while still preserving the simplicity of FPTP (though, getting people to vote is hard enough, forcing them to go vote a second time would probably be even harder).
I agree with FPTP being bad. But keep in mind the big advantage of the system is keeping two parties close to even, leading to more frequent regime changes. This makes it harder to rig the system in your favor, thus providing long term stability. I'm not sure if term limits alone would would be good enough at that.
I'm somewhat skeptical of the thought that FPTP makes it harder to rig the system. I'm probably a bit information diet biased here, but it seems (as an example) that Republicans have had more court rulings against them due to unfair gerrymandering of districts. It seems who holds the power gets to determine the districts, which would help preserve power. If there wasn't a two way swing, it would arguably be harder to gerrymander in one parties favor, as it _should_ be more difficult to hold 51%+ power if more than 2 parties are available.
Wouldn't you expect even more frequent regime changes in a system where the vote was split between three or more parties? This is a common criticism of minority government.
The status quo and abandoning copyright aren’t the only alternatives. It would also be possible to reform copyright. One obvious change would be to shorten the time that a work can be copyrighted.
> That's yet to be determined. Disney is a big influence on the length of US copyright protections. Let's see what happens come 2024
I'm well aware of Disney's role in copyright law.
Disney's opportunity to do extend the term was before Dec. 31, 2018. That's how they extended copyright durations in the past - preventing any new works from entering the public domain at all. It's much harder for them to retroactively amend the copyright term now that some of those works have begun to enter the public domain.
For works released in someones lifetime the effective limit is effectively infinite for ~25% of people based on actuarial tables and assuming the best case of the author published it the year you were born and died that very same year. If the author died when the reader was 13 that's less than 50% who will ever live to that point.
If the author is anonymous(or work for hire) or lives for 20 years after they published the work then it is effectively infinite for ~91% of people assuming the best case.
Say what you want about the old 14+14 system but at least it would have meant that by the time you were a parent you could almost certainly share the works that were influential with you as a kid with your kids. With the current system you have to cross your fingers that it was popular enough to remain in print rather than moving to some limbo of unable to be acquired except 2nd hand or illegally.
I think that is too short for cultural reasons. I think it needs to be at least long enough that something new can come out during a person's childhood and become important to them, and still be under copyright when that person is an adult and has children of their own, so that they can introduce it to their own children. Maybe even long enough that this will work for grandchildren too.
Short terms can make that hard. For example, suppose your childhood thing was "Calvin & Hobbes". With a 14 year term that would be public domain by the time you are an adult, and I have no doubt that advertisers would have immediately conscripted Calvin to push toys and cereals ("It's even better than Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs") and such and saturated children's media with this.
So then you go to share with your kid what was your favorite comic strip when you were a kid, and they have no interest in a strip about the Kellog's and Mattel and such spokes character that they've been bombarded with already for years.
Maybe it is time to consider different terms for different copyright rights? Shorter term for the right to make and distribute literal copies, but longer terms for the right to make and distribute derivative works?
Not being under copyright doesn't stop you from sharing it with your kids. It just makes it less likely to be worth sharing it with your kids, for the reasons in the second and third paragraphs.
Do you think practicing civil disobedience on copyright law will lead us to fixing it? It seems like the opposition is just digging its heels even further. In addition to fighting for their right to control distribution, they're also pushing for DRM, which is making things worse..
There will always be a crackdown. This is how entrenched power works. It happened with India and immolation and the Boston Tea party. Standing up for yourself means someone will always try to knock you down.
Err, are we on the same page here? I don't think so. Because I'm talking about copyright law. Comparing the morality of pirating a disney movie with opposing killing people is not a reasonable position. It cheapens the real struggle that people went through.
A big issue of reform was the switching costs. A number of countries specifically the Nordics and France, have very elaborate and somewhat successful systems for renumeration to publishers and (theoretically) authors. For these any shift to more lax rules risks upending the system in such major ways that they are opposed to it. So any EU reform faces a really uphill struggle, as the vetos are pretty much guaranteed.
It seems almost certain that "piracy" would go down. Even if the only change was that people torrenting Firefly in 2019 would be doing so legally, that's that much less piracy.
Then you get the effect that everything from the 20th century becomes available on YouTube, which is likely to cause increased viewership of that content over newer content pirated or otherwise. Which I suspect is the main reason Hollywood is really against shorter copyright terms -- not just losing the revenue from past works but having to compete with them when they're free.
I'm also curious about this. Offhand I wouldn't expect it, since even the historical 14-year window is well past where most people buy or pirate a work. Of course, that also implies the time past 14 years isn't about giving creators time to monetize so much as letting a few behemoths protect their brands.
So, just as an hypothetical.. If it were impossible to pirate Windows, would all of those users switch to Linux or BSD or other free OSs?
If even a single user goes out and buys a license to Windows, then there is a definite argument to be made that piracy resulted in the loss of at-least one sale.
I don't contest that changes in the environment change purchasing behavior.
However, such wishful thinking has no place in my worldview. Either a sale happened or it did not and it never was. Again, you can't lose something you never had, and calling it a loss is just wordplay. Doubly so when it's only a loss if such and such had been so and so and yada yada. It never was. If you lost something, you go find it or call your bank and have them explain how the account now has less money than yesterday.
And yes, thanks to piracy, you might make fewer sales. I don't have a problem with that. I also don't have a problem with pepsi resulting in coca cola having fewer sales.
>Again, you can't lose something you never had, and calling it a loss is just wordplay.
Well, you can. We have entire legal systems dedicated to assessing economic harm based on similar hypothetical situations. For e.g. Loss of income due to injury.. loss of earnings due to defamation.. diminished earning capacity due to a handicap, etc, etc. You can't simply say - "it never was or you never had that money". All these things have well established economic and legal histories. I don't know if those are part of your worldview. If you wish to reject them, then be assured that you are well outside of mainstream economic and legal thought.
A loss is simply a reduction. I hope you realize that a positive claim that piracy results in zero loss of revenue, has to be substantiated. At best, you can claim "we don't know" and you might very well be right - we simply don't know exactly what would have happened. But that is not the same as saying - we know nothing. We can piece together a model based on basic economic principles of market value, supply and demand, opportunity cost, etc, etc. and come up with a reasonable analysis.
If someone pirates a movie and watches it without paying, the movie studio loses ROI only to the same extent that they lose ROI when someone doesn't pirate it and doesn't watch it. Am I stealing ROI from the Detective Pikachu movie by not going to the cinema to watch it?
But when a person has the option of watching a pirate copy vs. a paid copy, then there is a loss. To extrapolate— if everyone only used pirate copies, who would finance movie production or music production or book publishing?
> To extrapolate— if everyone only used pirate copies, who would finance movie production or music production or book publishing?
If everyone only pirated, it would mean nobody valued that stuff enough to sustain it. If people doesn't value it, let it die. Can you imagine a world where nobody values movies or music or books? I can't. And therefore I can't see them dying, no matter what. So this concern is irrelevant to me.
I'm not sure why I would need to come up with ways to finance the production of goods that people don't want to pay for. Going back to my previous example, I have no idea how the Detective Pikachu movie would get financed if everyone in the world had the same lack of interest in it as I do. But I also wouldn't be too upset if no one was interested in a Detective Pikachu movie and it never got financed and produced.
At one end of the spectrum, everyone pays to see every movie they want to see. The movie makers make bank and keep making movies.
At the other end of the spectrum, everyone pirates the movies they want to see. The movie makers stop making movies because they won't make money on them.
In between the two ends is a large grey area. Pretending that it's always acceptable to pirate any movie you want to see is akin to saying that you don't want the movie studios to make movies anymore. But pretending that every movie pirated costs the studios a ROI equal to the cost of buying the movie is disingenuous, too.
> The movie makers stop making movies because they won't make money on them.
Counterexample:
fanfiction.net 13'293'677 works
archiveofourown.org 4'825'000 works
fimfiction.net 125'797 works
[assorted forums and individual websites that make up the other half of my bookmarks] ? works
It looks like people will in fact make things even when they know - due to copyright law even - that they cannot make money on them.
Any creative work that will only get made if the authors think they can extort money from the people who benfit from it is a work that society is better off without.
> Pretending that it's always acceptable to pirate any movie you want to see is akin to saying that you don't want the movie studios to make movies anymore.
It is always acceptable not to watch a movie. Does that mean one doesn't want studios to make movies? No, they can still keep making movies if others care enough to keep them going.
This is just saying that movies will be produced in proportion to the amount of people who want to watch movies bad enough to actually subsidise their production.
The same exact mechanism is in play in music (fans who go to gigs & buy swag etc. subsidise music for the masses who hardly put a penny in it), and many other parts of the economy. Enthusiasts, companies with deep pockets, everyone who pours big money into research & bleeding edge tech subsidise the things that will ripple down to the rest of us with lower and lower margins, often in such a way that the original inventor/researcher/producer gets cut out of the loop in that market.
