Comment by blfr
5 days ago
Just pirate it. They can't tell you this but there's a quagmire of rights, licenses, agreements, treaties... and you can untangle this Goridan Knot by just pirating, especially media, for your own use.
There are pixel perfect 4k drm-free rips out there made by people who poured thousands of hours into understanding codecs. They will work on any platform, forever, you can stream them or play offline.
These rips can be freely distributed to friends and family, your kids will be able to play them, they're easy to back up. Physical media are a legacy solution.
And it doesn't stop you from getting a revocable or whatever other license the creators prefer to fund their work.
Another thing that always needs pointing out: that ad-free, copyable, unencumbered, pixel perfect 4K drm-free rip with multiple language audio streams, hand crafted accurate subtitles, chapter tags, and embedded poster art cannot be bought from the movie industry at any price. That's why piracy is a product problem, not a price problem. The industry refuses to produce and offer the superior product, so regardless of the price, piracy is the only way to get it.
There used to be this funny anti pirate advertisement, that tried to raise awareness in people to check if they maybe have a pirated DVD and not the original.
Somehing like, make sure your DVD
- has unskippable advertisment - long intro, also unskippable - ...
If you don't have all that, but just a video that just plays the movie, you got to rush to the store and buy the legal obstructed version.
I actually remember getting so frustrated that I ripped some of my DVDs, made a copy without that, and put it in the same case so that I could just enjoy the movie. VHS you could always fast forward, which is not something I thought I would miss as much as I do. Physical goods that work offline are my default.
1 reply →
This is so true, I pirated movies that I was ready to pay for so many times, just because they weren't available in my area, or there were no subtitles, or they only offered 720p.
You can download a MTK file at 4K with multiple audio tracks and subtitles and more often than not there are enough seeders to just start watching it while it downloads in the background.
They need to wake up.
Despite paying for Netflix and Disney+ and Prime and etc, I have pirtated 1080 copies, with subtitles, of all our favorites because network access is unreliable and service provides add and remove media without warning.
As has been said before, the pirated copies are frequently a higher quality product than is available for purchase or rent.
2 replies →
Pirated media also can't be silently and remotely censored or edited. It's also increasingly the only way to consume media where somewhere somebody isn't keeping a highly detailed record of every time you access it (when, where, how long, how often, etc.).
You can't even watch a DVD or bluray these days without a record of what you're watching and when being stored and sent over the internet. Companies like Roku are doing multiple screencaptures every second and uploading those to content recognition systems.
Can't you use bluray players without a network connection?
1 reply →
It's also a usability thing.
Downloaded stuff comes into one service on a server I own (Jellyfin or Plex) and I can see _everything_ there. Every movie and TV show.
On the official services, that I pay for, I need to go through a good half dozen trying to see what's where this time.
That's what always gets me. Pirates get a superior product while paying customers get garbage. Netflix streams obscenely compressed "high definition" content while pirates get blu-ray remuxes painstakingly sourced from multiple Blu-Rays in order to select the best frames. Music industry releases compressed, clipping, horribly mastered tracks while pirates pull out all the stops to rip old vynils with insane equipment in order to get clean high dynamic range sound. Pirates keep playing at full speed while the genuine copy's obfuscated denuvo VM slowly churns and kicks them our when it fails to phone home to the corporation's dead servers. Nintendo makes some token effort to sell the same Mario ROM to people for the tenth time while pirates get cycle accurate emulators, ROM hacks, translations, save states, cheats, network multiplayer, graphics filters, universal compatibility, perfect A/V synchronization, fast forward, slow motion, frame advance, tool assisted speedruns, debuggers, disassemblers, anything you can think of.
I feel like a total moron every single time I "purchase" these things. The industry doesn't give a shit, only pirates do. Pirates spent thousands and thousands of dollars and absurd amounts of effort sourcing, scanning and cleaning up old Star Wars films. You'd think these trillionaire corporations would be able to exceed a bunch of enthusiast "pirates" in performance, but they don't give a shit. In fact they go out of their way to make everything worse by failing to make works available, badly editing or even censoring whatever they put out there and locking it all down with obnoxious DRM.
Remember the story of the man who died at Disneyworld, and Disney said his wife couldn't sue them because he agreed to the Disney+ TOS?
I think about that every time I open up Jellyfin
No, but I found a link for it
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/disney-says-man-cant-su...
believe it or not, but pirated copies can be better a thousandfold than what paying customers get.
whenever I want to play Deathloop, I download it from torrents despite "owning" it on Steam, all because Denuvo really likes my SSD, and whenever I want to go online, then, well, yeah, I have to suffer. still, not regretting the purchase, cuz this money went to Arkane.
