[belinder]

Drm is not targeted at the hardcore pirate, it's targeted at a potentially larger percentage of people who would be tempted to get the thing for free if it was easy. Drm may be circumventable, but any complex set of steps for doing so is enough to deter that target audience.

[matheusmoreira]

Piracy is a service problem. Copyright monopolists always defeat themselves with their obnoxious greed.

Things were easy enough when Netflix had a complete catalog, now every studio wants to roll their own shitty streaming services in order to cut Netflix out. Result is a fragmented mess where you want to watch a great film but you have no idea where the hell it even is, and even if you find it you discover it doesn't work because your computer isn't locked down to their tastes, and even if you buy a TV appliance they stream you some shitty horribly compressied "high definition" video with artifacts in pure black frames, all on their homegrown laggy borderline unusable video players with zero features.

Meanwhile the pirates offer Blu-Ray remuxes with commentary tracks, subtitles for every language, DRM free files that just work on your video player of choice. It's the sort of thing that makes me feel like a total moron for giving money to these corporations.

[tokioyoyo]

Every time this argument comes up, it doesn’t explain why piracy rates are much lower, despite having a lot of service problems. Piracy is a cultural thing. And I’m saying this as someone who kinda understands the pirate’s position.

[laserlight]

> it doesn’t explain why piracy rates are much lower, despite having a lot of service problems.

Can you explain why you think piracy rates must be higher? Piracy isn't “free” after all.

[tokioyoyo]

Very common for some movie, tv shows or music not be available here. Or also, fairly expensive to buy/rent for some. If it was service issue, this would drive people who want to enjoy the media to piracy.

Yet it doesn’t.

[laserlight]

Piracy has its own costs. It's likely that given the trade-offs, piracy rates don't increase.

PS: I have no idea whether piracy rates are up or down.

[fy20]

I think something that worked well (against privacy) is in the US ISPs work with the studios, and you will get a letter threatening to be sued if you download a torrent. My country doesn't have that... And everyone I know uses torrents.

Netflix etc is also popular, as it's easier if the content is there. But if it's not... people know where to find it.

[inigyou]

IIRC most of the US ISPs are simply owned by the movie studios now. They bought them to fight piracy.

[fc417fc802]

Isn't the explanation self evident? Piracy requires nonzero technical competency (not much but still), dedicated computing hardware, and a decent chunk of storage. It's a fairly low barrier to entry but it is nonetheless a barrier and your typical person off the street these days doesn't reliably know what files and folders are.

[tokioyoyo]

I know Japanese people who can easily pull it off, but ideologically very against it.

[fc417fc802]

Sure, there are those who ideologically oppose it in most or all scenarios. But there are also obviously those who don't exhibit such unconditional opposition to it.

So what is the answer to your original question? I don't believe it to be some large cultural shift on a global scale regarding its acceptance (as I took you to be suggesting) given that such opposition clearly is not itself universal.

My impression of cultural acceptance of it in the US is that it is highly dependent on (at least) one's socioeconomic situation as well as the effectiveness of the solutions on offer. As a concrete example, if you're well off and everything you watch is available on netflix people will probably judge you if you're bragging about how you pirate it all in order to avoid a few dollars a month. Meanwhile I know plenty of people who preface their explanation with "well I do have several subscriptions, however ..." and no one seems particularly bothered by this.

[jrm4]

That would be because "piracy rates" are not, in fact, much lower.

[bitwize]

Apple TV has a search function that allows you to find a film or series irrespectice of whatever service it's on, and launch the appropriate app to play it.

[Aurornis]

Some times I read these mental gymnastics comments about piracy being easier and wonder if these people have actually tried to learn how to use something like an Apple TV.

I think the services part they really dislike is just the part where your credit card gets charged when you click the buy or rent button. Doing all of the piracy stuff with VPNs and navigating torrent sites and getting a setup where you can play files on your TV is an order of magnitude more work.

[matheusmoreira]

> I think the services part they really dislike is just the part where your credit card gets charged when you click the buy or rent button.