The market will correct itself so it's kinda pointless to hypothesize about a world where nobody wants to pay for a movie yet somehow everyone wants movies real bad.
I think fireworks are a good analogy. On New Year's eve, many people buy them and fire them, but others just go for a walk or watch the show from their window or roof.
The act of pirating the movie itself signals that there is some notional value to the downloaded content. Otherwise, you would just pipe 1GB of bits from /dev/random in to a file and play that.
>The same exact mechanism is in play in music (fans who go to gigs & buy swag etc. subsidise music for the masses who hardly put a penny in it), and many other parts of the economy.
This is correct; income from services like Spotify are pitifully low. However, it highlights an important distinction between two types of movie piracy: cam-rips of movies currently playing in the theatre, and "normal" piracy, which is of stuff available through retail. The thing with music is that you can't pirate a live band performance: there's very rarely anything comparable to a cam. For one thing, too much of the value of a live performance comes from the experience. Second, it's usually too difficult to capture such a performance as an ordinary audience member. (Official recordings released after the tour are different, of course.)
While I, like some others here, don't believe in intellectual property at all, I do think that artists should be rewarded for their work. Until we can get a better system, I question the ethics of taking something for free when you are in a position to easily pay for something of equal or better quality. So I personally have never torrented anything that was playing in theaters, and I think that's a principle one could reasonably stick to.
However, I think there's a striking difference between what you might call "performance rights", and right to copy. In the latter case, while I think it still makes sense to give the artist some recompense for their success, the situation is in fact much different. Other people regularly make these points, so I'll only mention the top few most relevant for me:
* It's usually impossible to rent / purchase a movie at home at watch it instantly without DRM. Many movies aren't available for streaming at all.
* Quality is usually quite bad when streaming. Even if you get lucky and can get 1080p or above (which means you're not a Firefox or Chrome user watching Netflix), the encoding quality of the film is usually quite bad.
* Even if you have a video rental service nearby, and they have the movie you want to watch in Bluray, you then need to have a Bluray player to watch it (more DRM), as well as hope you have the latest AACS keys, or that your player can download them in a reasonable amount of time if you do not. (Even then there are quite often encoding problems on Blurays, which pirates take the time to fix more often than not.)
In other words, the value proposition of pirating retail products is pretty good. You can instantly (or nearly so) watch a larger selection of films in higher quality than you can get through any other means, with no technological limitations. I think in this case, the value of compensating artists is outweighed by the competing value of the incredible increase in convenience and quality that piracy represents to the public.
None of this is to say that compensating artists isn't important; the problem is that the current system for compensating them sets up a whole bunch of competing values. While your "fireworks" analogy probably works for films in theaters, it doesn't exactly capture the realities of the retail market for films. That reality is that we need a better system for distributing movies that makes it possible to compensate artists without neglecting other values.
On the third end of the spectrum, there's the crowdfunding model. Alternatively, we could only have "free non-commercial use" - so that if you make money from the movie (e.g. a movie theatre) you'd need to pay royalties... so people could either pay to see it in the cinema, or download free and watch at home... i.e. same as the de facto status quo. (Personally, I don't understand why people go to the cinema - I prefer to watch movies at home even if cinema was free - but some people still seem to like going...)
Crowdfunding is not inherently limited in scale. If it can raise $5k $50k or $500k, there's no reason to think it couldn't raise $5M. Or even $350M for that matter. The reason these projects aren't being funded is because they're basically uneconomic to make in the first place; by forcing people to pay for content instead of releasing it for free (effectively a price floor!) the proprietary market has to compete by "gold-plating" the stuff and wasting away any potential gains in efficiency.
Compare U.S. airlines before deregulation got rid of the price floors there. Incredibly appealing service, with great waiting areas at the airport, gourmet meals in-flight, young attractive air-hostesses, and so on and so forth - but only if you could afford it in the first place! Behind all that luxury, we were actually seeing rampant wastage of resources.
I specifically called out “Get Out” for that reason. It definitely wasn’t “gold plated”. It was made on a budget of $5 million and grossed $285 million and got great reviews.
RMS's stance is that he is against the idea of 'intellectual property' as an umbrella term for copyright, patents, and trademarks, as it conflates three (or more) largely unrelated areas of law. This does not necessarily mean he is against any of these ideas per se.
My reading of the linked rant is that RMS is against lumping copyright, patents and trademarks under the umbrella of "intellectual property", but not against those things individually. I don't see anything there to support the idea that RMS is against the idea of copyright (that being the section of "IP" that the GPL most directly addresses).
The GPL is hijacking IP to create a consumer right to repair that should exist but doesn't.
Total IP abolition in combination with a strongly enshrined right to repair, which would necessitate access to source code of binaries given, would be perfectly in the spirit of the free software movement.
The same law that protects people from stealing GPL code also protects movie studios from having their content copied and redistributed without permission. And I wouldn't be at all surprised if some of the GPL family of licenses' restrictions on exactly how you can use GPL software are legally difficult to discern from media companies' efforts to restrict how we are allowed to consume their works.
But there are things that I suspect would be easier to disentangle. I wouldn't mind seeing some sort of provision where copyrighted works can more easily fall into the public domain when they've been abandoned by their copyright holders, for example. We could also stand to roll back some of the power grabs that media companies have managed to get codified.
What The Swedish Pirate Party Wants With Patents, Trademarks, And Copyright (2012):
> Copyright must be reformed. We’d like to keep the copyright monopoly for commercial use (but with shorter, more sensible terms of protection). The big problem is that copyright has expanded in the past 20 years, going from being something that only corporations needed to care about, into something that criminalizes the entire young generation (and more and more people who aren’t even particularly young anymore).
> The Swedish Pirate Party wants to; Legalize file-sharing and other non-commercial sharing [...] At most 20 years of protection from the publication of a work. [...] Registration after five years. [...] Sensible regulation for quotations, parodies, and remixes [...] A ban on DRM
> I agree with all three of these positions. I do suggest, however, that it would be better not to group together these three issues and only these three. Why would anyone group together these three unrelated laws? I suspect it reflects the mistaken concept of "intellectual property".
You can reform copyright without rendering the GPL unworkable. I asked Rick Falkvinge about this a number of years ago (2008-2010), and he seemed quite confident that the GPL would still be viable given their proposed reforms.
(Current Pirate Parties appear to use similar policies, such as Pirate Party UK:"A fair and balanced copyright regime that is suitable for the 21st century is an absolute necessity for the UK to remain competitive in a global economy that is built upon ideas and innovation. Copyright should give artists and innovators the chance to make money from their work; however, that needs to be balanced with the rights of society as a whole. We will work for copyright reform and reduce copyright terms to 10 years to balance everyone's needs." https://www.pirateparty.org.uk/policy/culture/home)
Burning copyright to the ground would be a significant improvement over the mess we have now. Artificial scarcity enriches a few at the expense of the many; hardly a desirable state of affairs.
This is true if you only consider the first order effect of copyright.
However, the second order effects would lead to, for example, significant decrease in investment of the creation of any work that has marginal production of near $0. Why would Disney/Marvel go to the effort of creating the Avengers movies when those movies could be shown freely by movie theaters? They, of course, would not as there would be no way to recoup their investments. Now the millions of "the many" who have freely exchanged their dollars for movie tickets are worse off. Nobody wins, not the few and not the many.
Why would GRRM write the next two works in ASOIAF if ANY publisher could take the text, print it and sell it without remuneration to GRRM? At best he would because he's already rich but would he ever have in the first place?
The winners in your world may very well be Amazon and others with the easiest/best distribution platforms at the cost of the creators and in turn at the cost of all as the creators no longer create.
We could transition into a model where works are crowdfunded before they are made by people who want them the most. Creators set the amount they want for their work and if there are enough people that wish to see the work it will get funded and will be free for everyone to enjoy without artificial scarcity.
Crowdfunding exists today. We don't see this model much at all and certainly not at the levels of quality or scale seen in for-profit, copyright/IP based enterprise. Why?
1) To gain a crowdfunding base of sufficient size to replace the current models and achieve the necessary budgets in the first instance would require massive marketing spend. This would HAVE to be forked over prior to obtaining funding and therefore represents a major risk because with crowdfunding, it's all or nothing.
2) Tragedy of the commons/freeloading. Why agree to pony-up when I can wait/hope for some other saps to do so?
3) Crowdfunding means paying for something that doesn't exist to be created and trusting that the creators can/will create it at a level of quality that matches what you expected from their pitch. But wait, you've already committed your resources to them. Why should they actually strive to create an optimal good when they get your money regardless of the quality? This is a huge problem with crowdfunding. In today's world, you can rely on word of mouth, reviews, previews, etc.
