Just a few days ago I pulled an old Sony’s NWZ player as they still have superior audio quality compared to phones. I had to throw it away after 10+ years as the battery died.
The hunt is part of the fun. Like how people will opt to build a PC or a keyboard over a pre-built or pull out vinyl over digital. The steps taken to retrieve and enjoy the media is sometimes a relaxing process.
Throw in a spouse, kids, good but demanding job, a place to live, social obligations, detoriating (geriatric) parents, and you’re so happy you can just mash one single button and your favourite track, game or series starts to play.
That’s the reason why people stop pirating. Time.
When time is not (yet) your most precious resource you can see the fun in anything. Even virus scanning.
Really? I could understand that point from someone not in the piracy community, but doesn’t seem any more time consuming than posting on lemmy. Not really starved for time if someone is spending their time on social media.
Mind you I don’t pirate software or games, so maybe that’s why. Pretty much hardest has been waiting for download to finish.
There is stuff worth pirating, stuff which can’t be found through other means or is way overpriced. Stuff like old movies or impossible to legally gather roms.
For all others: “convenience is king.”
And you’re smart to not pirate software. The. “no illegal software” rule has saved me many times.
What are you pirating that makes it so hard? I don’t bother with software or programs so it’s just pretty much looking at what’s newly released and torrenting it.
Why even pirate if it’s that much of a pain? Pretty much same logic to me a someone who complains about how confusing pc gaming is. I’d point to the consoles.
Also, complaining about not having time but wasting their time talking to strangers online. I could understand the perspective from someone who doesn’t pirate, but to a pirate it is pretty hilarious seeing them making it out as this incredibly difficult time consuming thing like infomercials do.
I always pay for vijia but I wait for like a year or two and get em at a heavy discount.
I haven’t bought a movie or a music in 20 years. Well that’s a lit, I bought a bunch of FLACs from a guy whose music I loved because he’s a small artist and I want to see him bigger.
Other than that… movie, shows, and a music are a YOINK
Yeah, I basically stopped pirating entirely despite doing it relentlessly early in life. I still owe Capcom a thousand bucks if I am to pay that one alone back.
The basically part is that I still pirate what little music I need. Fuck the music industry.
Because, at the end of the day, we’re basically just downloading commodity entertainment. There’s nothing directly substantive about that and that’s fine. Not everything we do needs to become a direct part of our identity.
Yup. Pirating is about filling a need where companies sorely lack in providing services. When a company provides a shitty service or offers no viable alternative to obtaining something I would gladly pay for, pirating bridges that gap.
I’ve pirated almost everything for the last 30 years from msdos on. But I wouldn’t say it’s a lifestyle. It’s just that most of the stuff I would never buy. I don’t need them, they are not important, but maybe I want a taste. I don’t pirate music anymore because it’s not practical and some of the software. Some.
Games I don’t play much anymore, but I would pirate them until I have like 50 hours in. Then I start thinking maybe it makes sense to buy.
Unless it turns out cracked version is better than official one.
It depends very much how and why you pirate. I guess for many it is a hobby, they are data horders, etc. If you only stream pirated media online and use free cracked software like I mostly do, it is also totally free to pirate. But it costs you another resource then: time! So yes, piracy has a cost, the effort you have to put into it. It’s the same like trying to avoid the big five. Installing a custom os on your phone, blocking ads and intrusive trackers, selfhosting stuff etc all takes a lot of time and effort. So most people just pay for this stuff with their money or with their data out of convenience. When it gets too pricey, then they start finding alternatives. I would argue that we shouldn’t let convenience deter us from trying to be independent and having our sovereignty over our personal data respected.
Not really over a 5 year period, especially if you talk about more than a single subscription service. If you mean by preserve as keeping a full 3-2-1 backup, then yeah sure, but most people don’t need that. Double backup the truly important/rare content, everything else can be redownloaded in case of tragedy.
For posterity, 1 year of HBO Max or Disney+ is $150. Over 5 years that’s $750. If you are someone who knows you annually rewatch content, then that’s likely a guaranteed expense. Btw, if you pay month to month unless it’s less than 8 months of the year, monthly is more expensive, so I’m being generous here. No managing monthly subscriptions is also a major benefit.