You think wrong. My Steam account has 300+ games on it. I pay for several streaming services. I have a physical media collection that even includes a copy of windows vista, to my eternal regret.

> Doing all of the piracy stuff with VPNs and navigating torrent sites and getting a setup where you can play files on your TV is an order of magnitude more work.

And yet that's what you have to do if you don't want to pay to get total garbage in return for your money.

The pirates compete with each other to release the best encodes, to the point they mix multiple Blu-Rays together into an ultimate release because some region somehow received a better version of some scene or whatever. Normal files you get to play using mpv.

Netflix ships horribly compressed nonsense where color gradients are so full of artifacts it hurts my eyes. Highly dynamic segments are painful to watch. Amazingly enough it's still the least bad option, the other services have even worse quality and a borderline unusable video player software to boot.

Service isn't just about ease, it's also about quality. If you want quality, piracy isn't just easier, it's almost always the best option, if not the only option. It's sad that the copyright industry can't seem to match what's essentially a bunch of amateurs but what can you do?

[Aurornis]

If you don’t mind paying for things and your only concern is the quality, then presumably you pay for the source material and then also download the best quality pirated version you can find, right?

That would satisfy both of your claims: That you don’t mind paying for things and you only do piracy to seek out the highest quality.

If you selectively choose not to pay for things where you can get away with it (e.g. not Steam games) then this claim doesn’t hold the slightest amount of water.

[matheusmoreira]

> presumably you pay for the source material

I do. Multiple times, even.

[nradov]

I would be happy to pay to buy or rent a single show or movie. The problem is that a lot of that content is only available with a monthly subscription. Screw that, those monthly bills eat you alive. I hear that the For All Mankind series is pretty good but there's no way I'm signing up for Apple TV just to watch that. So I'll skip it and watch something else.

[bitwize]

And that's the appropriate response to have. If you don't want to pay according to the copyright owner's terms, then you don't watch the show. Not liking the copyright owner's terms for watching the show does not give you the right to steal it.

Yes, I know copyright infringement is not stealing per the technical legal definition. But splitting those hairs is like splitting hairs between pedophiles and ephebophiles: anyone doing it is very likely just telling on themselves as the exact sort of criminal under discussion.

[inigyou]

Where do rights come from?

[vermilingua]

Sometimes I read these mental gymnastics comments about being leashed to half a dozen providers for “convenience” and wonder if these people have actually tried to learn how to use something like a NAS.

I think the part they really dislike is the undermining of the moral superiority they claim by donating their money to corporations that contribute ~nothing to the actual evolution of culture. Inventing strawmans about how difficult it is to click one button in Jellyseer and have a max-quality, buffering free copy of what you want to watch in perpetuity is an order of magnitude more work than renting a poor-quality subset of the media that publishers consider it profitable to provide.

[Aurornis]

> I think the part they really dislike is the undermining of the moral superiority they claim by donating their money to corporations that contribute ~nothing to the actual evolution of culture.

My local farmers and grocery stores contribute ~nothing to actual evolution of culture. I still think they deserve to get paid for what they do. I don’t think this is as smart of a point as you thought it was.

Regardless, the content can’t both be worthless and worth pirating at the same time.

This boils down to “I want free stuff but I want to feel morally superior about it”

[defrost]

> the content can’t both be worthless and worth pirating at the same time.

More commonly, at least in Australia which at various times has had record level piracy, content can be worth _something_ and also not worth "that much" and hence worth pirating.

This has been seen with games - once charged in Australia significantly more than in Europe or the US. Game piracy was rife and didn't really drop in volume until Australian game prices fell more in line with elsewhere.

With the coming of Netflix TV and movie piracy dropped a lot - as prices rose and sheer number of providers rose making it impossible to see whatever caught your eye all on the one source subscription, piracy volume in AU increased again.

This boils down to "We'll pay for stuff .. but only so far".

[vermilingua]

I never said the content was worthless, I said the distributors are worthless. If I can get the same content, at a higher quality, more efficiently and cheaper (free) through piracy than legal means, the distributors are by definition not providing value.