So, no, the proposed world would be much worse. The set of above reasons are really showstoppers, imo, and they don't even cover the full scope of the problems with your proposal.
> Why would Disney/Marvel go to the effort of creating the Avengers movies when those movies could be shown freely by movie theaters?
Maybe we could wait a bit for cool movies when technology advances to the point where they can be made by few dedicated people with off the shelf hardware instead hundred million budget that needs to be propped up with additional millions to trump up the hype so it can be earned back?
So many things made possible by copyright that we are accustomed to look like severe pathology when you look at them with fresh eye.
> Maybe we could wait a bit for cool movies when technology advances to the point where they can be made by few dedicated people with off the shelf hardware instead hundred million budget that needs to be propped up with additional millions to trump up the hype so it can be earned back?
We aren't far away from that, but it's important to remember that creators now have the option to create without attaching copyright to a work. Copyright isn't mandatory. Creators tend to choose copyright because it is in their best interest.
Also, it isn't mandatory to consume copyrighted media. Just find something else that isn't encumbered by it if you wish.
Of course it is not. What I'm saying is, optimal economic decissions of some people might not be good for people in general. When it comes to copyright we can't consider only the good of the creators and people who paid creators.
Copyright is not just for popculture. Also learning materials, software and culture in general. Tonnes of people in the world got their higher education on pirated software and xeroxed books.
If your "fresh eye" take on copyright is "Hey man, one day just a few dedicated people will be able to do this and we should just wait til then because it will happen and those people will do it for free and it will be of equal or greater quality to what we have today or would have in the future regardless" without a clear path to that being a reality nor a clear argument for why these people will actually do that, then I'll stick with the "severe pathology" which to date is still clearly the best means through which resources are put to productive use.
Long live capitalism, free choice and property rights: the greatest human forces of all time; the creators of prosperity.
I appreciate the sentiment that leads one to such considerations, but really all I see with no copyright is that creators will be completely exploited and the only people making money from people's works will be corporations who lock stuff up with DRM, or with other IP, or sui generis licenses, or simply through physical gateways like only showing movies in cinemas. I don't see that this would lead to greater access to new media creations (though obviously past media would all be open to use).
Short copyright terms - someone mentioned 20 years max, with registration needed after 5 years. That sort of thing is better, far better than both longer copyright and no copyright.
The maximum term, IMO, should enable people to enjoy for free-gratis in their middle ages the media of their youth and build on that freely (libre) as inspiration to create cultural works for themselves and those that follow. Being able to have open, uninhibited access to one's own cultural inspirations well within one's working lifetime seems ideal to make sure that the demos get something worthwhile out of the deal.
Works restricted by DRM can't enter the public domain and so should be exempt from protection by copyright, though I'd allow some sort of deposit system whereby companies could put un-bound works in escrow, and so still be allowed to get copyright protections.
What you describe in the first paragraph seems like a detailed and accurate description of the current state of affairs, with strong copyright law essentially written by the large corporations you describe.
Anyone who is making a modest living producing their own original IP is not doing so because of IP protection laws, because they surely cannot afford to litigate (and they certainly can't afford to lobby to get the laws to favor them).
GPL is in the word of its author Richard Stallman a strategy to maximize the amount of users that can exercise liberty over their own life in regard to software.
I think it is a rather nice trade to give up GPL if we get in return the right to repair to deal with DRM and no copyright to allow for sharing and modifying software.
For my own part, outside of OS and security software, which I feel should be 100% monolithic and black box, I'm fine with the idea of all text and code of every program and file being available to anyone who may wish to improve it.
> For my own part, outside of OS and security software, which I feel should be 100% monolithic and black box, I'm fine with the idea of all text and code of every program and file being available to anyone who may wish to improve it.
Curious to hear why you think OS and security software should be black boxes and not open.
Because I don't trust anyone. I feel that human interference is a security problem that can't be overcome and should be reduced by every possible means.
By that same logic, you shouldn't trust the creators of the monolithic black box either. So you can't trust anyone, except yourself and the OS only you have access to.
In general, do you not find carrying this level of paranoia on a daily basis is simply oppressive to your own well being?
You're right. The preference would be that each person has access to a single part of the black box and no access to anyone or any other part of the whole shebang. Either that or the old way of dealing with people involved in things that have to remain secret. Of course, you behead enough OS devs and soon there won't be any.
As far as my daily life, no not really. I just live a life where I grant very few people a view into the things I consider private, and ensure that every two or three people know contradictory things without knowing the parts that put them together. It leads to a robust but distant social web.
> I grant very few people a view into the things I consider private, and ensure that every two or three people know contradictory things without knowing the parts that put them together
Sounds exhausting, I can't imagine using that much mental energy to keep up this web, but your life your rules.
The vectors I fear are the potentially malicious brains behind every pair of eyes. Why do you want to see my OS (or really any of my software)? The only reason I can think of is to have access to my files, or to hijack my machine and install customized ransomware as part of the OS. Therefore, any individual who sees any part of my OS that could grant them any access whatsoever to any part of my PC is an extreme and real danger.
GPL is a way to ensure that this particular piece of software stays free forever. One thing that GPL definitely doesn't do is "you have to contribute back your changes", it's fully legal to modify and use GPL-based systems and not contribute any changes back; the only thing that GPL prohibits is enforcing copyright restrictions on others when (if!) I pass the software on to them.
In a legislative regime where all software is free, that goal is achieved without GPL so GPL isn't needed anymore; I get the permission to use, modify and redistribute all software as if I had received it with the GPL.
that's a gross mischaracterization of the situation.
copyright doesn't mean "i get paid", it means "i get to withhold" (see all the out-of-print books, abandonware, etc).
GPL does not mean "you have to contribute back your changes" at all: "The GPL does not require you to release your modified version, or any part of it. You are free to make modifications and use them privately, without ever releasing them." https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#GPLRequireSourc...
one is about taking access away (for whatever goal), the other is about taking that option away (for the benefit of users).
Well, the author of a work should be able to control certain key aspects of distribution. Either you agree or disagree. Anything else is just a special-pleading logical fallacy.
I don't think that's true at all. We can acknowledge qualitative differences and aims and indeed this "special pleading" is the foundation of all law - we select based on our own conceptions of what is right which laws to make; to say that it is special pleading is to say that laws against those actions which cause harm is special pleading - after all, what's so special about harm? Nevertheless, it is possible to imagine a world in which one restriction (or liberalization) is made but another is not. While this requires a competent legislature and judiciary, there is no reason to think it is impossible; the difficulty in making an analytic distinction is only a small speed bump.
Well, sure, thats all well and good in theory. How do you deal with existing laws though? Its hypocritical to tell someone to not "steal" GPL code, when you're downloading the latest Avengers movie yourself. I'm all for changing the law, but I don't agree with the approach that copyright law can only be fixed via civil disobedience.
You are creating a false dichotomy by using the word stealing in the first place.
If you accidentally take a picture of my shitty origami art project you are not stealing
If you walk into a factory and take the mold for a military sonar device you are stealing.
At what point does changing the first story into the second story does it become stealing?
Either you can pinpoint a minimal set of changes in which it becomes stealing OR 'stealing' vs 'not stealing' is insufficient to accurately describe a situation
Yes, stealing applies primarily to physical property or physical items of value. And the word hacker now has a second meaning with a negative connotation. Words outgrow their original meaning as the language evolves. I'm not advocating for the word 'steal' to be a legal definition of anything. I'm simply using it on an internet forum in a casual context.
The author already doesn't control all aspects of distribution. It's for example okay to use copyrighted works for satire in many legislations. So lawmakers already agree that there are legitimate uses of copyrighted works that are out of control of the copyright holder. If we wante to we could extend such uses to include filesharing.
As a society, we have generally agreed that the author has certain rights of control, and as a society (i.e. using taxpayers' money) we will enforce those rights on behalf of the author.
How is that different from society agreeing that it'll use taxpayers' money - through the police force, courts, etc - to uphold my right to keep control of my wallet, my car and my house, in the face of someone who might want to take them from me? My possession of these things is personal, yet society supports/enforces it when challenged.
GPL "abuses" copyright to prevent conveyors from closing off software from its users. make the provisions of GPL the law, and copyright of software can go.
The reason GPL exists is because of current IP. Stallman believes in all source code being open and treated no different than a cooking recipe. GPL was created to use existing copyright laws to fight with proprietary software.
So if we had no copyright, GPL wouldn't even be needed.
> Stallman believes in all source code being open and treated no different than a cooking recipe.
Not exactly. He doesn't want people modifying the recipe and keeping it a secret. Or atleast, not distributing food made from that recipe. (I know that analogy breaks down here.. but I tried!)
But Stallman and the pirate party have come up with a pretty nice proposal in the end: a much shorter time limit on copyright that can be extended if you give more rights to the user.