That price nets you at least six 8TB HDD’s at $109 each, which 48TB is far more storage than most people would ever need so some of that cost can go to a power efficient Optiplex and some to spare for a VPN leaving you with at least 32TB.
As mentioned, each additional streaming service is going to exponentially increase that cost, further justifying your investment, and the peace of mind that whatever service hasn’t removed it.
Technically you use your time to pay for “setting up and maintaining it” but… That’s some BS honestly. Plex/Jellyfin are set up once and forget about them. Us nerds put in time to curate and go the extra mile, but most people can very easily have a simple low power server running. If they can set up the *arrs (not really very hard) then good automation for them, if not manually searching for what you want as you want it is one more step than a subscription. More steps if you need to sign up for the first time ;)
Granted - a streaming service doesn’t charge you $325 for the initial server+storage, however streaming services also don’t give you a lot of things for 2.10 years of streaming so I’d say it’s worth the investment. And it definitely does not cost more to preserve your media if you subscribe to more than 1 service. If you subscribe to only one and cancel monthly and spend your time managing that then maybe. (but if you don’t need 4k and consume that little content, you may still be better off with a Pi-like and a hard drive…)
Money is not the issue to me. I’ll happily pay for every episode I watch, maybe even per download. I just don’t want my content scattered across different platforms in suboptimal quality and be forced to pay a fixed fee even if I just need the one show on that platform.
If media/publishing companies would just throw the exclusivity model in the trash where it belongs (and let DRM die too), then everyone could pay to see what they want on their platform of choice without this bullshit. As long as that’s not the case, I don’t see myself using these “services”.
I just don’t want my content scattered across different platforms in suboptimal quality and be forced to pay
That and also the fact that sometimes content vanishes from those platforms because of licensing agreements and/or get censored like many older TV Shows have gotten.
Oh, yes, so true. Like when a game is no longer up for buying because one of the music tracks in the OST had it’s license rot, perfect customer service
AND you have access to NEARLY EVERYTHING, with the right trackers…. vs one sub to n-flix getting you 2% of shows. My server has Simpsons S01-s13 randomizer, KotH randomizer, and Futurama randomizers… can’t get that on Netflix!
My coworkers were talking today about all the hoops they were going through with streaming to find the content they wanted and navigating the byzantine extra charges to share it with their family. If piracy wasn’t an option I still wouldn’t go through all that, it’s madness how much worse the paid service is to the high seas.
Yup. My gf has Netflix but for one of our shows, the English subtitles disappeared (she’s ESL). Took like 15 minutes to figure it out, but happened again the next day. Now we pirate that show because it’s easier, even though she has it on Netflix.
Also used someone else’s Netflix to finally hit the attack on titan craze some years back.
No english subs. Have to read the local language. Whatever. The names were not accurately translated. Whatever. I could look past that since they were consistent within the subs as presented.
Season 2 - all the names changed from season 1. Even something as simple as changing a K to a C is too much and unacceptable, but the fuckers were straight up changing the name of the militaty units and shit. I had no idea who was who.
20 minutes later, I’m watching the HorribleSubs version with the worldwide-accepted English names and I never watched anime on Netflix. Piracy is a service problem.
I’ve been pirating for twenty years and you do kind of just stick with it even when you can afford stuff.
That said, when I reinstalled Windows a while ago, I was fannying about for aaaaaages trying to get a cracked version of Office to work when I suddenly realised I could just buy it for a tenner and not have to fuck about 😂 It hadn’t occurred to me before
Yeah office is literally the only thing that’s not worth it. Lifetime office 2019 is like 20 euro. This will die out with the subscription shit taking place though
Yep, it’s likely a sus licence, but when it eventually refuses to work, a quick phone call to MS and they just say “Fuck it, go on then”. Call centre people don’t care where you got it 😅
Jesus 2024 gets sent straight to jail for just copy pasting everything for everybody, completely ruining the economy. You wouldn’t just download food for the hungry? Think about the corpo farms.
I am an anti-theist. I am a follower of Jesus mythos. In the words of Mahatma Gandhi - “I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.”
