Then, the great splintering happened. I currently pay for 5 services, but that doesn't cover even 1/2 of what I want to watch.
All the content owners said to themselves "we can be Netflix or Amazon Prime, too" and they pulled their content into their own services.
But the biggest problem: the user experience absolutely sucks now. It's so hard to find stuff and remember where things are, there's no universal search. I have to use justwatch.com on my phone when I want to sit down to watch something new, which might mean a trip to the computer to download it if one of the many services I already pay for don't have it.
I am not going to pay to rent stuff I used to be able to encounter for free by surfing channels...well, on top of my dish/cable bill
Now, for less money, I don't even have to get off the couch. What a world!
That said, I don't know why the 48 hour limit on rentals got normalized. I've fallen asleep, gotten distracted, etc. while watching a movie and I don't like now being forced to watch it soon.
Maybe the limit could be 72 or 96 hours instead. Or you could rent it with no time limit but maybe can't ever rewind then you can make it last as long as you need but when it's done, it's done.
While I tend to agree that piracy and/or ripping isn't something everyone can do, I've filled out my Plex collection legally lately with DVD acquisitions at bargain-bin prices. Used doesn't matter if you only have to be able to read the disc once to rip it, and I'm yet to get something used off Amazon that couldn't be read once. (I haven't even had to clean it or anything, it's all just worked.)
So, my Plex install in terms of raw content isn't up to Netflix's size. However, I rather suspect there are some people reading this who have more hours of video on their Plex than Netflix even has available. And while mine isn't that large, it is much better tuned for me and my family's interests at this point. And I don't have to worry about getting halfway through a series, only for some licensor to notice it has become popular enough to pull it and run it on their own service. Netflix has the problem now that anything that becomes popular on their service will get yanked. I do not know how they overcome that. They hoped to do it with enough original content, but to my eye, that has failed, and there is now no longer enough time to fix that. While I understand the complaints that they treated it too much like "content", to be honest, I've never thought this would work out, from the moment they announced it. A single company just can't produce a sufficiently diverse set of "content" to be the everything-to-everybody they would have needed to be to justify a Netflix valuation.
The $3 is for fast-forwarding Mr Video to next week.
Understandable, I just cut back on all the TV engorging and rotate the streaming services every quarter. IMO it's a net win. Save money on the streaming services and life is better for having not watched so much television. Not going to the grave wishing I binged Season 2 of some random show one more time.
Which means that dinosaur-industry would finally have to arrive in the 21st century. People are very much willing to pay for things they enjoy - see Twitch Subscribers and Patreons for examples. Paying for shitty catalogues where the parts that you actually enjoy are distributed across multiple services just isn't cutting it.
Good riddance to all those copyright-attorneys and other parasites leeching off of the entertainment industry.
Let's talk $1 to watch something once. That's reasonable and a price I'd pay. $4-5 to watch something in my own home is not.
Better to buy a physical media.
We live in a world where 90% of the entire catalog of movies ever filmed are available to be instantly delivered to your home in 1080p for less than the cost of a Big Mac. In the 90s it cost about the same not even taking into account inflation or gas to drive to blockbuster and rent a VHS. We are living in the future!
Yet whenever I want to watch something, I have to look up which service it's on, see if it's available in my country, sign up for a subscription, possibly download an app.... Or, go to the high seas and be watching it in 4k resolution within 2 minutes.
As simple as that.
The problem, for me at least, appears where some legal rights damage technological usage.
How many times my Netflix downloads will “expire”? Is this milk or something? Why do they need to expire? Sorry, but I refuse to understand…
So if I watch it at home and remove all those costs from the cinema, surely $1 is going to be closer to what the film studio would have got if I went to the cinema?
I'd much rather go to the movie theater and pay the even higher price for admission, because that's an actual experience. You can't replicate "going to the movies" at your house very well.
The reason music streaming defeated piracy is because a single subscription gives access to most of the music in the world, including from other countries and languages as long as you can type the search query (Indian, Japanese, Turkish, Russian etc.)