You’re suggesting that actors/directors/musicians shouldn’t be paid because the marginal cost of their product approaches $0? Wouldn’t that disincentivize production of new TV/Movies/Music? Enshrining the right to piracy is enshrining the right to destroy your artist community.
This whole thing usually goes in circles but I think I've observed a few consistent facts in the discussions on HN:
* People believe that you shouldn't be able to remix art to make money off it.
* People believe that you should be able to pirate games for free, often because they feel that the games makers are exploiting them (via DLCs, in-game purchases, whatever)
* People believe that essays, books, etc. should be pirateable
* People believe that business software shouldn't be pirateable because software engineers need to make money. You'll usually be downvoted if you suggest this on, say, a Jetbrains release or something.
All this taken together, to me, provides some amount of evidence to me that this stuff is just characteristic of the kinds of employment that most people on this forum have, rather than some sort of philosophical position people have on this issue. Hope this saves you some time in discussion.
My take is that copyright got lost when people started treating it as property. In that aspect I think GPL has a better philosophical standing as treating code as a commons to be protected from becoming property. Would not be sad to see it go out as collateral damage if it would mean abolishment of copyright and it’s philosophical failure though.
We should focus more on how to incorporate the commons in all we do. Economics, politics, justice.
This is what John Locke was talking about when he suggested that not everything can be private property.
Yochai Benklers the Wealth of Networks is a good overview of the concept of commons based peer-production, and the tragedy of the anti commons.
Any talk by Lawrence Lessing from way back when the topic was hot is fantastic takes remix culture
Personally I add to that the thinking of Henry George on how an just society should divide the land rent as public dividend. Also checkout geo-libertarianism and surrounding ideologies.
Perhaps taking it a step further:
Locke argues that land becomes property when you mix it with your labor. But only if there is no contention, the land is after all for all to share.
I’ll restate that as this:
The commons is primary. We all have an equal claim to it all.
To take something from the commons and make it private requires a fair trade. It’s not enough to put a stake in the ground and just claim it. Instead what is lost to the commons must be repaid.
Hence the question should never be, “how should x get paid?” but rather “what value can we derive from granting x exclusivity?”
Just consider for a moment the amount of resources are spent on enforcing the artificial scarcity supposedly motivating copyright.
The primary costs of policing it. Employing people to fight legal battles over it. Implementing automatic enforcements. The cost to those getting caught in violation. The cost of practioners in negotiating rights (what would it cost TPB to secure rights for everything it facilitate access too?)
Then there is the secondary costs. The opportunity costs of not having free access, the Napster that could have been. The things all those people impacted by the primary costs could have done instead, what value could they have provided?
My mind boggles when contemplating it, and I can’t for a second believe that if that is what it takes to get Game of Thrones produced, that I couldn’t live without it for a freer world.
Most content creators already aren't paid well. Value accrues to the publishers and the publishers today have massive control over distribution channels.
Isn't that mostly how Silicon Valley works too? Software developers like content creators are generally compensated well enough to live an upper middle class lifestyle, but their compensation doesn't necessarily match the value they create. Instead much of the value is captured by VC or production companies. This is because those companies are the ones who bare the largest percentage of the risk. If a project completely falls flat on its face, software developers and writers, actors, directors, etc still collect their paycheck. It is the VC and production company that lose money.
Isn't that mostly how Silicon Valley works too? Software developers like content creators are generally compensated well enough to live an upper middle class lifestyle, but their compensation doesn't necessarily match the value they create. Instead much of the value is captured by VC or production companies.
It's not just that. Society is still catching up to the ramifications of the additional value extracted by social media and tech media companies. People can't deny that automotive technology made much of the US population dependent in their daily lives on cars. (Whether this is a good or a bad thing is besides the point for this discussion. Probably bad in many ways, good in a few.) This gave the auto makers a certain responsibility for meeting minimum levels of safety, reliability, and environmental friendliness. Society eventually caught up to the implications of automotive technology, and this was reflected in laws codifying that social responsibility.
This is because those companies are the ones who bare the largest percentage of the risk. If a project completely falls flat on its face, software developers and writers, actors, directors, etc still collect their paycheck. It is the VC and production company that lose money.
Then it is also the "production company" which should bear the social responsibility for their impact on the media landscape and social discourse. As was the case for the appearance of laws and regulations covering the activities of the automotive industry, as that industry had ever greater impact upon the general public's life, so too is the case for social media tech companies.
If they reap the rewards, then they should take on the social responsibility.
I thought it was interesting to highlight the similarities because this community would likely push back much harder if you said the startup scene is inherently flawed like that comment said about content creation.
NotLD entered the public domain because of a failure to apply a copyright indication. Largely due to this oversight, and entire genre of Zombie media has flourished unencumbered by restrictive IP.
Obviously your cynical take on fan-art is despicable and ignorant, but there's no shortage of examples of what the commons can produce.
Porn is inevitable though even with the laws... I think the parent is referring to people making games and writing stories based on popular franchises.
Look at game companies stopping fan made games. I remember hearing about a fan remake of PS1 Metal Gear Solid. Was gathering huge fan far and had kojima's blessing, but the studio shut it down.
I can't speak for actors and directors, but as a musician I have made peace that the only pennies I'll be having are from live events.
Even if you pay $5 a month for <insert music streaming service> and only listen to my songs, I get literally $0.00 (up to significant figures). They pool everything together so essentially you are subsidising Justin Bieber; just putting it out there...
Exactly, yes. But many fans (of other artists; when referring to myself we'll have sampling bias) actually have no idea that their $5 doesn't go directly to the songs they listen to in a month.
> let's say
I would happily accept if we can cut out transaction costs. My idea of a "good" streaming platform for music is one with only a flat rate (say $5), no free option, and no pooling. That means that if I listen to Scatman once in the month and it is the only song I listened to, then John Larkin's estate should get exactly $5, min some small platform fee. (Sorry for picking a dead artist; royalties after death is complicated. Personally I guess I would limit mine to about 10 years, but then again I don't receive any royalties.)
Sorry, just another clarification. I am not against pirated music. But I am just explaining a possible improvement over Spotify / Apple music. Also, this "improvement" may actually discribe a niche kind of "fandomify" that maybe will always be small. But if you implement the above it puts the onus on the customer to support their artists. It also disincentivises account sharing for hard core fans that want to give money to their favourite artists.
You can easily check that your money goes where you want it to from a statement at the end of the month... If you see that Justin Bieber's Baby got $0.99 then of course it's plausible because your "friend" logged in and listened to the song 99 times out of your 500 listens that month.
Not everywhere do Pirate Party and Pirate Bay have similar or compatible goals.
In Canada, Pirate Party claims to stand for:
- Increased privacy of citizens
- Increased ability of citizens to own and control their data
- Increased visibility and public discourse &debate of technology's impact on private lives, business climate, intellectual property, societal changes, etc
As such, it is the only party here to openly tackle, let alone make it their core platform, what I personally perceive to be the defining issues of the 21st century.
I feel that Pirate Party may end up like the Green party of few decades ago -- initially perceived as fringe, marginalized, irrelevant; until we realize they are tackling emerging core societal problems.
As such, while I'm extremely in favour of supporting creators (all my software, from OS to Photoshop is legally purchased; I duly pay my Netflix/Spotify/Prime, purchase photography and clipart when I need them, go to concerts, go to cinema, tip baskers, participate in Patreon, buy webcomic books, etc; and discussion on whether those appropriately pay artists is important but orthogonal to this one), I do support Pirate Party of Canada through my membership and might consider voting if they had a local candidate.
>I feel that Pirate Party may end up like the Green party of few decades ago -- initially perceived as fringe, marginalized, irrelevant; until we realize they are tackling emerging core societal problems.
I don't know how much if at all the Canadian Green Party relates to the US Green Party, but the Green party south of the border is certainly still perceived as "fringe, marginalized, irrelevant". A quick look at Wikipedia suggests that the Canadian Green Party probably still fits that bill as well.
The Green Party is certainly marginalized here, but a lot less so than in the US. The party leader actually has a seat in Parliment and is regularly quoted on public radio. They also form a small part of the a coalition government in BC and almost did in PEI.
The Green Party here suffers from our poor electoral system (FPTP), but they definitly have supporters, even if their supporters don't vote for them for strategic reasons.
No, this incentivizes different models to reward content creators. Torrents are technologically a super efficient way to promote discovery. Off the top of my head, artists can make money off live events, live streams, interacting with their community, sponsorships, patronage, etc.
Look at what people routinely pay for in crowdfunding models, where all costs are 100% transparent and marginal cost is indeed generally low or even zero. You'll find a whole lot of indie stuff (very high-quality indie stuff in fact - because the same well-established reputational mechanisms that are active in the FLOSS community work there as well!), and few or no "actors/directors/musicians" of the mainstream sort getting any money there.
This is how it should be - there is simply no rational case for mindless entertainment ("TV/Movies/Music") that costs on the order of $10M or $100M to make!