A Middle-Eastern Jewish Socialist walks into a marketplace…
The streaming was sort of OK, and now it’s wank. Spread across dozens of services, that don’t have enough content to justify their existence. No UI linking them all together means you have no idea if something is available or not without checking justwatch.com
The Plex watchlists seemed stupid and pointless to me…until someone pointed out you can subscribe to your Plex watchlist in Radarr/Sonarr. Now, I can watch trailers on Plex, add stuff, and it shows up automatically when released. Super convenient.
At least Chromecast for TV basically does this. I can search for something and it will tell me all the ways I can watch for any installed app even unsubscribed.
Still, the issue of paying multiple monthly fees to see what you want is ludicrous. It’s as if the media companies maliciously complied with consumers’ desire to pick and choose what they watch rather than pay $200 a month for 1000 stations they don’t watch.
Now, you have to pay $200 to get all the services that have what you want to watch - and you still have to sift through the drek.
I used to be poor and pirate everything. Then I was making enough money. I got subscriptions and paid for games. But still pirated everything but games because Netflix was just too annoying to use.
Now everything is going to shit. I still make money but I’m going to start pirating way more. This time it will be out of spite !
How do you steal something that is infinitely reproducible?
If you have an apple and I steal it, you cannot eat the apple.
If you have a movie, I can copy it and you can still watch it.
Say for instance, there was a magic apple machine that copied apples infinitely with zero loss. If not intentionally destroyed, access to this machine would be restricted by the first party with enough capital to acquire and protect it. Using the machine to copy apples would also be considered stealing.
You people have recited that bullshit for as long as I can remember usenet. You’ve stolen the right to distribution and taken money out of progress 6 hands.
Invent whatever little story you need to live with it.
In 12 years of being subscribed to Netflix, it did not happen a single time that the movie I tried into the search was available.
I got the subscription as an indulgence. To answer the question, “how will the artists get paid”. But I still get everything from piratebay. Again, because Netflix is crap.
Oh, I didn’t come here to complain about stealing.
I came to make fun of idiots that make it their identity. The ladder is very much open season on piracy forums. You seem to be conflating (and other) the two.
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
⚓ Dedicated to the discussion of digital piracy, including ethical problems and legal advancements.
Just a few days ago I pulled an old Sony’s NWZ player as they still have superior audio quality compared to phones. I had to throw it away after 10+ years as the battery died.
Replacing the battery isn’t that difficult. You should have kept it…
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Replacing the battery isn’t that difficult.
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
I’ll pirate anything except indie games. Gotta support the small devs
The hunt is part of the fun. Like how people will opt to build a PC or a keyboard over a pre-built or pull out vinyl over digital. The steps taken to retrieve and enjoy the media is sometimes a relaxing process.
Yeah, no.
The hunt is only fun if you’ve got time to spare.
Throw in a spouse, kids, good but demanding job, a place to live, social obligations, detoriating (geriatric) parents, and you’re so happy you can just mash one single button and your favourite track, game or series starts to play.
That’s the reason why people stop pirating. Time.
When time is not (yet) your most precious resource you can see the fun in anything. Even virus scanning.
Really? I could understand that point from someone not in the piracy community, but doesn’t seem any more time consuming than posting on lemmy. Not really starved for time if someone is spending their time on social media.
Mind you I don’t pirate software or games, so maybe that’s why. Pretty much hardest has been waiting for download to finish.
There is stuff worth pirating, stuff which can’t be found through other means or is way overpriced. Stuff like old movies or impossible to legally gather roms.
For all others: “convenience is king.”
And you’re smart to not pirate software. The. “no illegal software” rule has saved me many times.
What are you pirating that makes it so hard? I don’t bother with software or programs so it’s just pretty much looking at what’s newly released and torrenting it.
Why even pirate if it’s that much of a pain? Pretty much same logic to me a someone who complains about how confusing pc gaming is. I’d point to the consoles.
Don’t have kids then. Much more free time.
I don’t understand
Also, complaining about not having time but wasting their time talking to strangers online. I could understand the perspective from someone who doesn’t pirate, but to a pirate it is pretty hilarious seeing them making it out as this incredibly difficult time consuming thing like infomercials do.
yes, that’s why I pay for some things and pirate others, because for me pirating is often significantly easier and less time consuming than paying
I think for movies and music this is totally true. Video games less so but not impossible
I can’t think of the last game I wanted to play that wasn’t cracked within week 1
I always pay for vijia but I wait for like a year or two and get em at a heavy discount.
