[c1yd3i]

I pirate everything. Haven't subscribed to a service like Spotify, Netflix, etc. in many years. I can listen to my music in CD-quality and bring it anywhere. Same with any movie, TV show, etc. And I know that no one is selling what I find interesting as analytics data.

At the same time, I want to support creators, and I'll donate/use services like Bandcamp to directly support folks I appreciate. I have a $100/mo "donation" fund.

Has nothing to do with the price as I'm more than happy to support creators. Just not through centralized platform that doesn't respect my freedom.

[skrowl]

I channeled the money I was spending on YouTubeTV into a seedbox that has 0 personal information about me, paid for with Monero (XMR). Much better bang for the buck and completely removes all the potential adverse legal effects that you could have by torrenting on your home / work connection.

I was happily paying a netflix and spotify sub for over a decade, but once we started getting greedy with Paramount+, AppleTV+, Discovery+, Peacock, etc. I decided it was high time to sail the seven seas again, which I hadn't done since college.

I keep waiting for all the netflix-likes to fail and people go back to just selling their content to netflix, but I don't think it's going to happen. I might be yaaar matey for the rest of my life.

[palata]

How do you access the seedbox anonymously? Unless you use Tor (which doesn't seem practical for movies), they surely see where your connections come from, don't they?

[lrvick]

You can buy seedboxes and VPNs with cash-purchased bitcoin.

[palata]

Right. But if you only buy a seedbox and connect to it from your home IP, then it does not matter that you paid with bitcoins, right?

If you connect to it through a VPN, then that's a second level of indirection, but still you must trust the VPN. Because even if you paid with bitcoins, the VPN knows your home IP and it knows that you connect to a seedbox.

[lrvick]

A VPN service would have no way of knowing the box you are connecting to is a seed box. Particularly if you connect over a different IP than you seed from.

Piracy is a local tort at worst, and not a crime. Certainly not something that can compel mandatory IP disclosure from multiple foreign entities at the same time for a US copyright claimant targeting an individual.

Even then if access to said seedbox is shared with multiple people they would need to prove who actually executed the choice to seed which files. Now you need a court order to get the FBI to travel to another country to use a hotplug device to seize the entire machine with memory in tact and do forensics.

If you do not do any logging then only recent files could be claimed if at all.

That much work to prosecute someone over their two most recently downloaded movies at worst? Never going to happen, and it never has.

There are exactly 0 cases of foreign seedboxes being seized over copyright claims.

I am not a lawyer and do not currently operate any seedboxes so take this as you choose.

[palata]

Interesting points indeed. Connecting through a VPN may be enough for the this case. I guess I mostly wanted to make it clear that it's not "perfectly anonymous" just because one paid with bitcoins. And of course that if you connect directly to the seedbox, then you trust 100% this seedbox to be legit.

[emeril]

I've been using a seedbox for years

I think the risk of not using a vpn to access it is pretty much zero as these seedboxes are deliberately designed to essentially eliminate this issue (i.e., business in one country, hardware is another, likely minimal logs)

I've never heard of anyone getting in trouble using a seedbox - likely because there's enough much lower hanging fruit to prosecute

[palata]

If you DO NOT use a VPN, you 100% trust the seedbox. You trust that they "are deliberately designed to essentially eliminate this issue". That's fine for me, but it's important to know that it's about trust.

If you use a VPN, then you do distribute that trust between the VPN and the seedbox, which makes it much better already.

[electriclove]

Do you move the files from your seedbox to your home to watch or do you have Plex or something like it on your seedbox and just stream to your home?

[JeremyNT]

The challenge with this is actually supporting creators for complex works that are published by these companies.

Take a TV show for example - hundreds of people work on these things. There's no real way to support the show when you pirate something. TV shows don't have patreons or kickstarters.

Piracy is quite attractive because of how hostile the copyright holders are to end users. Sticking it to the megacorps that treat us with such disdain, even in these small ways, feels great. But this leaves a difficult question of how to actually support the people who are making the thing.

As far as I can tell, if you are serious about this, the closest thing to directly supporting a complex creative endeavor like a TV show is to "purchase" it from Amazon. Of course, you realize you "own" nothing, and Amazon still takes its cut, but at least it's a "sale" for the specific work in some spreadsheet.

[pbronez]

I think this is where NFT could actually be useful. Buy a video, and you have a license for it. The money goes to the people who made it. Maybe you resell that license sometime, whatever.

The point is that you can get the actual video file from ~wherever~ and you're legally fine because you own the license.

Now the streaming platforms compete for being the best video delivery service for the array of things you own a license for.

Movies Anywhere is the closest thing to this I have seen. It only works for movies though, and it's a centralized service.

[__MatrixMan__]

> TV shows don't have patreons or kickstarters.

I wonder why not. If you're already doing payroll for the production of a TV show, it should be trivial to express each payout as a percentage (this particular gaffer gets 0.56%, etc).

It would then be easy to encode that in software somewhere (smart contract?) such that when payments come in, they get split up and disbursed accordingly.

If you coupled the addresses of these contracts with the content itself (as metadata on the file or in a lookup table somewhere, keyed by CTPH) consumers could then be choosy about whether they're supporting content which transparently supports all of its creators vs content that just lets a middleman soak up the profits.

[pardon_me]

By the time this could be set up, making digital content by recording real-world action will be niche. It will be mostly computer generated.

[kaba0]

I honestly don’t feel bad at all. I am fairly sure the actual creators barely get any compensations from plus 1 subscriber, so in effect one only hurts these streaming sites, which really should finally get the message sent by that.

[mikrotikker]

Aye matey. Only thing I pay for is Bandcamp since it goes direct to the creator and steam games because the experience is amazing esp since I game exclusively on Linux.

[sliken]

How do you view that content? Plex, Roku, TVs, and related are definitely spying on what you watch, even if it's locally hosted.

[camel_Snake]

Jellyfin would be my recommendation if you are concerned about this. It's like Plex but open-source.

[notch656c]

Do those devices have cell network access?

[lrvick]

Hook a small PC to each TV and run Kodi.