For example it's basically impossible to legally watch anime with English subtitles in my region, so I have no alternative to piracy.
It's the same story for more mainstream content. There was no legal way to stream Game of Thrones in English when it was being aired. There's no way legal way to stream Star Trek Discovery as it's being aired. Were I in the US, the only legal options, as far as I know, are to pay ~$10/month each for streaming subscriptions that would only be used for these shows.
EU-commissioned studies like [0] show that I'm not unique.
So the solution here, in my opinion, isn't to try to outlaw piracy (it's actually legal in my country) but to make the legal options more reasonable. Eliminate regional restrictions entirely. Eliminate content silos (require studios to license on the same terms to all streaming platforms).
Plus, at least one study has shown that piracy doesn't actually hurt sales [1], save for movies still in cinemas.
[0]: https://torrentfreak.com/eu-study-more-people-consume-legall...
[1]: https://www.engadget.com/2017-09-22-eu-suppressed-study-pira...
I do this too.
But I asked whether copyright enforcement was necessary for films to get adequately funded. I'm assuming that the problems you've described with region locking aren't there. I resort to piracy when I have no other options.
I addressed that by referencing a study that concludes piracy has no measurable impact on revenue.
> I addressed that by referencing a study that concludes piracy has no measurable impact on revenue.
I'm weary of studies in general because they're capable of justifying absolute bullshit. Anyway, your study was conducted in a regime where getting films for free is illegal and therefore somewhat less convenient than it could be if it were legal. We don't have access to a world in which that isn't the case, so your study is kind of... not able to answer my question?
People who appeal to studies should look up "how to prove a counterfactual".
Do you have a proposal for an alternative process?
> Anyway, your study was conducted in a regime where getting films for free is illegal and therefore somewhat less convenient than it could be if it were legal.
In Switzerland, the country I live in, piracy is legal. You might be interested in researching the consequences.
Then your question is moot, as no one can answer it. Perhaps it is you who should actually look up unfalsifiable statements.
[edit]
Also, to be clear, I think that if a study is being used to justify a counterfactual, a long-form argument needs to be made about why it does that. You can't just give the study results (which don't actually test the counterfactual scenario). The relevant counterfactual here is "If copyright law were to be abolished then it would not hurt producers of media like film".
This whole discussion reminds me of the 2000-2010 internet. https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-o...
Finally, I've edited out some insults and comments which didn't make sense.
Unsurprisingly, HN being full of people who've got rich off Web 2.0 tech that profits from the spread of piracy and its resulting products (ultra cheap streaming at the expense of artists and creators), plus enjoyed tons of cheap/free digital goods and entertainment over the years, has a hive mind that considers all this perfectly ok
- 20+MBit connections are the norm in the Western world
- there are no border checks or national firewalls to impede the flow of information worldwide (barring tyrannical regimes)
- the cost of making a copy and sending it out to anywhere around the world approximately = free
- we've had 20+ years to work on the service problem of piracy, to reach an acceptable equilibrium
It seems outrageous that we have fractured streaming services, no true digital ownership (even to match what we had for decades with VHS and optical discs), that restricting download rights is even a thing (I got my bag of bytes and paid for it, what is it to you what program or hardware I use to play it?), or that we have to wait at all for a film to be released in all geographies (I don't care that I'm in the Philippines - I already speak English and can't be bothered to wait for the official dubbing) if the bytes can come streaming down the pipe in less than a second.
I'm not entitled. I do have high expectations because we live in the goddamn future and copyright cartels are LARPing a world of digital cavemen. Like hell I'm gonna be content with that.
hint: i thought there was a finer drawn li...
> REM://youtube.com/watch?v=WpU7Hxf8iBw
Let me pay money and download a DRM-free mp4 that I can keep forever and watch anywhere. I'd do it and so would a sizable percentage of existing pirates.
> The latter costs money, but is more convenient.
Not really. If my internet connection is fast, I can download a movie in a few minutes and watch it in VLC, which is more user-friendly than any web player. If my internet connection is slow, streaming won't work anyway. Maybe there's a medium-speed sweet spot in between for which streaming is more convenient, but I suspect only a minority of users occupy that sweet spot.
> Illegal streaming services are not viable because they're centralised and easy to crack down on
No, illegal streaming services are not viable because torrents exist and people prefer downloading movies to streaming them. People who prefer legal streaming services over illegal downloads do so because of the legal vs illegal bit, not because of the streaming vs downloads bit.
Show me the online service that lets me purchase any TV show or movie ever produced, in the highest resolution the media was mastered in, and allow me to play it on whatever device I choose--and I will be a paying customer for life. The service simply doesn't exist outside of piracy.
This. DRM is a major incentive for piracy. I regret every single DRMed music and video purchase I've ever made.
- If I pay for Netflix, I can't watch in full quality because I'm on Linux.
- If I pay for an online rental, I can't watch in full quality because I'm on Linux.
- DVDs and especially Blu-rays come with DRM that breaks in weird ways for many people.
- DVDs and Blu-rays come with unskippable warnings (often about piracy) before getting to the content.