I haven’t bought a movie or a music in 20 years. Well that’s a lit, I bought a bunch of FLACs from a guy whose music I loved because he’s a small artist and I want to see him bigger.
Other than that… movie, shows, and a music are a YOINK
Anon willl soon be 14 years old
Ah, to be young and -6 years old again
People lying on the Internet?
They can’t do that, that’s wrong
I’ve been pirating since I was a child. That being said, I don’t think it’s particularly healthy to pin ‘media pirating’ as a personality trait.
Yeah, I basically stopped pirating entirely despite doing it relentlessly early in life. I still owe Capcom a thousand bucks if I am to pay that one alone back.
The basically part is that I still pirate what little music I need. Fuck the music industry.
My exception is smaller bands with bamdcamp.
Buying from there supports the artists well!
I basically do the same. I buy a majority of albums as records from my favorite bands or just bands I want to support.
Why not?
Because, at the end of the day, we’re basically just downloading commodity entertainment. There’s nothing directly substantive about that and that’s fine. Not everything we do needs to become a direct part of our identity.
Oh. Omg you’re so right lol.
Do you know what community this is?
participating in a community ≠ making it a lifestyle
I think a lot of people in this community consider it a lifestyle to pirate media.
I think most just don’t give a fuck. Definitely not enough fucks to make it a lifestyle.
Yes, why?
deleted by creator
Yup. Pirating is about filling a need where companies sorely lack in providing services. When a company provides a shitty service or offers no viable alternative to obtaining something I would gladly pay for, pirating bridges that gap.
I’ve pirated almost everything for the last 30 years from msdos on. But I wouldn’t say it’s a lifestyle. It’s just that most of the stuff I would never buy. I don’t need them, they are not important, but maybe I want a taste. I don’t pirate music anymore because it’s not practical and some of the software. Some. Games I don’t play much anymore, but I would pirate them until I have like 50 hours in. Then I start thinking maybe it makes sense to buy. Unless it turns out cracked version is better than official one.
Ironically piracy actually costs more than streaming if you intend to preserve media.
It depends very much how and why you pirate. I guess for many it is a hobby, they are data horders, etc. If you only stream pirated media online and use free cracked software like I mostly do, it is also totally free to pirate. But it costs you another resource then: time! So yes, piracy has a cost, the effort you have to put into it. It’s the same like trying to avoid the big five. Installing a custom os on your phone, blocking ads and intrusive trackers, selfhosting stuff etc all takes a lot of time and effort. So most people just pay for this stuff with their money or with their data out of convenience. When it gets too pricey, then they start finding alternatives. I would argue that we shouldn’t let convenience deter us from trying to be independent and having our sovereignty over our personal data respected.
Not really over a 5 year period, especially if you talk about more than a single subscription service. If you mean by preserve as keeping a full 3-2-1 backup, then yeah sure, but most people don’t need that. Double backup the truly important/rare content, everything else can be redownloaded in case of tragedy.
For posterity, 1 year of HBO Max or Disney+ is $150. Over 5 years that’s $750. If you are someone who knows you annually rewatch content, then that’s likely a guaranteed expense. Btw, if you pay month to month unless it’s less than 8 months of the year, monthly is more expensive, so I’m being generous here. No managing monthly subscriptions is also a major benefit.
That price nets you at least six 8TB HDD’s at $109 each, which 48TB is far more storage than most people would ever need so some of that cost can go to a power efficient Optiplex and some to spare for a VPN leaving you with at least 32TB.
As mentioned, each additional streaming service is going to exponentially increase that cost, further justifying your investment, and the peace of mind that whatever service hasn’t removed it.