> This is how it should be - there is simply no rational case for mindless entertainment ("TV/Movies/Music") that costs on the order of $10M or $100M to make!
How is this not just outright snobbery about what people should enjoy?
We all – not just those who go to the movies, but everyone – also pay a hidden cost: The cost of the copyright system itself. You imply that this cost is necessary for “high-scale, ambitious entertainment”, but I say that you should then be held to pay for it, instead of society as a whole.
It may or may not be true that “high-scale, ambitious entertainment” is unsupportable without copyright. If it turns out to be not supportable, it would be like the pyramids: Large, impressive, and expensive things which the structure of our society and our economy can no longer support the constructions of. I.e. the society we live in could concievably be re-organized to again support the construction of pyramids, but we choose not to do that, in order to have a modern society and economy instead.
And yet those big budget films/TV shows are one of the few things remaining that provide a common cultural experience. It’s nice to be able to talk about something besides the weather with a complete stranger.
> things... that provide a common cultural experience.
That's what the public domain is for, of course. It's too bad that this limits us to 1923-or-before material (in the U.S., and ignoring non-copyright-renewed stuff from later in the 20th c.) but that still covers centuries of shared culture - even millennia, in some cases!
True enough, but those lack the virtue of timeliness.
Absent an organizing effort, it’s unlikely you’ll catch someone who has read, say, Dracula for the first time recently just like you have and can share that initial enthusiasm for the material.
The rational case is that it's absurdly expensive to make artistic content in term of people's time, as well as the cost in things like location, filming, and support. This isn't saying there isn't unneccessary costs...part of the need for a publisher is to keep costs under control! But things like building sets, special effects and more really ramp up the cost and fast.
You are supporting an army of workers to make a decently budgeted film, for multiple years.
Why would I create an indie production of some kind for no money? Are you saying now if I want to make something I have to setup a gofundme and get it funded before I even make the product. That's fine for something, and ruins the artistic intent for other things. Imagine Star Wars being crowdfunded before it was made.
If we reach 100k we'll make sure Han Solo shoots first.
It doesn't make sense. People should be paid for providing a service, whether it's a hamburger or a movie. You don't pay someone before the goods are delivered. The modern system of pre-funding and patronization is absurd for many projects.
> ...get it funded before I even make the product.
Strictly speaking, you don't have to do this. You could make the product, send it under a strict NDA to a variety of widely-trusted 3rd-party reviewers/critics, with whatever sort of protection against leaks you might require, then put the existing product for crowdfunded "ransom" (Like Blender was, after the original company went out of business), building in whatever return you might wish to ask for in exchange for bearing the ensuing risk. This doesn't require ordinary copyright protection at all, only a very limited-in-scope protection for private, unpublished stuff.
(The "ransom" model is in fact already potentially-applicable to a lot of existing content that's generally considered worthless, but that, much like Blender itself, might be valued more in the context of an open release. Transaction costs - namely, wrt. the exceedingly-common case of "orphan works", with unknown rights-holders - get in the way of it, however.)
Maybe, but piracy skirts that issue. Who's going to protect you when someone breaks the NDA? When someone steals your production copy? Piracy is a broad brush.
You produce whatever small part of your work you can afford to on couch change, pizza favors and family support and sell it. Fund the next part from the proceeds of the first.
It lives on today in webisodes and patreonage, or, hell, TV shows, but some of what we now consider great literature was produced as serialized chapters in magazines, and only after the fact bundled together as a single volume novel.
Maybe box-office blockbusters funded as multi-million dollar investments and released all at once were just a temporary aberration, like the "album".
No, I am not suggesting that in any way. I am suggesting that when the marginal cost of their product approaches zero, a system that is based on retributing them based on the number of copies do not make sense anymore.
Actually I am goign to vote for them more because of their proposals on liquid and direct democracy, I haven't followed their debate on copyrights in the last few years. When I was the most popular proposal to replace copyright was a global license, which actually exists in a very badly implemented form in France for bars and shops.
TPB was good for software, even if I owned legit software I would run the dongle free hacked version just because it didn't put you through hoops to check your license, giving a better install/start time.
But we don't run that desktop software now. Open Source is better than closed source for many applications, then there is SaaS. I am not going to want to get excited about Microsoft Word as nobody uses word processors these days.
It's been forever since I've fired up a torrent client besides grabbing the latest iso of this distro or that distro. Where do the cool kids grab their torrents from these days?
If you have an adblocker (to prevent cryptocurrency mining, and giant transparent overlays with links taking you to horrible ads) I hear that skytorrents, 1337x, the pirate bay, or eztv are pretty good.
Yes, this problem can definitely be seen on some of the trackers, but many old school players have crews that are mature and behave normally. The only proof for this is their long track (10+ years) of successful existence.
What the regular person gets from it is the access to the great quality of content in easy way.
I think it varies from tracker to tracker. The "cabal" ones probably match that, but a lot of the smaller niche private trackers have been very welcoming and a great place to get content in my experience. They are still very strict in terms of uploading requirements, but that is to be expected in order to maintain quality.
They have killed off the best sites though. Like Demonoid.. There you could find lovingly curated collections of obscure stuff that could not be found or bought anywhere. Eg. obscure Arthur C Clarke short stories.
On public trackers like TPB and RarBG you will only find popular trash like Marvel movies and game of thrones.
So imo the heart of 'piracy' has been mostly torn out.
Pirate Bay solves many problems and it will continue to exist in some incarnation until those problems have been resolved by some other, better solution.
For many, perhaps most people, Pirate Bay is literally the ONLY solution available.
I'm using Pirate Bay in a general sense to refer to Bit-torrent but also in a more specific sense as it applies to their longevity.
Honest question: What is TPB good for these days? Recent mainstream movies are available through iTunes and similar venues. Older and/or lesser known movies usually have very few seeders on TPB IME. IMO it’s more convenient to just order the DVD by mail in that case.
I like to have downloaded files of movies I own. Thus I can watch them without and internet connection and also I don't have to trust the the streaming service will randomly delete my movie (as has happened).
Why not just rip them? I used to rip all of my DVDs, but then found I never watched those rips, and now I'd rather just pay $5 to watch the 4k version than track down my "free" 480i copy.
Ripping them is exactly as illegal as torrenting while being harder to do and the tools to remove DRM from content are under constant attack. It's easier to just torrent.
In-browser players with drm lag and don't give you options about video quality, can't shift playback speed or shift audio/video sync timing or add subtitles from fans etc etc.
Software like Photoshop or After Effects, cracked PC games I would guess, and of course pornography. Important to note that despite the convenience offered in today's streaming services, there is still a large portion of people who are morally/ethically against paying for streaming services, so there is still a market for TV and movies -- PopcornTime runs on torrents and there are millions of users.
I guess I'm in the minority here, but I honestly find everything I want there. It's still the only sensible place to obtain stuff I want to check out (no, I don't want to dish out 20€/month to see one film once) and I never have a problem with getting old things faster than I can plug in my DVD drive. It's perfectly fine as a normie tracker imo.
To try games. Since companies stopped creating demos I need to download a pirated copy of a game before deciding if I should buy it or not, even just to check if it runs decently on my hw configuration.
Reading the tos for refunds it seems I have to play for a maximum of two hours or must be passed less than two weeks from the moment I buy. Considering I play mostly rts, simulator or survival games I need far more than 2 hours to understand if the gameplay is deep enough or replayable enough, or if the game slow down too much as soon as I have too many units/buildings in the screen
I’m not surprised, that’s exactly the kind of material one would expect to find there. If I would watch GoT I would just do it on HBO, but to each their own.
I guess I always thought things would go back to IRC once all of these sites got taken down. While I was still getting everything I wanted on Undernet or Dalnet, I remember thinking it was brazen to have this stuff on a public website, and that it wouldn't last long if it was legit stuff. It's funny Pirate Bay is still proving me wrong after all these years.
My IRC revival just doesn't seem to be in the cards. I can't even find an active server outside of freenode, which is basically like a stack overflow chat.
Wasn't the domain operated by the FBI at some point (or some other law enforcement agency, I forgot)? No mention in the article? Perhaps it keeps operating as a honeypot?
There is still, for me and a few other people, value in obtaining and sharing music that is outside the influence of corporate curation. It feels more organic.
IIRC, it was hosted by the Pirate Party at the Pionen White Mountain reserve for some time. But ever since Cloudflare came into existence, access to their front-end is provided by them with a hidden tor node in the back-end.
At this point the media companies are relying on the public being “normalized” to buying their content.
“Of course I buy my songs and hit up Redbox and buy DVDs! That’s how it works!”
The tools will get easier to use and the outputs will continue to approach studio quality.
You hear the stories from folks in the industry: I grew up making movies with my parents camcorder.