The reason video piracy is resurging is that every streaming service provides 2-3 good shows and hundreds of fillers, and to have a real selection of what is currently good one would have to pay $200-300 per month for dozens of apps. On top of that, pulling the show from one app and reappearing it on another loses watch history, which is no way in the interest of the customer. Sell what the users really want to buy, and they will pay.
The last movie I pirated was directed by a man who died almost 30 years ago. Do you suppose if I subscribed to Netflix (which doesn't even have any of his movies at all as far I can tell), they'd hire a necromancer to get a few more movies out of his corpse?
We don't hire necromancers anymore, they’ve been replaced by training models on a corpus anchored by the creator’s existing work.
- Lesser Known actors - Assistant Directors - Stunt Coordinators - 2nd Unit Directors - Stunt Performers
and I'm sure there are others. Residuals factor into our income, allow us to qualify for health insurance, empower our unions, and provide a stable income to continue working in an unstable career.
All so we can make better entertainment for you! When you pirate, you're stealing money from us.
You can accuse the pirates of limiting your potential for future earnings, but that is not the same as stealing from you.
If I can't buy something for a price that's worth it to me, I will just watch something else. It doesn't mean I'm going to pay more for it.
You get the same amount of money either way.
But extracting the value of watching something without paying the fee for that service...that's stealing.
Not that it matters though, I was trying to make use of the "common knowledge" that banks make money from your deposits, and that therefore you spending your money instead of depositing it in a negative return account is costing us potential revenue. I know that's not how banks make money, but it's the culturally accepted explanation for how banks make money.
If you weren't gonna watch it, don't watch. The argument being made is you in fact, do want to watch it, you just don't wanna pay for it. That's stealing.
If you're interested in the content, but dislike the delivery mechanism, ignoring the content entirely sends the signal: "I am not interested in the content you're producing". The companies will attempt to address that signal by changing the content, to try and find content that attracts larger audiences.
Piracy sends a different signal: "I am interested in the content, but not the price or the delivery mechanism". The companies will attempt to address that signal differently. Maybe they lower the price. Maybe the ease the friction on the delivery mechanism. Maybe the increase the friction on the delivery mechanism (by adding DRM). But the signal from piracy sends a more clear message to the content companies that ignoring the content.
Ignoring it sends a different message.
> So they should invest in locking down their content, not improve their experience.
Good luck with that.
That reminds me, what do you think about geoblocking these services? If one has a choice: buy the content, buy VPN and break the copyright by watching it in unsupported country or just break the copyright by pirating it outright, what should one do?
If you want to watch that show but you don't want to pay for subscription, let DIsney know. If the market demanded it by way of retracting their subscription dollars, they would notice.
But if you steal it because that's just how you want to do things, you're a thief.
>If the market demanded it by way of retracting their subscription dollars, they would notice.
One could say that pirating is the act of retracting the subscription dollars, but I digress. I can't retract my subscription dollars, because they won't even offer me the subscription (which I mentioned in my comment).
Could you as an knowledgeable insider actually answer the part of my previous comment you conveniently skipped, that part about what is person supposed to do if the Disney doesn't even offer the service in their country? And don't say "let Disney know", something actionable please.
>But if you steal it because that's just how you want to do things, you're a thief.
1) it's not theft, it's digital "piracy"
2) And I didn't say I pirate their stuff, the show was just an example. But I still feel discriminated on account of country I am from by them refusing to sell me their subscription service. And everyone knows that racism is worse than stealing.
Netflix did it (once upon a time. no, not the movie). I don't really care for reasons why this is hard for the industry or really anything else. As long as it doesn't economically make sense for me to give money to someone (doesn't reduce my own effort/time expenditure or provide something I can't have otherwise), I will not give money to someone. Morals be damned.
Plus, this rental will not be available in all locales, for every video, etc
It won’t work?
pay full price for the online offering (conducting the transaction in a browser) and then just download the content from BitTorrent.