Technically you use your time to pay for “setting up and maintaining it” but… That’s some BS honestly. Plex/Jellyfin are set up once and forget about them. Us nerds put in time to curate and go the extra mile, but most people can very easily have a simple low power server running. If they can set up the *arrs (not really very hard) then good automation for them, if not manually searching for what you want as you want it is one more step than a subscription. More steps if you need to sign up for the first time ;)
Granted - a streaming service doesn’t charge you $325 for the initial server+storage, however streaming services also don’t give you a lot of things for 2.10 years of streaming so I’d say it’s worth the investment. And it definitely does not cost more to preserve your media if you subscribe to more than 1 service. If you subscribe to only one and cancel monthly and spend your time managing that then maybe. (but if you don’t need 4k and consume that little content, you may still be better off with a Pi-like and a hard drive…)
Money is not the issue to me. I’ll happily pay for every episode I watch, maybe even per download. I just don’t want my content scattered across different platforms in suboptimal quality and be forced to pay a fixed fee even if I just need the one show on that platform.
It’s a service issue.
If media/publishing companies would just throw the exclusivity model in the trash where it belongs (and let DRM die too), then everyone could pay to see what they want on their platform of choice without this bullshit. As long as that’s not the case, I don’t see myself using these “services”.
Pretty much all of piracy is. That philosophy more or less birthed steam.
That and also the fact that sometimes content vanishes from those platforms because of licensing agreements and/or get censored like many older TV Shows have gotten.
Oh, yes, so true. Like when a game is no longer up for buying because one of the music tracks in the OST had it’s license rot, perfect customer service
How so?
I have 32tb, bit overkill 8 tb HDD ~$180 X4= $720
Netflix (no ads) 22.99 22.99/720=31.3
As long as you use it for 3 or so years, it pays for itself. The only difference is you have both the hardware and the movies forever.
AND you have access to NEARLY EVERYTHING, with the right trackers…. vs one sub to n-flix getting you 2% of shows. My server has Simpsons S01-s13 randomizer, KotH randomizer, and Futurama randomizers… can’t get that on Netflix!
My coworkers were talking today about all the hoops they were going through with streaming to find the content they wanted and navigating the byzantine extra charges to share it with their family. If piracy wasn’t an option I still wouldn’t go through all that, it’s madness how much worse the paid service is to the high seas.
Yup. My gf has Netflix but for one of our shows, the English subtitles disappeared (she’s ESL). Took like 15 minutes to figure it out, but happened again the next day. Now we pirate that show because it’s easier, even though she has it on Netflix.
I wonder if you have legal access to things you’re pirating, could someone call that a theft too? 🤔
Also used someone else’s Netflix to finally hit the attack on titan craze some years back.
No english subs. Have to read the local language. Whatever. The names were not accurately translated. Whatever. I could look past that since they were consistent within the subs as presented.
Season 2 - all the names changed from season 1. Even something as simple as changing a K to a C is too much and unacceptable, but the fuckers were straight up changing the name of the militaty units and shit. I had no idea who was who.
20 minutes later, I’m watching the HorribleSubs version with the worldwide-accepted English names and I never watched anime on Netflix. Piracy is a service problem.
I have Netflix and Amazon and I still pirate a bunch of stuff, sometimes I even forget to check if something is available there before torrenting it
That’s what they get for being too stupid to use free streaming services.
A fool and their money are soon parted.
It’s easier to fool someone than to convince them they’d been fooled.
Cringe!
I’ve been pirating for twenty years and you do kind of just stick with it even when you can afford stuff.
That said, when I reinstalled Windows a while ago, I was fannying about for aaaaaages trying to get a cracked version of Office to work when I suddenly realised I could just buy it for a tenner and not have to fuck about 😂 It hadn’t occurred to me before
Yeah office is literally the only thing that’s not worth it. Lifetime office 2019 is like 20 euro. This will die out with the subscription shit taking place though
Wasn’t it like 120€ ten years ago?
they might be talking about those questionably-legal licenses off ebay
Idk. It’s a real website and Company that I pay. But the license itself could be sus.
Yep, it’s likely a sus licence, but when it eventually refuses to work, a quick phone call to MS and they just say “Fuck it, go on then”. Call centre people don’t care where you got it 😅
Or, pirate because it’s what Jesus would do.
Jesus 2024 gets sent straight to jail for just copy pasting everything for everybody, completely ruining the economy. You wouldn’t just download food for the hungry? Think about the corpo farms.
Imagine the faces on the baker and fisherman when when Jesus copy pasted their hard grafted produce to feed his five thousand starving followers.