Today’s kids will grow up using a computer and iPad to quickly make a movie, aided by ML tools that help edit and create CG content, and publish it instantly for free.
Legal avenues have already replaced illegal downloading of music for nearly all of us.
I grew up torrenting and was a proud member of what.cd when that tracker was still alive.
These days I listen to nearly all of my music on paid Spotify subscriptions. The number of people who have access to either Spotify, Amazon Prime, or Apple Music subscriptions must be huge. Those who don’t have paid subscriptions probably aren’t that interested in music in the first place.
Video is a different beast, but I do like Netflix. Torrents live on for new releases and less available content, though.
Agreed, I like Spotify quite a lot. But for movies, Netflix simply ins't cutting it these days. Try searching for any movie from 2000 - 2010 [1] that made more than a million in the box office on opening weekend. Most of them are not there. I want to watch films like Harry Potter, The Dark Knight, and Lord of the Rings. Unfortunately, they are either scattered across a dozen different services or simply not there at all.
What I would like is a rent-on-demand method. Xbox almost gets this right: they have plenty of titles you can rent for up to 24 hours. You typically pay between 3 - 6 dollars per film. More recent films are more expensive. However, I would like to see the cost go down, especially for older titles. Basically match any Redbox prices (1-2 dollars), and provide a way for me to stream it on-demand.
Have you tried Youtube? They have a pretty extensive catalog of rent-on-demand movies, and I rarely find a mainstream movie that I want to watch, that isn't in their catalog. Most of them range between $2.99 / $5.99 or so, with really recent releases going higher, and the rare oddball title that's $14.99 or something (presumably because that's what the rights-holder demanded?)
Netflix dropped the idea of being a universal streaming library years ago; once the copyright holders realized the actual value of the streaming rights to their properties, they stopped letting Netflix license them for peanuts and the total cost of licensing everything became way too high even for Netflix.
That was what fueled their move towards producing original content -- they knew they wouldn't be able to license third party content for much longer, and they needed to have something people would want to watch when that day came. They've explicitly said they see their future as being the next HBO, where what draws subscribers is access to Netflix-original content you can't get anywhere else rather than access to a deep catalog of content from lots of different sources.
> Basically match any Redbox prices (1-2 dollars)
Redbox has the same advantage that Netflix had back when they were shipping discs by mail, namely that discs are a physical artifact and thus subject to the first sale doctrine (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine), which says that the seller of a physical good can't put artificial restrictions on what the buyer of that artifact does with it after they buy it. As long as copyright holders sell movies and such on discs priced for everyday consumers, services like Redbox can also buy those discs at the same low price and then rent them out to people, and the copyright holders can't impose a post-sale restriction to stop them. They sold the disc, once they took the money they lost the right to say what it could be used for.
Stream the same movie instead of delivering it on disc, though, and now since there's no transfer of ownership of a physical artifact, the first sale doctrine no longer applies. Anyone who wants to stream that movie has to negotiate separate streaming rights with the copyright holder; the copyright holder is free to demand however much it wants to as part of that negotiation; and if that price is too rich, the would-be streamer doesn't have the option to just buy a bunch of licenses on the consumer market the way they would with discs. Their only options are to pay what the copyright holder demands, or not carry the title. So
All of which means that streaming services will always be at a severe disadvantage price-wise to services that rent out physical media -- even before you start factoring in the cost of all the infrastructure needed to stream video reliably to a global audience.
Yeah, Netflix is only really useful to me for originals, for the most part. Occasionally I'll watch something they've licensed from AMC / CW / etc. Netflix has been so successful they had to become a content powerhouse in order to survive. I did a B-school project on Netflix almost 10 years ago. This was before House of Cards, but after HoC had been discussed / announced. We talked about NF doing OC but at the time we had no clue if they would pull it off. They have been successful beyond our wildest.
I hate the rental model, it's extortion. It made sense when you had to return a disk to a store for others to rent, but putting an expiration date on a digital file is absurd. At least with redbox you can rip the DVD.
Well, if you consider ripping the DVD valid then there's absolutely nothing stopping you from saving the rented digital stream either. At the bare minimum, aside from whatever DRM is in place directly capturing the stream w/ OBS is always viable.
specially when you are already paying a fixed monthly fee for the transfer cost of the near-zero-cost-to-them crappy non-premium media content, which is the same bandwidth cost to provide you with reruns of what you "rented" before.
> I want to watch films like Harry Potter, The Dark Knight, and Lord of the Rings. Unfortunately, they are either scattered across a dozen different services or simply not there at all.
FWIW, Netflix has had a scattered selection of The Dark Knight and Lord of the Rings off-and-on recently. I guess that might be your point, though…
> Those who don’t have paid subscriptions probably aren’t that interested in music in the first place.
Or aren't interested in supporting closed corporations that benefit financially more than the artists who produced the music in the first place. It's a predatory system trying to get grandfathered in from the (g)olden music industry days, and to be fair involves bigger fish than streaming services (labels, promoters, etc.).
I'd provide a counter argument putting blame on artists: those who aren't selling and promoting themselves via a personal website or websites like Bandcamp probably aren't that interested in monetizing their music career.
As someone still paying monthly subscriptions to streaming services, I've recently begun to purchase more DRM-free music in lossless format. I get the best possible quality of audio, directly support the artist (or more directly than via streaming), and I get to keep the music indefinitely, as long as I can manage the storage requirements. It's not cheap nor easy, but I believe it's the fair approach for consuming music, and look forward to the day I disable my streaming subscriptions.
> I get the best possible quality of audio, directly support the artist (or more directly than via streaming), and I get to keep the music indefinitely, as long as I can manage the storage requirements
This is why I love Bandcamp. Lossless format for my good stereo at home, mp3's for my car, and streaming when I'm at work.
Hm, I understand your perspective but it's really a different topic altogether. "Paid subscriptions" may have been an accidentally narrow group of people, but I just can't imagine many houses with some discretionary income that aren't subscribed to Amazon Prime or at least one Spotify / Apple Music / Tidal / etc. account. That's probably naive of me.
There is a whole class of people who are content listening to whatever is on the radio or the same 20 year old CD's they've had forever without ever seeking new music or even knowing what's playing. That's really what I meant by people without paid subscriptions not caring.
I prefer the subscription model. I rarely get hooked on an album, but when I do, I'll listen to it on repeat for 1- a few months - and then I'll might not ever listen to it much again. These albums might be the only ones that make sense for me to buy (and even though, maybe not - I might hate it in 3 months - but let's consider the expense like a circus ticket or something, pay to experience pleasure).
On the other hand, a bunch of the stuff I hear on Spotify, I never seek again, it's just background noise. Sometimes this turns into a relationship and they win a fan, sometimes they don't.
The best way to support artists is by attending shows.
I have been hooked on Mac Miller's album Swimming for the past few weeks. Sadly, he passed, but he's the first artist I've ordered merch for, maybe ever, because I liked the album so much. Highly recommended. Start on track one and play through.
Going the independent route as a musician doesn't necessarily mean they'll successfully monetize their music. While more artists are doing this, there's still a lot of the old "looking to get signed" mentality. I agree with your post, but I wanted to point out that someone not taking the more independent routes doesn't necessarily mean they aren't interested in monetizing their work.
> Those who don’t have paid subscriptions probably aren’t that interested in music in the first place.
Sorry I just don't buy into the spotify/applemusic/etc life. I adore music, but my first step is usually supporting the artist directly via bandcamp when possible. Luckily a huge amount of artists I follow have bandcamp pages. It's not as direct as going to a show and buying merch/albums there, but I don't get a lot of shows near me for the genre's I prefer.
>Those who don’t have paid subscriptions probably aren’t that interested in music in the first place.
Or we run our own media streaming setup rather than pay Spotify $10/month. Spotify gives the illusion of supporting artists but the artists you listen to will never see a significant amount of money from your subscription fee.
I've downloaded thousands of albums over the years and have my own music library. Why should I pay Spotify for doing the same thing? This is literally how they seeded their library when they started out.
I have since mainly moved from torrenting to buying vinyl and using Bandcamp like others here have mentioned. I still see artists tour on occasion, but I'm not convinced that touring is sustainable for musicians, so I'd rather buy the album.
It's sad to me that so many have bought the lie that Spotify et al have pushed. They are no different from the music labels.
Spotify is worth it alone for the discovery to me now, and I grew up with my weirdo foobar music player and etc.
I don't know what your impression of Spotify is, but it seems quite different than mine. When I think Spotify, I think Discover Weekly, awesome machine learning that finds artists similar to whatever I was listening to every time I listen to an album / artist all the way through, often finding me new favorites, well made apps that integrate nicely between my iPhone / Mac desktop app - I can easily resume something on a different player. This seems like it's getting smarter. I don't really use it the way I used to use Foobar / Winamp / iTunes - but I probably abuse it. I create playlists for whatever I'm listening to lately, and just access those. I don't want to scroll 2000 artists in my library.