- More and more content is becoming exclusive to specific streaming services, dramatically increasing the complexity and price for everyone.
All of these problems only apply to people who pay for the content. Everything is available for free from pirates without any of these issues (but with plenty of other issues, which are accepted because it's free). Legal, permanent digital copies of movies and TV shows don't seem to exist at all.
I have on several occasions downloaded pirated copies of movies or TV shows that I already had legal access to, just to watch them the way I want. The fact that that's even something to consider is ridiculous.
For music this is partially solved. I can pay for streaming access to anything in the Spotify library, or the Apple Music library, or one of several others. They all contain the vast majority of music most people want to listen to, and compete on other features. This is the direction Netflix and competitors should have moved in, but instead they went for exclusivity.
If I would rather maintain my own library (which I do), I can buy songs and albums on services like Bandcamp, and get high-quality, DRM free files. There is no equivalent for movies and TV shows.
I still semi-regularly run into artists who only offer their music on streaming services, in which case I will listen to their song on YouTube and then forget about them. The alternative would again be piracy, so these artists are missing out on revenue.
They are selling files. It's not that hard.
1. Frequently movies I want to watch are simply unavailable to stream or purchase in my country (Australia). Often they are available on the streaming services I subscribe to but only for users in other countries.
2. Being hearing impaired, I need subtitles but these are often unavailable on the streaming services. I can almost always get them for pirated content. So often I will pirate a movie that I could watch through a streaming service just so I can get the subtitles.
I just laughed, closed the browser, opened up tpb. In 5 minutes I was watching what I wanted in 4K. I don't need to jump through hoops, install spyware, surrender my privacy, and I have a .mkv I can play on whatever device I want. I'd gladly pay good money for this.
Not to mention: I have access to older/niche content, not just endlessly formulaic "Netflix original series", I can lend it to someone else (remember dvds?), I can archive a copy and not be dependent on the whims of my provider.
> What is your model for how films should get funded?
The same way free-to-air TV pays for itself - adverts. Either a couple of ad breaks in the film, or rotating watermarks on screen throughout the film. And make getting it easier than me finding the equivalent torrent. Release schedule - cinema, streaming, 'free'.
When films aren't available on any of the streaming services I subscribe to, what do you expect me to do? Pay another £60 per annum to watch one film on a streaming service I'll never use again? I read somewhere there are 1000 streaming services in the UK, and over 2000 in the US.
I've said before on here, it's a shame we didn't have today's bandwidth back in the mp3 days, because that forced the hand of the music industry to back iTunes, or Spotify, and only now they're beginning to fragment a little. If the video industry was under pressure from widescale cheap piracy, we'd have an industry wide streaming site. Instead we have Netflix, Prime, Hulu, Disney+, HBO, and so on.
One day before launch Paramount pulled Star Trek Discovery off Netflix to their own streaming service. Can you guess what the most pirated TV show was over the following weeks?
To be clear, I don't agree with piracy, but I have zero sympathy for movie studios and their shitty walled gardens.
Please no. Watching La vita è Bella[1] or a Clockwork Orange[2] and being interrupted by an ad for toothpaste or a theme park would muddy the experience. That model would make most good films unpalatable. Were that the only legal way to consume movies, piracy would continue to exist for cuts without ads.
Do note that the US model of having ad breaks during an episode of a TV show isn’t in use all over the world. In Portugal, breaks happens between episodes but are longer.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_Is_Beautiful
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Clockwork_Orange_(film)
Agreed, but how else would you release a "free" version of a movie that funds itself as per the parent comment? Watermarks are probably the optimal solution, but people are used to advert funded TV/movies.
Yes? Especially when you actually normally are able to use a thirty day trial, or pay £5 for a single month without a rolling contract, or just don't watch the title, or go and purchase/rent it from iTunes et al?
All of those are perfectly legitimate options.
The Pentagon and CIA Have Shaped Thousands of Hollywood Movies into Super Effective Propaganda
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29835933
I say, if piracy destroys Hollywood- let it.
'Be a favour to everyone and above of all, cinema.
Back in the day, Netflix's DVD library was close enough to complete that there was little need to look elsewhere, and their streaming selection was not terrible when it launched. Now that the whole system is fractured, the simple act of finding out who streams your movie is a chore, and in many cases getting it in the original language with proper subtitles is non-trivial.
Create a single point of entry to a high-quality library with minimal friction, and you eliminate the desire to pirate in many people.
Try living outside the US :).
> What is your model for how films should get funded?
I don't see the movie industry suffering all that much. So maybe ... they can figure it out themselves since it's obviously working well enough, and it's not a life&death situation, but one of optimization. https://www.statista.com/statistics/260198/filmed-entertainm...
I’m not finding it now, but I remember a joke attributed to Tim Berners-Lee (unconfirmed). Paraphrased:
> In the past, if you wanted to see new episodes of a TV show as they came out you’d have to fly to the US every week. Today, thanks to the internet, you can find much cheaper flights.
Film "success" is still measured primarily in box office revenues, indicating - to me at least - that a successful theatrical release is where the money's at. There are certainly some people out there who would rather watch some shaky camcorder recording of a theater screen for free than actually go to a movie theater, but it doesn't seem like that's had much of an impact on the box office bottom line - even with COVID affecting theater attendance - probably because of the theater experience itself still ostensibly having some dollar value.
