To not have to worry which streaming service currently streams the season of the show you want to watch.

Or at all. There's plenty of older TV shows and movies that you can't get your hands on anymore. Buying a second hand DVD from ebay or Craigslist doesn't count.

Streaming services are increasingly going over cable TV route and screwing customers over. The age of piracy is back.

Please, don't call copyright infringement 'piracy'. Piracy is a penal crime that involves violence, theft of property and is often accompanied by murders. Torrenting is just copying data.

I quite like embracing the word personally, I suspect it dates back to pirate radio in the 1960s which in parts of Europe actually did come from ships anchored just outside of territorial waters.

Another interesting example of people embracing the pirate image was British submarines in WW1. The First Sea Lord of the day saw them as ungentlemanly and called for all German submarine crews to be hanged as pirates, this outburst birthed the tradition that a British submarine returning home after successfully sinking an enemy vessel flies the jolly roger! The last time this occurred was after the 1982 Falklands War, I believe HMS Conqueror to this day remains the only nuclear submarine to have engaged an enemy ship with torpedos.

It's much older than that, from etymonline:

pirate (n.)

Meaning "one who takes another's work without permission" first recorded 1701; sense of "unlicensed radio broadcaster" (generally transmitting from a ship outside territorial waters) is from 1913.

pirate (v.)

"to rob on the high seas; commit piracy upon," 1570s, from pirate (n.). By 1706 as "appropriate and reproduce the literary or artistic work of another without right or permission; infringe on the copyright of another."

-- https://www.etymonline.com/word/pirate

sadly it doesn't explain the how of the word coming about.

Embracing is exactly what corporations that abuse copyright want you to do. To quite rms,

"The term "piracy" is used by record companies to demonize sharing and cooperation by equating them to kidnaping, murder and theft." [0]

(Better read it in entirety, if you haven't yet)

[0]: https://stallman.org/articles/end-war-on-sharing.html

It's better than the "copyright theft" slogan pushed by the media.

Yes, but "The Copy Data Bay" just doesn't have the same ring to it.

we had literal pirate parties as fairly legitimate political actors, I think the term has long been reappropriated

You should probably learn the difference between 'literally' and 'figuratively'.

Literal pirate parties exist in Somali and prey on nearby shipping lanes.

If your political party documents and registration are under the name "The Pirate Party," you're quite literally the pirate party.

And you plunder ships in high waters?

literally has been used as figuratively for rhetorical purposes for a long time my overly literal friend

Even if the technical process is just "copying data" there is a whole world of legal and ethical issues around it.

Torrenting non-free products from unofficial sources is illegal.

This is the silliest argument ever. Helping slaves escape to Canada was once illegal. The society understood that such laws do more harm than good and changed them. Same will happen with copyright laws.

Koptimism is the practice of the religion of Kopimi.

I haven’t noticed any difference. If anything high definition releases are now easier to find because they are ripped right off streaming services practically immediately.

I personally use it for big files, still my goto when downloading Debian ISOs.

Used it to download GIMP the other day.

To remove the "other" part.

For example, buying a 4K HDR movie on iTunes does not allow you to even cache it locally (https://discussions.apple.com/thread/251320670), it is 100% streamed meaning you have to have a very sizeable and stable internet connection to watch it uninterrupted. Downloading it from a side channel means you can buy it on your favourite platform and actually keep it on your computer.

> Downloading it from a side channel means you can buy it on your favourite platform and actually keep it on your computer.

That would give the distribution platform the idea that what they are doing is OK. In this case, just download it and don't pay for it, if they are not actually providing you of any service. Vote with your wallet.

How are the producers reimbursed in your example?

"Voting with your wallet" means reimbursing producers who can provide content in the way I prefer.

> Vote with your wallet.

Just so you know (and stop using that phrase), there is no way scientifically or otherwise, to attribute the effect of non-sales to a feature, a service or anything else.

Your opinion on the matter just never shows up during product decisions, planning or analysis.

Your "vote" just doesn't exist.

So because there is no way of "scientifically or otherwise, to attribute the effect of non-sales to a feature, a service or anything else", I'm supposed to buy content on one platform and then download it on another, just so I can actually watch what I purchased?

Maybe the terminology is wrong, but I don't find the concept of "don't pay for what you cannot/won't use" wrong.

Still use it for a lot of documentaries. Also handy for offline viewing on a laptop (Netflix does that but only on a phone as far as I know).

Used it today for some archive.org content

Well after Netflix, Amazon Prime, HBO Max, Disney+ and dozens of other regional streaming services, I started using Transmission again.

This. I currently pay for Netflix, Disney Plus and Apple TV+. If I encounter something I still can't watch, I'm reasonably likely to fire up Transmission.