Downsides I've experienced - not many:
- quality not quite as good as Apple Music or Tidal ( and definitely not as good as FLAC, lol ). This isn't really a problem for me unless I A/B something.
Sometimes the library is missing something. These songs are probably not available from competitors either.
- Lyrics view? WTH guys seriously, this was good at first and now it only occasionally shows "Behind the music with Genius'... assuming this is licensing problems but if you can work out streaming rights, can't you work out lyric sheet rights?
- That might actually be all of them.
Buying vinyl is cool but I'll never listen to it. Inconvenient. It's a cool souvenir.
I used to have a big FLAC library. Somewhere along the road, it was lost, along with many other digital heirlooms.
>These days I listen to nearly all of my music on paid Spotify subscriptions.
This is absurd from my perspective; to go from the wealth of music created through history and countries available on what.cd such as the bootleg recordings of live music in a small Cairo bar to the limited and commercialized selection of what's on Spotify (and I do have experience with it), along with the fact you no longer "own" (in an informal sense) the music.
Music on the periphery, older releases and things people may not want to listen to are my lifeblood. I couldn't imagine being only able to access Spotify. It works for you and that's good - but for me (and I imagine quite a few other music enthusiasts) it's a totally different situation. Often if it's not on Soulseek or a torrent tracker then the only way for me to obtain it is through buying a physical copy, maybe from an online collector's marketplace like Discogs.
I might throw in an endorsement of the very new things one can find on Bandcamp too - I've profited greatly from that variety.
You might be pointing out how limited my musical taste is, lol.
I am a (hobbyist) musician and producer and my focuses have definitely narrowed inward the past several years. I wouldn't consider myself someone who listens to a lot of new music all the time and a bunch of unknown stuff. (but) I listen to more than most people - last.fm puts me at about 75-78% on number of artists, tracks, and albums listened to. Usually I jam an artist for a few months and learn all of their discography and when I am burnt out I move on. Sometimes I hit a dead patch and don't find a new artist that I love for a while.
The last albums (artists) I fell in love with were (mentioned in earlier comment) Mac Miller - Swimming, Caroline Rose - LONER, Kanye West - Life of Pablo. But really, I fell in love with these artists, and I like their earlier works as much as their more recent work, even when its much different.
I was ready to make this exact same reply - the convenience and popularity of Spotify is exactly why the current copyright environment fails the consumer and why What.cd existed for more noble reasons than "let's rob the record labels." That failure extends past just cloud streaming, because huge swathes of What.cd can't even be acquired physically either - good luck finding that beat tape J Dilla handed out on cassette at shows in 1997 Detroit, that indie electronic album that was pressed to vinyl once, etc.
I love Spotify too! But it is a perfect example of how copyright law gatekeeps the creative media we can consume, for reasons purely inherent to the system and not attributable to any individual's malice. Nobody set out to create an ubiquitous streaming service that's missing music people could love, it's simply impossible to create something else legally.
>good luck finding that beat tape J Dilla handed out on cassette at shows in 1997 Detroit
Ugh, now that I am actually making music I wish I had access to what.cd. When I was using it all I really wanted was the best FLAC / best master of a nice Vinyl I could find.
One that doesn't make the MPAA cartel filthy rich. I'd love to pay creators directly for content, but the model is set up to pay the boardroom enormous sums of cash vs. what the people actively working on the production recieve.
Very very rarely does a movie not make money. Even flops make money years after release. The latest avengers movie cost 356m to make, including everyone's salary on the film. It made the studios 2.63 billion. There is no investment in the world that can give you that kind of return. Was that 2.3b in profit split among the cast and crew? Absolutely not. It was feasted upon by the executives of walt disney, those poor deserving souls.
With Hollywood accounting there is no way to proof this and well .. with all the shady things the movie industry and their cronies did over the years they kind of lost the "but you should trust us on this" position.
Maybe if we fixed it we could have a real discussion about what makes money and what doesn't.
$5 means a lot more to someone who earns $5 in a day.
Look, if the companies are willing to look into a minimum wage and median salary when crafting prices for different countries, we might be easily convinced.
Do you know how much stuff you have available in Netflix? Now imagine having a choice between pirating and paying the same price as you do in a developed country for like 30% of the US catalogue. All that while earning much, much less.
I disagree. The market would shift. We would see a very clear split between talented and passionate amateurs creating for the joy of creation and large soulless productions which release only behind paywalls. Frankly, I'm all in favor of "artist" being a hobby and not a career.
You are correct, and what you state with disparaging feeling, I state with glee. The joy of creation should not put food on the table. You should have to work like the rest of us. If you have no time, make time and budget to create in the time you do get.
You've an inflated sense of the importance and value of the work you do. As well as trying to pretend that creativity is not work.
At the same time you talk about
pirating so you feel entitled to have the fruit of other people's labour whilst saying it has no value. Gleeful in your hypocrisy.
Why are you on this website to discuss technology? Most things made are pointless rubbish going off your definition.
What do you do for a living that in your opinion is actually worth money?
It's interesting - for music this has basically been solved because the industry was under tight financial pressures and many companies including Spotify, Apple and Google were able to work out large scale licensing deals. Heck, most music can be obtained legally for free on YouTube these days.
Compare with video where the market is fragmenting beyond repair and I get asked to pirate things for family and friends several times a week. In the gaming world, they never really got the subscription thing worked out decently, the titles are extremely expensive and now fragmentation is annoying consumers there too.
I hope more of these near-zero margin goods will go the cheap subscription route in the future. It makes this a much simpler time for consumers. Right now, I don't know what service even has a given TV show so it's easier to just click the button in Sonarr and watch it show up on my NAS a few minutes later.
> In the gaming world, they never really got the subscription thing worked out decently, the titles are extremely expensive and now fragmentation is annoying consumers there too.
Haven't they, though? In mobile, free-to-play model has solved most of the friction. For PC/console, Steam and Origin are doing a good job too. Most games on Steam cost less than $50, and that's weeks if not many months of entertainment.
> In mobile, free-to-play model has solved most of the friction.
Not really, this model is pretty awful as it creates motivations for developers to make the game repetitive or overly difficult in order to convince people to pay for stuff. Just look at the recent mobile Lemmings game, they lock you out of the game with a timer, offering only temporary timer bypasses in the store. A few developers sell a simple "get out of bullshit and ads pass" which does solve it though.
Overall though in the mobile world this hasn't been an issue as the expectation of prices for paid games is far lower.
> Most games on Steam cost less than $50
AAA titles are still $60 and in recent years often include "season passes" and similar, doubling their costs.
> that's weeks if not many months of entertainment.
I get over 50 hours out of probably 1/20 games.
So overall, I'd say far from solved still. Origin has attempted a subscription model but it's expensive and offers only trials of recent releases and significantly older titles. Humble Bundle actually has a decent subscription service going on, but it's not on the sort of "all access" model you get with music or movies.
Perhaps streaming game services will change this, but I do worry that they're a move in the wrong direction in other ways.
Much of the music I listen to is not on Spotify. Getting rid of what.cd meant losing really rare high quality rips not found anywhere else. The music recommendations on that site were top notch. It was the digital burning of the Library of Alexandria.
It's just a matter of getting the community reorganized. That's the beauty of bit torrent. Content is hosted no where in particular, instead it's maintained everywhere. The seeders just need to be rallied.
YouTube probably has the best catalogue of electronic music too, but since they removed the 256Kbps AAC format, we're stuck with the audibly lousy, frequency-limited 128Kbps crap. Well, it was good till it lasted.
They're probably getting mp3 streams I would imagine. Definitely not transparent at 128 kbps. I'm not sure who Youtube streams Opus to, I should look into that.
Yes, I'm actually quite impressed that they offer opus @160k. The real issue with Youtube is that you never know what the source was. If they're reencoding that from a 128 kbps mp3, that suddenly becomes much less impressive.
> Those who don’t have paid subscriptions probably aren’t that interested in music in the first place
.. or find that the endless-firehose model doesn't suit them? I honestly just prefer to buy one album (either CD or digital download) or so per month. The affordances of that encourage me to choose carefully and listen with attention rather than vaguely skim. I'd rather get to know a few things well than lots superficially. It's a bit like web-skimming vs reading books. Of course you can read long form on the web, just as you can get to know bodies of music well on Spotify et al, but it's going against the grain.
[Edit: in fact on reflection, my view is almost the opposite to yours: streaming subscriptions suit a listening habit not that interested in music per se, that desires ongoing background novelty]
Music is acceptable. Spotify/apple music is a one stop shop, and the only reason why I'm on spotify over apple music is the education discount; the services are otherwise identical in my eyes. Legal limewire.