I would happily defend that practice in front of a jury of my peers.
The thing they get you on with BitTorrent isn't the download part, it's the seeding part, where you're distributing the copyrighted content to other downloaders.
You could turn off seeding, but that'll get you banned from a lot of torrent sites, and it's not a technical distinction I'd want to have to explain in court to lay people.
Remember that whole Cuties debacle where Netflix sexed up a French coming-of-age about children ?
I really fail to see how a world without high-budget Marvel films will be so bad. I'd be fine watching old movies and art-house productions for the rest of my life.
How about “owning” a movie but not being able to resell it or loan it to friends. What’s that?
Please don’t use physical item terms for digital items.
Stealing something from you implied you don’t have to have it after I take it.
It’s illegal and unethical, we agree on that. But it’s not stealing.
I'm only here to pop the balloon on the consumer's perception that "it's not theft." there's a face and a name that goes along with that theft. Thousands of them.
See music streaming, the origin of video streaming, origin of steam etc
• Someone says they do not like cats and have no interest in having one as a pet. A cute stray kitten shows up on their doorstep, they take pity and feed it. They fall in love with it and keep it. They might say that the kitten "stole" their heart.
• An actor playing a minor role in a play gives a performance that outshines the performance of the stars. Many would say that the actor "stole" the show.
• An employee of a rival company poses as a janitor to gain access to your lab and takes a photo of a whiteboard containing the formula for a chemical that is a trade secret in your manufacturing process. It would be common to say that the rival company "stole" your secret formula.
• When crackers gain access to a company's list of customer email addresses, passwords, or credit card numbers, it is commonly said that the data was "stolen".
• Alice is Bob's fiancé. Mallory woos Alice without Bob's knowledge. Alice elopes with Mallory. Most would find it acceptable if Bob said that Mallory "stole" his fiancé.
• A team that has been behind since the start of the game but wins on a last second improbable play is often said to have "stolen" the game.
A great moral crime, no doubt...
The problem is once you expand the definition of 'steal' well beyond what is legally considered theft, the immorality of "stealing" is no longer a given. People who accusatorily use the word in reference to copyright violation are leaning on the 'illegal acts of theft' meaning of the term to add apparent moral weight to their argument. But when challenged on that, they retreat into these more diverse meanings of the word and pretend they never meant it that specific way. It's a Motte-and-Bailey tactic.
> the actor "stole" the show
> A team has... "stolen" the game
These examples are all obviously metaphorical and irrelevant, unless you want to talk about metaphorically stealing from people, which I don't understand to be the point of this thread.
> Mallory "stole" his fiancé
Bob has been deprived of his fiancé.
> the rival company "stole" your secret formula
> crackers gain access... the data was "stolen"
These are the only two relevant examples, and they're sufficiently debatable that it's unlikely you'd be able to prosecute either for theft or larceny. In the case of the crackers breaching an email list, many laws are broken, but I doubt "theft," or anything like it, would be one of them. In the case of the corporate espionage, if this is theft, it's theft of intellectual property. And that makes it the most direct comparison to content piracy, but it doesn't advance the conversation because it's the same debate.
Piracy is not stealing.
Maybe I didn't "steal", but I contributed to criminal activity.
Sure, copyright laws can seem absurd, but if you disagree with the laws, consider the ethics.
How would you feel if you have a business, I steal from you, and then go give random people your content? This especially when it starts to drive into your revenues.
"Only digital copy" is disingenuous. If the cost of producing the digital copy is say $40mm (an amount article says some Netflix movies can cost).
They're making copies from a digital copy, and their business is to sell access to them. If their model is "we'll replicate this copy 500 million times, and charge users $0.10 a view", every 10 copies viewed elsewhere is $1 lost.
Should a service raise the fee to say $0.12 to better cover costs?
Ultimately, theft is often subsidised by paying customers.
I'm also guilty of this. I download torrents where:
* I can't buy something because it's not available due to region restrictions, and I can't buy it via VPN (looking at Disney+)
* I can't buy it anywhere altogether.
