In contrast companies like Spotify don’t care about the music at all. They would just as well sell you white noise if it would somehow give them the slightest improvement in growth or margins.
Daniel Ek, CEO of Spotify, regularly makes statements that suggest he’d rather see professional musicians disappear. Most recently:
https://www.nme.com/news/music/music-fans-and-artists-hit-ba...
...but most are simply pirates, completely detached from the music or the artist. Let's not glorify them.
Thing is, he used virtually none of it. He collected software for the sake of collecting it. He didn't even play video games, just loaded them up once to make sure they ran. He was a hoarder basically, who had stumbled into a niche hobby, and like most hobbyists he would happily share it with anyone who asked.
I'm not saying every pirate is like that, or even most, but I am saying, I don't think the pirate scene works without people like that. The music fans are spokes, but people who do it for the sake of doing it are the hubs.
I’m half joking but all these tools to automatically download TVs and movies has absolutely led to this class of user that habitually downloads stuff just for the sake of doing it. Terabytes of movies they have no interest in. The psychology of it fascinates me.
For everything else (a minority): an excuse to play with my servers, cosplaying as an archivist, and "number must go up" for NAS size :)
Why should we view things through the lens of whether we are glorifying pirates or not? Is your assertion we should be condemning them? Why? Is it because they are taking bread out of the mouths of musicians? Is it equally bad if Spotify uses their leverage to commoditize and devalue music so musicians can no longer make meaningful money from recorded music? What about music labels who structure deals so they get the bulk of the money for a fraction of the work?
I'm curious to understand the principles you hold that give you such a black and white view on piracy.
As to the main point, no individual has the right to take someone else's intellectual property (such as songs, movies, books, etc that were often created by large teams of people over months or years) and, without asking any permission, "liberate" that content so that it can be freely copied and consumed by virtually anyone, anywhere, around the world, without recognition or attribution.
The question isn't whether distribution of the work ultimately does or does not benefit the creator(s), which it often does. It's that the "pirate" has no right to independently make the irreversible decision to freely distribute the content.
For example: audio description. Audio description is an accessibility technology that allows people who are blind or low vision to watch films, essentially by providing an extra soundtrack with a narrator concisely providing context for what's going on that can't be accounted for by dialogue or sound effects.
I have owned, in my life, 5 copies of the film Alien. None of those versions are audio described. Up until last year there was no way to hear a described version without resorting to “piracy”. The only way to hear a (mediocre version with a synth voice instead of an expressive human one) described version is to pretend to be in Canada, or attend a theatre capable of delivering AD with the new re-release. It's not a world-wide release.
So, sitting here in a cow-paddock in rural Western Australia, I still have no legal way to watch the audio described version of an oscar-winning film over 40 years old. Having paid 5 times for it, damn right I pirate that. And while I am not vision impaired, there are many others who are who depend on AD to participate in culture, and when they find barriers to that, they pirate that content too.
I have films on DVD I paid for, but cannot legally watch because I'm too many kilometers from some notional border or other. Damn right I “pirated” those!
As to your main point, you note that no individual has the right to take someone else's intellectual property. I presume you are giving your ethical blessing and a free pass to OpenAI and Midjourney et. al. who have provably leveraged a pirated corpus into highly profitable products?
Put a note up in the nearest local store, invite someone from the foodbank around and swap a meal for them describing what happens as you watch the film together.
FWiW I'm also currently living in wheatbelt W.Australia, my father (born 1935) makes a habit of helping out older people (Meals on Wheels, book reading, etc) in the local area that are struggling ..
You might have more legal options than you realise.
(Where I am the community is not so great. If you need a casserole, they're in your corner. If you supported gay marriage, and if prefer to do indigenous patch burning instead of let it turn into a wildfire so you can be a hero, then you're about as welcome as a blowfly).
Anyway I'm not vision impaired, I just enjoy audio described films while I'm doing chores or commuting.
Audio description is very much an art, and while some do resort to ad hoc description from friends, it's often clumsy and not immersive. Producing the real thing is highly asymmetric to the film run-time. It takes about 2 hours to properly describe about 20 minutes of a film, depending on the overal genre.