With video, its awful. Networks and production companies are all to eager to cancel licenses and pull their content off of a service. The golden goose is that every network and production has their own service that they milk customers for $9.99 a month for (like Disney's B.S.). The end result is instead of you paying $100 a month for cable, you are paying $100 a month for 10 different services to get the same coverage. Back to piracy it is.
Your summary of the music situation feels very accurate given that in general Spotify and other services are apparently terrible for artists. Which was less of a concern for me when I was on the mainstream pop train, and has become a huge concern now that I've been exploring into less popular genres (and leaves an interesting dilemma: if it doesn't make it viable for artists somehow, what's the point?)
Before Spotify and streaming, artists were already getting their pants pulled down by record distributors. At least now many artists can distribute their own music and keep more of the cut.
These days free streaming sites like putlocker have good enough quality most of the time (720p or better). Unless you want BR quality, and don't mind waiting overnight for the 20GB+ download to finish.
If it's not a sitcom, I'd rather have FullHD quality (which is between 1 and 5 GB / hour for h265/264).
And streaming is strictly inferior to downloading, as long as your bandwidth is good enough (since you can start watching while you download).
For me it's either watching something on a 13" laptop, where 720p quality is sufficient and torrenting is just too much hassle, or having a "serious" cinematic experience on a 75" 4k HDR panel, where you want to have the best available quality (i.e. 4k BR rip with minimal compression). So Netflix just isn't very attractive, especially if it does not have some of the movies I want to watch.
I just recently upgraded to a 1920x1080 101 cm flat screen TV - I'll consider upgrading to UHD-1 HDR when more content is available - most of it seems to be upscaled 2k, and when I tried to buy Planet Earth 2, they didn't even have it in stock ! (Not to mention that I would have had to buy an Xbox just to play it...)
Depends on what you consider full HD. Sure, if you're getting something from a streaming site you'll be lucky to get 5 GB/hr. But from a high quality source like a Bluray I would say 6 GB / hr is about the absolute minimum (for a crappy old transfer), and over 15 GB / hr would not be unheard of.
> Those who don’t have paid subscriptions probably aren’t that interested in music in the first place.
I'm very interested in music but I won't pay for low-quality streaming and music I've paid for that could disappear at any time or be geoblocked.
If it's not DRM-free FLAC that I can easily convert to MP3 for the car/portable player, or whatever format I may choose in the future, then I'm not paying for it.
after what went away I moved on to the two sites that replaced it (xanax and redacted) and the selection and convenience is almost as good as what was. If I buy something it’s almost always on vinyl or from the artist’s own site.
I’m not arguing against mercantilism itself in the context of art, really.
Just the lock-in currently enjoyed by the companies that own the MPAA and RIAA. If all the work is done on a digital platform and can be published to a dozen websites with a few clicks, their traditional distribution arrangements hold less value.
I say own even though legally that’s not accurate. The studios effectively control MPAA/RIAA talking points. Those two groups exist to make lobbying for studio interests more economical. Again, the elite get what the labor class does not: unions.
Agreed. I think most people are willing to pay for things they value, but in the past many forms of digital content was just too difficult or inconvenient to obtain.
Am I willing to go to a local record store and buy a whole album for $14 every time I find a new song I like? Not really. Am I willing to pay $10/mo for unlimited streaming? Absolutely. Am I willing to make sure I'm home at 9pm sharp on a Thursday to watch a TV show? No. Am I willing to pay $30 to stream the whole season on demand? Definitely.
This is like saying because Daz 3D exists, we don't need pixar any more. If you've ever seen or tried to do just what you did, you soon realize that the tools alone won't help; to make good quality art you still need to master a lot of time-intensive skills and have to go beyond entry level stuff.
That time requirement will slow the artist down if he has to do it for free, or may even prohibit them. The idea of renumerating the artist is to enable them to produce higher quality work more often; if he has to spend a lot of time begging on Patreon, and half of his projects now are porn because it's the only way he can get cash for his passion projects, we all suffer.
Sorry, I know I get strident on this topic, and hope I come across as civil, but tools are not that important. You could make a TV show for free at your local cable company, remember public access?
Kinda weird how speech about entirely legal activity gets deplatformed, but TPB whose core competency is theft has all the courts wringing their hands about freedom of speech.
That's probably a "golden" opportunity for the MPAA and the like. Implicate a Pirate Bay link with "neo-nazis" or "racists", watch it go down shortly after. Perhaps Alex Jones or Sargon of Akkad could start using it as another platform to distribute their content.
Maybe the society has to finally adapt & embrace to the way things are going in the last 20 years: music stars to earn their money in the concerts they sold out due to "piracy" and not from selling CDs, movie stars from royalties paid by subscribers of Netflix and HBO and other such services, or even monetize their popularity directly from endorsing products.
Software developers seem to be the first to adapt: you can't pirate a SaaS or a cloud. One can try and copy it, but will be always behind the first moved and the original creator, because they always seem to have good ideas.
Equating IP with real estate is bad for the society: why would someone keep producing and keep performing if they made a hit with a song, or a movie, or a game?
Deleted original comment, and btw - all the comments attached to this just underline the fact that the piratebay is not exactly user friendly AND ALSO BTW - A VPN doesn't in any way guarantee that your IP address can't leak out in a number of ways.
The torrent being "trusted" has absolutely nothing to do with whether your ISP is spying on your traffic. Paying for and enabling a VPN service is step 0 of torrent client use because it eliminates this issue.
“Trusted” is referring more to where the files came from. Is it a real account associated with some movie ripping group? Or is it someone pretending to be them and distributing malware?
BitTorrent is peer-to-peer. Anyone can join a swarm and see the IP addresses of other computers they’re communicating with. Knowing the files came from a trusted a trusted uploader won’t hide your identity from that.
Like many others here, Steam/Netflix/Spotify have largely stopped me from torrenting anything. But we continue to slide toward needing a separate streaming service for every single TV series, so I wouldn’t be surprised to see the piracy pendulum swing back the other way.
It's been a few years since I bothered torrenting much, but if you don't change the defaults on your torrent client, even then you'd get flagged pretty quickly. Biggest thing used to be not throttling upload speed; almost all consumers are going to be downloading wildly more than they upload, and even heavy users of upload bandwidth are going to primarily be shooting it to well-known destinations. If you start uploading at 100MB/s to random IPs, that looks suspicious.
PirateBay is probably the most common place to find torrents watched by rightsholders. Doing illegal things in general is dumb, but if you're going to pirate, go do it over the free wi-fi at McDonald's or Walmart.
Yeah, you don't torrent hollywood shit, that's well known. For that you either pay the troll toll or take the high road. I've personally chosen to just not watch hollywood movies and my life is a lot better off for it.
TPB neither dead no alive. It's been in zombie mode for months. Torrents are very old. Only porn vidz are still being actively uploaded. The search engine is a shadow of itself. In fact, I feel it's been intentionally crippled and here's why: Many times, the search bar claims zero result. I use a different torrent search engine and see a link to the same stuff on TPB!
Not only that, spammers have taken over the site - probably, randsomware spreaders. Torrents few minutes old would have thousands of seeds with ridiculous file sizes.
It's sad. TPB's like the Github of torrents. TPB's reputation system and comments was a godsend. Till now, there's still no replacement for it.
I feel something's up with the current owners of site.
Timeouts - very common. Just refresh. Maybe needs a few attempts.
> spammers have taken over the site ... Torrents few minutes old would have thousands of seeds with ridiculous file sizes
As has been the case for a decade, prefer torrents from users with the green or pink (trusted and VIP) icons. The spammy ones from unknowns get deleted often.
What? All new series are still available the day after episodes air. Newer movies as well. The search engine is kinda sucky sure, but I don't understand the criticism of content.
The strangest thing is that certain software is ransomware/fake seed bombed to the point where you literally cannot access the legitimate software torrents. Around page 40 in the search results, TPB stops loading entries in the search pages.
Weirdly I’ll sometimes get tpb links from bing searches (google doesn’t work) that work on mobile but not desktop.
Figure it’s a proxy thing.
The only thing I torrent nowadays is the skyf1 and rocadirecta is great for that and has already prevailed on court in Spain if I remember correctly so not getting to Pirate Bay isn’t as big of deal as it would have been 5 years ago.
People do sign up for streaming services, but not for like, 10. Furthermore torrenting got really convenient and is very fast with adequate Internet (let's say 10MByte/s), so you get a decent quality movie in under 5 minutes (obviously only if there are enough seeders - but the availability of torrents completely dwarfs the availability of streaming providers - if it's really unpopular and maybe a little bit older you just won't find it on streaming services).
Beside the fact that BitTorrent is an interesting protocol in itself, imagine just how much simpler Netflix or Spotify could be implemented, if we wouldn't stream DRM encrypted blobs, but download files? You just need many big fat file-servers and put your media there - if we wouldn't have DRM (AFAIK all streaming providers enforce DRM), this is technically a solved problem.