I absolutely pay for physical media, for which a much higher share of revenue goes to the actual creators of content than the leeches who extract rent from it.

This is exactly why Steam has and continues to dominate the gaming market, they made it easier than piracy, and didn’t fall victim to the terminal-stage capitalism that has turned every previously decent streaming platform into hot garbage.

[etdznots]

you bought a smart tv maybe you got a dumb tv and then plugged in a dongle? Or maybe you bought a smart tv and also purchased another home media device thingy and you gotta remember to switch to w the apple tv for this thingy. you signed in to it you created dozens ? Hundreds? Of accounts to watch all the content you want, try to figure out what plan you need to watch the content? Will you subscribe for a bit and cancel later ah ok siri set a reminder to cancel the subscriotion ill take care of that. Wait oops i went on vacation and netflix is mad that im. Not watching from home do i need a different plan? How do these amazon prime video channel subscriptions work how many do i have?

All that instead of a jellyfin server and a single search? It’s all gymnastics just different gymnastics

[matkoniecz]

> Doing all of the piracy stuff with VPNs and navigating torrent sites and getting a setup where you can play files on your TV is an order of magnitude more work.

Not really, decent chunk of my MP3 collection is abandoned media not sold literally anywhere at all. Or was never published in public in the first place.

> if these people have actually tried to learn how to use something like an Apple TV

no, as I am not interested in Apple's walled garden, and so far I have not used any of their devices or products

(OK, I used Mac for about one hour helping neighbor to fix their printer, and I tested Mac-specific bug on website for hour or two)

> I think the services part they really dislike is just the part where your credit card gets charged when you click the buy or rent button.

Not in my case, I regularly try to buy MP3 that are in my collection already but I have not paid for them.

It costs me mostly in time to find them and create accounts and pay for them and deal with various hoops. Far more than it costs me in actual payments.

[mopsi]

  > Doing all of the piracy stuff with VPNs and navigating torrent sites and getting a setup where you can play files on your TV is an order of magnitude more work.

It's not 2003 anymore. If "navigating torrent sites" is your idea of piracy, then you should certainly check out the so-called arr-stack of software that searches online sources for wishlisted items, downloads them, equips with metadata and subtitles, and presents for viewing or listening without any user input, based on predefined preferences.

Apple TV and other commercial offerings are a steaming pile of shit in comparison and I can't imagine people like the CEO of Apple watching stuff off Apple TV and not a proper arr-stack setup. It's like eating McDonald's every for every meal when a chef is readily available. Why would you do this to yourself.

With Apple TV, you can't even do something as mundane was fixing translation errors in subtitles before you show a movie to a friend. You're stuck with what some cheap outsourced translation service came up with. It reduces the owner of the library to a passive mouthbreather who has virtually no control over their experience; can't choose which cut of the movie to see; can't replace an ugly poster with a nicer one; can't edit movie description to remove spoilers; and so on and on. In essence, you're watching someone else's library, and that someone has not put much effort into proper curation to present every item from the best possible side.

[Aurornis]

> Piracy is a service problem

> Meanwhile the pirates offer Blu-Ray remuxes with commentary tracks, subtitles for every language, DRM free files that just work on your video player of choice.

I think the only people who believe that pirating is easier than using the streaming services are people who spend so much time with computers that they round the mental overhead of navigating torrent websites, finding the correct file you want, downloading it with your torrent client behind the VPN they set up, and getting files to a point where they can watch it on TV to zero. When you think that stuff is fun you don’t count it.

I am technically capable of doing all of those things. I also have a rotation of online streaming services. Nobody is ever going to convince me that pirating is actually easier than finding the thing I want to watch and putting it on my credit card.

I think this is all just mental gymnastics to try to avoid the elephant in the room, which is that some people don’t want to pay for things and, of those, some get a little fun out of doing all the steps and setup to pirate things.