I am an anti-theist. I am a follower of Jesus mythos. In the words of Mahatma Gandhi - “I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.”
A Middle-Eastern Jewish Socialist walks into a marketplace…
Today is Aaron Swartz day
https://programming.dev/post/5769498
I’m heading back to it.
The streaming was sort of OK, and now it’s wank. Spread across dozens of services, that don’t have enough content to justify their existence. No UI linking them all together means you have no idea if something is available or not without checking justwatch.com
If music was like this, I’d pirate that too.
Instead of using something stupid like justwatch.com, use something smart like https://fmoviesz.to/
You can actually watch the content for free there. Crazy, I know.
Just make sure you have uBlock Origin installed.
I prefer movieuniverse.se, but mostly for older movies.
For newer stuff it’s streaming or the servarr stack. I didn’t buy all these speakers to listen in stereo.
The more the merrier!
Personally, if I’m interested in quality I think downloading is the way to go.
Streaming is great for its accessibility.
Doesn’t plex have an UI for all of them? I use plex to watch my media and I saw an option to add your streaming services.
I think that’s just doing the Justwatch style thing. It’s a start, but it’s not a true integration.
Sad thing is, I’m pretty sure Netflix used to encourage you to make your own UI for it. Then they blocked it all.
The Plex watchlists seemed stupid and pointless to me…until someone pointed out you can subscribe to your Plex watchlist in Radarr/Sonarr. Now, I can watch trailers on Plex, add stuff, and it shows up automatically when released. Super convenient.
At least Chromecast for TV basically does this. I can search for something and it will tell me all the ways I can watch for any installed app even unsubscribed.
Still, the issue of paying multiple monthly fees to see what you want is ludicrous. It’s as if the media companies maliciously complied with consumers’ desire to pick and choose what they watch rather than pay $200 a month for 1000 stations they don’t watch.
Now, you have to pay $200 to get all the services that have what you want to watch - and you still have to sift through the drek.
Much better, that. /s
In this moment I am euphoric vibes.
Being a proud pirate is some of the dumbest shit on the planet.
Nothing wrong with sharing your favorite media.
BUT HAVE YOU MADE IT YOUR ENTIRE PERSONALITY YET? HAVE YOU PROUDLY GONE ON TO THE INTERNET TO DECLARE YOU WILL ALWAYS PIRATE?
If you haven’t you are definitely missing out.
Nah I am more of an open source and creative commons kind of guy
I used to be poor and pirate everything. Then I was making enough money. I got subscriptions and paid for games. But still pirated everything but games because Netflix was just too annoying to use.
Now everything is going to shit. I still make money but I’m going to start pirating way more. This time it will be out of spite !
I wish I could possibly convey how hard I just rolled my eyes back into my head.
Netflix is too hard? You’ll come up with anything to justify stealing it.
How do you steal something that is infinitely reproducible?
If you have an apple and I steal it, you cannot eat the apple.
If you have a movie, I can copy it and you can still watch it.
Say for instance, there was a magic apple machine that copied apples infinitely with zero loss. If not intentionally destroyed, access to this machine would be restricted by the first party with enough capital to acquire and protect it. Using the machine to copy apples would also be considered stealing.
You people have recited that bullshit for as long as I can remember usenet. You’ve stolen the right to distribution and taken money out of progress 6 hands.
Invent whatever little story you need to live with it.
gibve dindsey more monies . Mous not have enoigh monies but when you give money he do
👌
Piracy isn’t theft lawl gtfo with that
In 12 years of being subscribed to Netflix, it did not happen a single time that the movie I tried into the search was available.
I got the subscription as an indulgence. To answer the question, “how will the artists get paid”. But I still get everything from piratebay. Again, because Netflix is crap.
👌👍
Not as dumb as the people who go to piracy forums to complain about piracy being stealing.
Oh, I didn’t come here to complain about stealing.
I came to make fun of idiots that make it their identity. The ladder is very much open season on piracy forums. You seem to be conflating (and other) the two.
You’re literally whining about stealing in the two next comments.
I’m not the one who started in with justifications. That’s in the other commentators.
I certainly wasn’t calling him dumb because he makes coherent, logically consistent arguments.
Once you go black flag you never look back