Then you need a NAS, a backup process (backing up large collections of movies to S3 is actually pretty expensive). You need to keep your NAS up to date. You need to install / configure Plex, oops that's closed source now, uninstall that and get Jellyfin. Eventually your NAS hardware will be outdated and you'll have to get a new one and migrate your files over.
Even for technical people this is a pain over time. Nothing like just having a disc that can last 50+ years if properly stored.
A NAS, yes, but why bother with a backup process? I know it's sacrilege for most admins, but if you're already pirating the media you can just pirate it again if your storage breaks. Yes it takes a while but so would restoring from regular backups.
Backup the .torrent files, skip the rest.
Or you just buy a random NAS from a store, and do none of that. Sure, that's more expensive and less featurefull, but you do not need to know anything.
>Eventually your NAS hardware will be outdated and you'll have to get a new one and migrate your files over.
I know. The little watchdog process on the NAS sees that it's 10 years old, and locks it so it won't work anymore. So annoying.
Or do you mean that you will have so many movies and shows that you yearn for more storage? Because these two things aren't the same. The latter is "this is so good, I want more of it". It's like telling someone to subsist on pumpkin seeds and rainwater because if they eat anything more flavorful they'll become gluttonous.
>Nothing like just having a disc that can last 50+ years if properly stored.
There are no commercial disks that last that long, and no one can properly store them. Cold, dark, climate-controlled, pure nitrogen atmosphere? Give me a break. And how many can you even store?
I had a FreeNAS I bought around ~2010 and didn't use it for a couple of years at one point and when I went to use it again I could no longer update it, which meant I was on an ancient version of FreeBSD and none of the modern software ran on. So this literally happened to me already.
Naw.
> Then you need a NAS, a backup process (backing up large collections of movies to S3 is actually pretty expensive).
I have bandwidth, and I also have automation. If my collection of pirated movies takes a dive tomorrow due to some failure or other, then I can just instruct the machine to download it all again.
Backing up the automation bits and the list of films is inexpensive -- that data is small enough that it can even happen for free. The movies themselves are huge, but that big data is completely replaceable; losing it only represents an inconvenience. The Internet is my backup.
> You need to keep your NAS up to date.
My "NAS" is the same desktop machine that I'm writing this comment with -- and that's perfectly OK. It's a multitasking, multi-user system; it can do more than one thing at once.
I don't need yet-another system to keep updated.
> You need to install / configure Plex, oops that's closed source now
I don't need to do that. I can just watch films locally, or over my LAN. (But if/when I decide that I do want to do that, then: Plex is not particularly arduous to set up.)
> Eventually your NAS hardware will be outdated and you'll have to get a new one and migrate your files over.
Will it? The same hardware that transcodes to h.264 and h.265 today will still do so tomorrow. If that's good enough for today, then it will still be good enough tomorrow.
I suppose that I might outgrow a hard drive or decide to trim back power consumption, or something. But I won't have to get a new box for movie duties just because time has passed.
And as a realistic construct: I'll be updating my desktop rig because of things like GUI frameworks becoming intolerably huge and inefficient, not because its paltry few server-roles have grown untenable.
> Even for technical people this is a pain over time.
Is it? I think I've probably spent more time writing this comment than I have on maintaining this stuff over the past couple of years. Keeping it up and running is a pretty lazy thing.
> Nothing like just having a disc that can last 50+ years if properly stored.
We don't know if any of these optical formats will last 50+ years, even with the best of storage. We haven't yet had consumer optical media for films for 50 years (though laserdisc is getting very close).
On one hand: We had marketing promises of perfection that would last forever, and some of those promises were even backed by sciencey-data like results from accelerated aging.
On the other hand: Even though it sure would be nice if it didn't exist, we do have disc rot. It takes different forms and each of those forms are real. Disc rot can affect things even if they've been stored properly.
And if I buy a Blu-Ray disc today and it does last for 50 years, will I still be able to buy a player for it that works in 2076?
Meanwhile: It sure is easier to space-shift the contents of some hard drives than it is a few thousand optical disks. One of these is just a well-structured command that takes as long as it takes to complete, and the other is Real Work -- even if "space shifting" means just boxing them up and loading them onto a truck.
This 100%. The other day I was trying to re-watch Mr. Robot with my girlfriend. I found out it abandoned Netflix. I like the series enough to purchase a 1-month subscription if that means I can just press play and it watch it dubbed. I read somewhere I could find it in Disney+, only to later find it is not really there, and that actually there is no way to stream it from any service in my country. How did it get this bad?
You can buy it on DVD. Then you don't need to worry about what streaming service (if any) currently holds the rights.
I tried this with Halt and Catch Fire (and some others). I was able to get season one, but it turns out they don’t produce a lot of stuff on physical media anymore, and if they do, it’s often only briefly.
Another fun one is region locks. There’s a bunch of BBC type ones I would buy, but can’t.