Or, when ythe TV Series you've been watching gets removed from Netflix from one day to another

I like having true 4k media that I don't have to suffer through shitty streaming for, which often doesn't deliver the true bitrate of the media.

Also I can go to rarbg and find whatever I want, whenever I want, without ever needing to check whether this or that service has this or that particular movie. It's like how Netflix used to be, a single directory for all media, only even better due to the aforementioned constant and high bitrate.

With the use of Sonarr/Radarr/Bazarr, along with a NAS and a fast enough connection, the last advantage of using a streaming service (convenience) is gone.

Well considering they killed the idea of having a portal to access content, convenience isn't actually that high for me.

Boxee was excellent for this, we used their services, and paid for them, but a standardised interface let me watch shows from different networks.

These days they would have to work with Plex but they would never actually cooperate.

I massively reduced using torrent once I got proper high speed internet. As it turns out, streaming is much more convenient but the streaming world is not all candies and rainbows.

See, I do have Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney+ etc. but they each have their own app and even their combined coverage is not complete.

Do you know who has the (almost)complete movie&series coverage? Fmovies. That's where I watch most of my stuff lately, because of convenience. The legal content providers screwed it up again, once more they are not the most convenient way to watch movies and series.

Every now and then Fmovies would not have something, or I would like to watch something immediately after it's premiere and it would take more hours to be added to Fmovies. Sometimes I really like something I would like to keep it and make sure not lose it for re-watch or some movie has such a nice visuals that I need it in the best quality possible.

That's where Transmission comes handy.

Not only that, but some services like Britbox purposefully gimp their system.

Supports AppleTV, Android, Android TV, Roku and Fire TV in the USA.

AppleTV, Android, Roku and FireTV in the UK.

Why have they decided to not support my Shield TV in the UK? Who knows but NowTV has the same limitation so sometimes you have to find alternatives.

Some TV series aren't available everywhere. As an example, I'm currently watching "Dark", a wonderful 2017 German series (think about a grittier, darker, Stranger Things) that was dubbed in English but still doesn't seem to be available in other parts of Europe.

There are also other more legit usages of BitTorrent: I use it often to download Linux install images so that the network load is distributed among users and I do not tax excessively the servers.

I remember Dark having a pretty large mainstream following as it was getting released. I was under the impression that it was funded by Netflix and as such it would be available everywhere that Netflix is available (and by extension assumed Netflix was available everywhere in Europe).

Where in Europe is it not available on Netflix? Or is it the case of Netflix being unavailable?

> There are also other more legit usages of BitTorrent: I use it often to download Linux install images so that the network load is distributed among users and I do not tax excessively the servers.

Yeah, personally I use it to grab Path of Exile updates. The team release a torrent earlier so that people with bad internet connections can grab it early, it works great.

I pay for Netflix, Apple TV, Prime Video and Disney+ and go to the cinema every couple of months, but I still steal stuff. Sometimes I find out it was available on one of these services but it just happened that the search in QBittorrent was easier.

I am once again asking the entertainment industry to charge me literally any price they like per month to have all this in one place permanently.

I can not speak about movies and shows, as I don't watch either, I can speak only about music.

For me, streaming services for music is no-go. It is not about money, it is about control.

I prefer to listen only albums (not playlists, tracks, sets, mixes, etc), and I prefer to choose masterings & presses. Yes, Spotify has whole King Crimson catalog, but which masterings/remasterings among many? I don't know, Spotify doesn't provide this information and can change material at any moment without notification. Also all streaming services has stupid regional limitations (and I'm in process of transitioning from sanctioned country to "normal" one, good luck to use streaming services in this situation), and could remove whole catalog on whim due to some problems with label.

If I can buy music in ownable format (which means mostly "if it is presented at bandcamp"), I buy it, no problem. If I cannot - I download it. Also, I'm still buy CDs on concerts. Again, it is not about money (I've spent on bandcamp much more than several years of Spotify subscription), it is about owning music I love in exactly form I want.

That doesn’t make sense to me.

There are 200,000 movies, and Netflix and others catalogue 2000 of them. If you think of a movie to watch there’s literally 1% chance that it will be available for streaming.

I have almost never watched a movie I seeked out on the streamers. It’s the other way round, the streamers offer me some movies and if I’m interested I watch it. But their catalogues are laughably small. Completely incomparable to the music streaming catalogues which are really vast.

Nitpick, but you are off by about one order of magnitude for the number of movies available on Netflix. It's closer to 20,000.

For me a lot of streaming services have simple stopped working(Amazon Prime) in Firefox or are limited to 720p(Netflix), even though I have the DRM stuff enabled in Firefox. So I use it to be able to stream my "Debian ISOs" in at least full HD.