The blind community face an even greater hurdle. I've heard so many stories of blind people signing up to a streaming platform to watch a film, only for the audio description not be avaiable on that platform for that film. Because streaming platform X doesn't have the rights to the AD produced by streaming platform Y. It also leads to a great deal of redundancy as multiple services create entirely distinct AD tracks for the same film. It's crazy!
Piracy is the only way some of these movies and television shows can be enjoyed by some people, and often those people are of limited means.
It's raining here. Hope you get some. :-)
I did some digital | electronic support work for the WA Institute for the Blind(?) in Perth back in 1984 (ish) and understand the value of goo audio description (and piracy .. or file sharing in hobbyist communities as I might think of it) so I understand your position.
Just being that person on teh internet that likes to point out there are many ways to skin cats .. not that we do that in the country anymore.
Amazon did the same for a long time. It’s a fine strategy if your investors don’t need the immediate returns.
Amazon’s market cap grew by much more than the SP500, because the market (correctly) anticipated Amazon being able to earn profits.
Spotify’s ability to earn decent profits is not a given, and in my opinion, their whole business is currently being a negotiating chip between the 3 businesses that own music copyrights (Warner/Universal/Sony) and Apple/Amazon/Alphabet.
But executives loving money is a separate issue from whether the company is profitable or not.
Daniel Ek takes no salary but has filed to sell €165M in stock so far in 2024.
Also, Ek could have sold his equity years ago and made more money with less risk by sticking it in SP500. If he really loved money, wouldn’t he have gotten rid of stock in a business losing money and stuck it into something less risky?
My point is to say that Spotify is obviously in a difficult business, given the vendors it has to negotiate with, the competitors it has to compete with, and the customers it has to sell to. It is not some conspiracy or excess short term greed by executives that is hampering its success or ability to pay artists.
Right. So when you said this..
>Spotify loves money so much it has yet to show a profit in almost 20 years.
..was your point that Spotify, the company, doesn't love money, even if the executives might?
Spotify’s executive compensation is what it is, it is still a large organization managing 9k employees with 600M customers, so they obviously want a carrot to work. Shareholders and board members can vote on compensation they think is undeserved.
In fact, Ek hasn’t even received compensation since 2017, so he’s just been offloading his existing equity from being a founder from way back when. And since Spotify stock has lost money relative to the market for 7 years, Ek has been working for free. He literally could have more money if he had quit working years ago.
https://fortune.com/europe/2024/04/29/daniel-ek-salary-spoti...
The “tech bro” founder could have had billions of more dollars if he had dumped all his Spotify shares years ago.
It does not mean the organization is making a ton of money, or has any pricing power. An alternative is Visa or Verisign of Intuit or Microsoft or Qualcomm or Apple, those businesses have fat profit margins. Those businesses get to set their prices at the highest profit margins. Spotify barely limps along hoping one day it can eke out more than a low single digit profit margin consistently.
I wanted to complete a set of DJ mixes, and had to purchase them on Discogs to as there were no digital copies, one cost me EUR50 for one CD...
there's an episode of the suite life of zach and cody where zach pretends to have dyslexia in order to get extra time in his exams, and near the end of the episode he gets busted and they have a thoughtful conversation about how it's unfair and hurts the people who need the extra time, and he should be less lazy and do the work, etc, and somehow that's too offensive now.
As an example: I grew up in the 60’s and 70’s with the feminist second wave. Women of my generation hated being called girl, for good reason! In that time, men were men, and women were considered children.
Their granddaughters don’t seem to mind the term girl at all. They didn’t suffer the same trauma their grandmothers did. Society has progressed, at least a bit.
As for feminist and girls, you clearly drank the Kool-Aid as well. Women were called girls, because even after long maturing process, they still behave like children, or more specifically girls. Now there have been a very long propaganda platform to socially impose the "correct" behavior into men. But the reality hasn't changed, there are significant biological difference in the female human that makes it behave very differently and that becomes more and more noticeable the older they get.