I have a TrueNAS server with Jellyfin, but I'd still much rather have a physical blu-ray, especially if it's something with a Criterion release. I think the "inconvenience" of physical media is enjoyable. It makes me commit to actually watch a movie and not just have it on in the background while I look at my phone, much like how a physical record makes me commit to listening to a full album.
I borrow my Criterions from the library or a local movie rental place run by a film fan. I used to use SwapACD for music but activity there has really died off - regret declining titles offered to me after I started streaming music as they were rare one-offs.
Piracy also acts as a decentralised archive/backup of most stuff people care about. It's important we have this since mainstream media sources can be memory-holed at any moment.
Maybe the legal side will be solved one day, maybe it won't. It's not something a pirate cares about.
Exactly. I pirate eBooks and buy a physical copy when I come around to reading them.
Unrelated to the content: Claude really likes tags
You wouldnt train a llm to swede movies...
By not offering a refund, Sony has done damage to the moral superiority claim that pirated media is theft. If they can effectively steal something you bought, then they can't claim the moral high ground, just the fact of legality.
I’d be in favour of a law that if a product cannot reasonably be purchased legally obtaining it via other means is not piracy (e.g. in my country 80% of movies are not available simply because the market is too small, even though I would be ok with English - I still don’t want to pirate so I buy physical media)
When buying isn't owning...
[dead]
Yes, of course it's easier to pirate it. The problem is that its unethical (and illegal). That you find it inconvenient to pay for things you want is not a valid justification.
Your values are outdated and impractical. You've obviously stalled at the "law and order" phase of moral development which enables the parasites who are abusing copyright law in order to extract every cent from us.
I don't think the idea of "paying creators for things I want" is outdated or impractical. Law and order is the foundation of civilization, and just because some dumb companies charge more than you want does not mean you are righteous for breaking the social contract.
1 reply →
Someday you'll pass the 'edgelord' phase of development (hopefully).
1 reply →
> The problem is that its unethical
The article is basically a list of examples of how companies that offer legal options often use unethical business practices (sometimes to the point where they should be illegal).
I don't agree with all of their examples, such as conflating removing access to a purchased title with removing a title from a streaming service, but I can certainly understand why people are frustrated.
My issue is not understanding "why people are frustrated", it's that people think that frustration entitles them to take things they do not need from artists and creators who are trying to make a living.
3 replies →
> The problem
There is no problem, just pirate it.
> its unethical (and illegal)
I guess I'll just keep doing it then, and someone else can keep crying about it on orange computer reddit website
If the best you got is "you can't stop me", that's true, but not really very relevant to what is good and right.
1 reply →
I really hate the ethnical argument because It's so much weaker than people who use it imagine it to be.
As a very flattened retelling of history, it was only with the boomers that we reached the tipping point on how people started to think about copyright (Copyright != Attributed Authorship). With them, a majority started to believe in a world where the human history they consumed was a gift from the past, and that what they themselves create must be bought by future generations.
I'm not saying I have answers on how to build a better system, but the current one is neither ethical nor ideal - It's just creating (taxable) markets so business and gov is on board. The certainty with which people claim this setup provides great value to society is bullshit. The only certainty is that there are big businesses with vested interests and small creators who think their only ticket to sustainable income is their copyright (and having the --option-- requirement to sell it entirely, sublicense and all, to YouTube or Amazon).
This is word salad. People are making things that you want so they can make a living and you can have something you want. This is a win-win. The only problem is you have to pay for things which people only offer in exchange for money. You can cheat them, but it's not cool to pretend you're doing it for some big amorphous moral fight.
5 replies →
It's not that hard to imagine a better system. Abolish all copyrights
4 replies →
Again, pirating doesn’t stop you or anyone else from sending money to the copyright holder via whatever means the copyright holder prefers.
Most copyright holders prefer you sending money for them in the way they ask you to, which is by purchasing it in the way they are offering it. And it's completely hilarious to suggest that most pirates are somehow Venmoing the artists directly. 99% of content has no way to actually do that.
3 replies →
I ask a remote computer using an open protocol to send me stream of 3 million bytes, once, and then it sends me those bytes. Explain how this is unethical.
Mind talking me through the ethical problems of copyright infringement? I'm not a fan of copyright in general, and from that perspective, I fail to see the problem in copying files.
I prefer the artists who make the work I enjoy not to starve. That is a moral/ethical principle.
5 replies →
You can look up Gabe Newell's quotes on this, but the reason for piracy often has more to do with the fact that the pirate product is better (or more respectful to the user, or less hoops to jump through) than economic reasons.
Especially for people outside of the US, licencing and region locks can make it extremely technically difficult to source and play a genuine piece of media - whereas the pirate one takes 3 clicks.
This is an international website. Many people here come from countries where pirated CD and DVD stands were part of the local marketplace or mall. Your harping on ethics just won't be relevant to those fellow readers.