Haha. I remember this from... 15 years ago? The pirating industry has moved on substantially since then
https://thecinemaholic.com/movies-that-leaked-before-they-we...
I've heard from a friend of mine that torrent clients have streaming mode as well. I.e. packets arrive not randomly, but in order, and as long as your DL speed exceeds 1 second per second, you are fine.
Don't bother, the narrative here is that Netflix, Disney+, IP owners and distributors are literally forcing people to pirate content not available to them through their subscriptions.
streaming service: If you figure out which service to use. If the service that has them is available in your region. And has that movie with your preferred language. And with your preferred subtitle language.
Only if all points are checked do streaming services become more convenient… mostly. There are then also companies like Netflix or Amazon who like making it as hard as possible to watch something compared to pirating it (hyperbole, yes. But also with quite some truth to it, at least for TV shows, I don’t watch movies)
Of sorts, when there's enough excess bandwidth available that fairness doesn't really matter. By design bittorrent randomizes download order to improve the ability of peers to be of mutual interest to enable tit-for-tat.
Doesn't BitTorrent download the file in random order, instead of from beginning to end? I thought there was a good reason why it had to do that. I thought the only alternative was centralisation.
But as the other replies say, your client can request any part it wishes. A few clients doing this won't have a significant effect on the overall throughput. Even if most clients were doing this, it would mostly only result in slightly lower download speeds overall.
The exception is for torrents with very few seeders, where this can have a much worse effect, but you are unlikely to be able to stream those sequentially at a reasonable speed anyway.
You can fund them before the fact with patronage. That is, recoup the cost beforehand, and the work is free for everyone to enjoy after it is made.
I don't care is an acceptable answer here
Live off the fat of the land. Judging from how profitable movies are, there is plenty of fat
The fact is, piracy is widespread and profits are growing. There doesn't seem to be a big effect of piracy on the market as a whole. People do understand the concept of paying for what they use. The right way to battle piracy is to make payment super easy for the kind of use people expect.
As a more practical matter, I see the fight against piracy resulting in the creation of totalitarian systems of control on the internet, along with systems to block people from having control over their devices and data, which I do not agree with.
I agree that people should be paid something for their work. I also postulate that letting people with lower income pirate the majority of their entertainment results in a better market in the long run, when they (hopefully) get the means to contribute back. I see the current Draconian measures as not helping anyone, except the people implementing them and the less savoury branches of government.
But I have no qualms about pirating things that simply aren't purchasable without jumping through hoops (or at all as is the case for most older TV shows that are even a little bit obscure).
I'd like a full quality, DRM-free file with my BluRay purchases. And then I'd just skip the BluRay and buy the file itself...
They don't sell the DRM-free file because of piracy... But in fact, there is more piracy because they don't sell the file!
I myself grew up in the post-soviet baltics and around the time when when I got more into gaming - my monthly income was around 400 and new games were around 60. When Steam (and it's sales), Humble Bundle, GOG became more of a thing and my income increased - I just sort of stopped pirating games. It was definitely more convenient to get something on e.g. Steam than pirate it and jump through hoops to get the cracks working.
When Netflix first became available - I started using that. It seemed worth paying even for limited library. But there were lots of things that was impossible to get any other way than pirating. As I stopped watching movies/tv shows - I stopped paying for Netflix. I don't thing I'd be willing to pay for multiple streaming services.
My current (largely overpriced) media of choice is audiobooks.
It depends on the video file format. If the file format supports opening partial files you can just open them when downloading.
>The latter costs money
There are plenty of free movie streaming sites.
It's a bit more complicated than that as you have to ensure that your torrent client downloads data in order, from start to finish. Usually it's more or less random.
There are torrent clients that support this though, for sure.
>It depends on the video file format. If the file format supports opening partial files you can just open them when downloading.
I based my assumption on the fact that BitTorrent doesn't download the file from beginning to end in order. It downloads the file in a random order.
The current status quo is that we have two methods of obtaining a film:
The latter costs money, but is more convenient. While certainly some of that money goes towards bandwidth and infrastructure, some of it also goes towards paying the studios themselves. If sharing films were to stop being illegal, then the fixed overhead from paying the studios would go away, and the savings could be passed to users of streaming services. Illegal streaming services are not viable because they're centralised and easy to crack down on. The conclusion is that obtaining films legally via streaming services remains the most convenient option only because copyright gets enforced.So for people who say "MAFIAA" etc. What is your model for how films should get funded?
[edit] It's interesting that this is getting so many downvotes, even though it's asking a question and the premises are currently true. As other commenters have pointed out, BitTorrent downloads a file in random order and not from beginning to end, and this is less convenient than streaming.
[edit] Even if you can configure your client to download a file in a non-random order, this will still have some trade-offs. I suppose though that this might be less of an issue than I thought. ;) I still think you're a bunch of entitled nobodies and freeloaders tho. (My sympathies to the people battling streaming service fragmentation and region locks).