Pretending there has been progress when all you did was censor the truth and impose an ideological vision on society. It's worse than religion, because at least those were created from behavioral observation.
But I guess you are a believer, if that floats your boat, have at it.
Sure, but they do like to discriminate against others based on their skin color or gender. Race and gender-gated policies are everywhere today.
The patterns are obvious and the future is clear, it's obvious who is going to be on the wrong side of history. There is no place for social regressive conservatism in a free and open society, that doesn't mean you are being oppressed not matter how convenient of an idea that victim complex is, society at large will progress, with or without you and there is nothing you can do about it.
And you clearly don't understand much about what you are talking about. The fact is that society as we know it is clearly going away, precisely because the fertility level is so abysmal that at this rate in two generations the genetic heritage that built all this world of freedom will be extinguished.
There is actually a trend of "strong women" going out of their way to bring around men from foreign countries to mate and create a family, precisely because of all the problems the social propaganda has created. Another society will perdure that's for sure, but it definitely won't be the same and the more time passe the more it looks like the replacement won't be as nice and open to liberties as what it replaced.
I don't even care, this is what happens when a culture gets too complacent, it gets overthrown and replaced by a stronger competitor. Now the question is: will it be better? So far, I fear the signs are not in favor of this conclusion, but we will see...
How do you think people felt that opposed social progress in the past? They felt exactly like you are feeling, but you don't agree with them now do you? Everything you say is derived from those base emotions, but it's all just in your head. You don't have to fear people who are different from you, they are all just people, we are all the same, we are all the same species, race, gender, sexuality, religion, language; it's all unimportant, we all just want to live happy lives in peace. Anyway
We are still hearing about discrimination of women in STEM subjects when not only they have the same exact opportunities but we reworked a lot of the education system to accommodate them in preference.
We can never win with your type because there is no logic, it's all about the feelings and emotions that uncomfortable truths create.
And nice trying on the racist insult, I fundamentally don't think there is a superior race or whatever, just that there are objectively different genetic heritages that are better at some things (and vice versa). It's the same thing for women, men are not able to make other humans, that's an objective truth. Either you take advantage of that and assign different things to do depending on actual relative strength of peoples or you put your head in the sand, makes everyone go through meaningless competition that bring about the same results, just less efficiently and with way more casualties than necessary. People are complementary, you can't have the smart ones doing masonry while the strong ones doing architecture, that's just stupidly inefficient and a sure way of creating problems in the long run...
And to be clear, I strongly believe in the equality of opportunities as well as equality in laws but that doesn't mean you have to engineer a whole system against "discriminations"; it won't work no matter how much you believe.
Hulu on the other hand just pulls shit. For example they pulled my favorite it’s always sunny episode where they do that diehard movie. I guess the fact they do black face makes it racist (which they call out as such in the show itself!) and since we are all apparently too stupid to think for ourselves about the content we watch they better block it. After all they know better than me about what is offensive.
… shit like that… that is what is gonna lead me back to piracy.
Bitrates are tied to the subscription tier. If you do the 4K plan, it's visibly noticeable that 1080p video bitrates are higher. They don't have much 4K content, but the 1080p difference is worth it for my 4K projector.
Yeah, nah. WhatCD’s full catalogue has never been recovered.
> nah. WhatCD’s full catalogue has never been recovered.
The loss of WhatCD's torrent database didn't wipe out anyone's library.
Burning the Library of Alexandria also didn't burn the other copies, and yet many books were lost.
In college I ate up an entire hard drive downloading the bootleg discography of Pearl Jam live shows in the hugest quality I could find.
Not sure why I needed 50+ live versions of the song Daughter or Yellow Ledbetter but… I had ‘em
I feel way freer when watching downloaded films. Like the old VHS days. It is mine.
I find this often the case with streaming. I used to think that this is just how they make movies now, but when trying out the same movie in Bluray, every word comes out crystal clear.
For a lot of pirates, it's a niche hobby to preserve the best quality version of some media / art. I see it as an underground librarian archivist movement.
In 100 years iTunes may be dead, but there will be some person with every album available in high quality lossless FLAC. Same with Netflix and it's bit starved encodes.