Where I used to download maybe 50 torrents a year a decade ago, I probably do it <5 times a year now. It's stealing, or consuming stolen content.
The pricing strategies of big corp is a separate accessibility issue.
I would consider that if I am selling a product that has absolutely no scarcity, such as digital files, I have a few approaches.
- Introduce artificial scarcity with something like DRM
- Create a business model focused on the service of providing the product, rather than the product itself
I would not try to accuse my potential consumers of a crime in order to fix the flaws in my business model.
problem is that greedy media moguls want to get paid for a piece of content forever, instead of just raising enough money to cover the labor and advertising, give stakeholders some profit, and move on, so they cannot exist this way.
That is their problem though :)
The end result of my pirating is a media service that is easier to use, is higher quality and requires less effort than a streaming service (though initial costs and setup time were high).
I also pay for 3 streaming services that go unused, and this covers about half or maybe 3/4 of what I watch.
Streaming is in a dangerous place when piracy works better, looks better and is more convenient.
Edit: Call it digital trespass then. I don't really care what you call it. There are obviously fixed costs to creating content. Just because there aren't incremental costs incurred from piracy, doesn't mean there isn't harm. Lost revenue is harm.
The amount of oil is small enough that it would have absolutely no measurable effect whatsoever on Puget Sound.
Would you say that it is therefore OK for me to dump it in the ditch?
I'd say no - because it's decreasing the intrinsic value of a shared resource (whether or not it can be measured). Downloading a movie, on the other hand - doesn't decrease the intrinsic value of the media being copied.
A ride requires a vehicle, a driver, fuel, etc. You can’t freely copy a vehicle, a person’s time, or the fuel required to power the vehicle.
A theater requires electricity, seating, space for seating, an audio and video system, etc. These are also things that you can’t freely copy.
Not everyone is a A-List celeb or director.
The legal term you're looking for is probably "theft of services", e.g. https://definitions.uslegal.com/t/theft-of-services/).
And, to the people trying to play semantic games with "steal" and "theft", theft of services does have laws defining it as a criminal offense, e.g. https://oregon.public.law/statutes/ors_164.125 .
1: to take the property of another wrongfully and especially as a habitual or regular practice
Yes, piracy is stealing according to the dictionary, especially if done habitually. That the owner is left with a copy of the work is immaterial to the act of theft.
Take verb
1: remove (someone or something) from a particular place.
Piracy doesn't remove something from a particular place, so it is not taking, so it is not stealing. You know, "according to the dictionary"
(My point here is to show that quoting dictionary definitions to resolve technicalities is a worthless argument. I don't actually care whether or not piracy is classified as theft)
It would be taking and theft if you deprived the owner of their content while copying it for yourself. Like stealing money with wire transfers.
This isn't just semantics, it's important to not conflate theft and piracy. They're almost completely different, except in both cases the offender obtains something they didn't originally possess.
"You wouldn't steal a car" is mafiaa newspeak intended to maintain control of rents.
I recently went over my media collection and did some conservative guesstimation of my spending over the last 20 years. I've paid over 6 figures to consume various sorts of media.
I have absolutely zero moral or ethical qualms with downloading and/or pirating content I've already paid for. I don't give a flying fuck if the copyright holder doesn't like the means by which I get the content. The studios and copyright lobby and mafiaa are not good faith operators.
Piracy is not theft. Sometimes it's ethical and justified.
I WANT to pay. I want to give a streaming service money to curate, deliver, and maintain a library of high quality content. The industry doesn't want that to be possible, because it interferes with the bad-faith rentseeking games played with royalties and residuals. I'm done playing pretend, and will happily Pirate even new content I haven't paid for.
I will pay when there's the opportunity for good faith commerce. I'll buy discs and files directly where possible.
Taking a good or service that you don't own is stealing. That's piracy. That's theft.
You will argue that this may deprive the copyright holder of some rent if the media is for sale, but that sounds qualitatively different than taking or stealing.