Comment by pharmakom
4 years ago
It feels increasingly like paying for media is for chumps. If you pirate then you get the format you want, the edition you want on the device you want… indefinitely.
4 years ago
It feels increasingly like paying for media is for chumps. If you pirate then you get the format you want, the edition you want on the device you want… indefinitely.
Paying for DRMed media is for chumps. While I agree with you overall in spirit, lets not forget that there are in fact 100% DRM free quality stores out there. And for music and games not minor ones either, in music in fact humanity outright won that war and DRM free is the standard for purchases not the exception. Even for games the selection at stores like GOG is in no way minor with lots of full AAA titles. Lots of DRM free places for ebooks too, though admittedly that one for some reason is less extensive.
But it's movies and TV shows that are the real odd ones out. That industry has always been some of the worst, and unfortunately they seem to have watched what happened with music and learned all the wrong lessons plus had the opportunity to stop the particular path towards DRM free music took from happening to them. Things are a complete mess a true perversion of the point of copyright. I hope this sort of thing eventually prompts backlash that results in legal changes.
music has a lower production cost than tv shows and films. the copyright holders are more willing to distribute them at a lower price
Feels like there's a 10-year cycle of this:
1. Companies lock down access until everyone starts pirating, broadcast rights become increasingly worthless.
2. A company realizes that this is a great opportunity to provide easy access to all of the media and becomes wildly succesful. Broadcast rights suddenly become very valuable.
3. Goto 1
Sadly, the lessons that businesses learn from this is "we should have better DRM so users have no alternative" and not "we should have less user hostile business models"
Having less control, having less hostile business practices, is leaving money on the table. And leaving money on the table is heresy to modern businesspeople.
Consumer rights only matter to these people if they are codified in a law and the consequences have teeth.
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I tend to feel the same. Something like I understand their legal hurdles licensing things across different country laws and such but in reality that is not my damn problem. Silly things like why can't I watch HBO max in Germany?
Even sillier, why are there subtitles for languages available in some countries, but not in others, even on the same service? If I'm in Brazil watching a Netflix show (even some Netflix originals), I don't see the same amount of subtitle options if I was in India. Absolutely bonkers.
AFAIK this happens when the subtitles are not made by the same company, for example old Disney movies are translated in each region, but not by Disney itself, so they don't own the subtitles.
For Netflix originals I have no explanation, I though they do it all themselves.
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> legal hurdles licensing things across different country laws and such but in reality that is not my damn problem.
and in essence, a made up problem. The owners of those licenses simply wants to increase profits by price segmentation - that's why media is restricted in some countries from being viewed from other countries etc.
So i have absolutely zero qualms about piracy when such practices exists.
Yeah well, I forgot to connect the vpn to download a movie, a single mistake that costed me almost 1k euro here in Germany, not sure how to proceed.
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In case of HBO Max it's probably because they licensed most of their content to Sky. I'm sure once that agreement runs out we will see HBO Max in Germany. And Sky will be even more worthless to non-sport audiences.
At least with streaming services you know that it's only temporary. Often Netflix is just more convenient than searching for torrents, setting up a device with a hard disk/NAS to play offline content etc.
There are (non-trivial) ways of making back-up copies of your purchased digital material, just as there were for Blu-Ray and DVD purchases in the past; so the choice isn't solely between piracy and purchasing.
Kinda is because it’s so much simpler to download it for free. Or get it from the library (if you have a decent public library system)
I'd rather send an amount of money to the actual creator (without intermediaries) and still pirate the content just because it's more convenient.
So, with a movie, who is the "creator"? The studio? But those folks are the source of the problem with their licensing deals. The director? The screen writer? Camera crews? Actors? Props?
It's easier with books, or music (with different degrees of truth, a single singer-songwriter would be a lot easier to pay directly than a symphonic orchestra...), but involved products are not easy to finance individually - or pay individually - that's the exact reason right-management studios exist to begin with.
Many of these files have uncracked DRM so not sure that's true.
Even as an absolute worst case there is always point camera at screen and record. HDMI splitters/cheap HDMI capture cards will often ignore HDCP too allowing you to record content. Not really convenient to do it real time, and there generally is some quality loss but it is doable.
They have to be decrypted to be played back. The analog hole cannot be closed.
Wrong mindset. You still need to support the developers somehow. I still bought games/movies but get the non-DRM version just for the convenience i.e. not having to start launcher for playing games.
If the developers make the game/movie available in a reasonable way (e.g. DRM-free download). If they want to control what you do after the transaction then that's their problem and I see no problem with piracy.
Disagreeing with a content producer's distribution methods is not a moral justification for theft.
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You could also buy the DVD/Blu-Ray/UHD and rip it...
That's more effort than torrenting to get exactly the same end result.
I would be surprised if it's really THAT easy to find any arbitrary movie ripped in full Blu/UHD quality without any transcoding, dowloadable within 30-45 minutes (average rip time). New Hollywood releases, sure I can buy that, back catalog stuff that's even the slightest bit obscure? I doubt it, simply because how many people are currently torrenting e.g., a full bitrate UHD copy of Django (1966)?
I've heard it repeated many times over the years that movie torrent sites are a magical one-stop shop where every movie in the history of cinema is available instantly and in full quality, but I've just never seen it except for new release stuff. Now perhaps the story changes a little with private trackers, but in order to use those you have to be an active seeder. Now you've moved from a simple DMCA bypass to actively distributing pirated content. Thanks, but I think I'd rather rip purchased movies onto my Plex server.
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No good option for 720p TV series though that never got a blu ray release. DVDs with horrible interlacing are usually a pretty big downgrade compared to the source material and what is available for streaming and rips thereof.
The major problem with Blu-ray is ensuring authenticity. There are so many fakes out there.
I feel lucky that I don't feel the need to "own" any particular movie. I'm content enough to rent it. I rarely want to watch the same movie again more than once every few years. In my case, it's much cheaper to rent on demand than to digitally "buy" it.
Of course, some movies exist exclusively on platforms like Netflix. If I want to watch something bad enough, then I'll go ahead and pay for one month, which is again cheaper than buying outright. And then I'll usually suck up all the other exclusive content that month, so it doesn't feel too much like a rip off. It's still annoying though.
You can do this via purchasing physical media, too. You can even pass it along when you're done with it.
Paying for media is a good thing. Paying for content without getting the media is a problem.
> It feels increasingly like paying for media is for chumps.
It's for honest people.
Unfortunately honest people are synonymous with chumps these days as a result of increasingly user hostile behaviour of most big corps.
And it’s the honest people that repeatedly get taken advantage of, then.