[perpetuallunch]

Yep, same. I still pirate media from time to time, but it’s become increasingly infrequent that each time I think to do it I end up putting it off for months because I’d rather gargle broken glass, or watch politicians give state their opinion on topic or another, than go through all the rigmarole of pirating media.

Watching something on a streaming service, or using Apple / Google to “rent” it for a few days is like, what, three clicks away.

Rather than my media server updated over night and won’t boot, I’ve got it booting to a terminal session but the database is corrupted, fuck it I’ll just buy $2000 worth of new hard drives and then re down everything in Ultra 16k 96 bit colour with 4000 gigabit Dolby 400 channel surround-surround and upgraded to all gold plated fibre cabling and have this fixed in no time. Or my torrent site account got hacked or blocked, or the site changed URL again, or they updated their database and “hope to be back up soon”, or a Three Letter Agency seized the their hardware because they were also a involved in human trafficking of blood diamond child sex slaves, again.

It’s all too hard. I’d rather just listen to the footy on AM radio, or maybe read a book. Or occasionally complain about there being too many, or not enough, clouds / rain / sun / wind.

[matheusmoreira]

> Nobody is ever going to convince me that pirating is actually easier than finding the thing I want to watch and putting it on my credit card.

That's just because you're fine with consuming the low quality slop they stream out. Doesn't mean people who care more than you do are engaging in "mental gymnastics". We don't want the same things.

I want the best version of everything. The highest quality version. The uncensored version. The uncompressed version. The lossless version. The DRM-free version. The best version.

The copyright holders just aren't providing it. They only provide slop, and only on their terms, take it or leave it.

Then a bunch of fans gather together, hunt down an old film roll, drop tens of thousands of dollars on equipment to scan it and somehow it becomes a better version than the one the industry released. It's not fair to dismiss that level of commitment as "it's just people who don't want to pay for things". Industry should probably hire more people like that. People who give a shit.

[tr4656]

That's true, but a lot of the time the best version is available on a blu ray you can buy.

[matheusmoreira]

The best version isn't some cumbersome Blu-Ray disc, it's the Blu-Ray's data remuxed into an mkv you can play with mpv.

Sometimes the best version just isn't sold anymore. See the 4K77 project for a concrete example.

[Aurornis]

> Then a bunch of fans gather together, hunt down an old film roll, drop tens of thousands of dollars on equipment to scan it and somehow it becomes a better version than the one the industry released. It's not fair to dismiss that level of commitment as "it's just people who don't want to pay for things".

This is absurdity. The average pirate is not downloading content that some fans spent $10K digitizing from an original film roll.

The average pirated content wasn’t even shot on film.

These piracy justifications are some of the weirdest mental gymnastics that happens on this site. I’m not taking about the pirate connoisseurs who only download the finest encoded sourced from artisanal film rolls to complete their collection. We’re talking about the average pirate who searches for a torrent or stream because they don’t want to pay a couple bucks.

This constant attempt to glorify pirates into the true, most moral, purest content consumers is so weird.

[matheusmoreira]

> This constant attempt to glorify pirates into the true, most moral, purest content consumers is so weird.

Why? You just said that they have to put more effort into it than the average person. Normie just signs up for netflix and watches whatever shows up. The pirate has to set up a torrent client, join private trackers and get connected with the so called scenesters, only to end up scrutinizing film grain of different encodes on screenshot comparison sites so he can spend his ratio budget on the best possible version.

It's true, that's a ton of work. Why would anyone put up with that nonsense, if not because they want higher quality than the industry is putting out? Netflix is not that expensive, and even if it was you can always share an account with some family members or something. Trivial.

[antonvs]

> I want the best version of everything. The highest quality version. The uncensored version. The uncompressed version. The lossless version. The DRM-free version. The best version.

Basically the same greed that every billionaire has, just with negligible economic impact.

[inigyou]

If billionaires are allowed to be extremely greedy then why aren't hundredaires allowed to be extremely greedy?

[bladeacidic]

There's apps for that these days. Not going to names them, but if you're still downloading a torrent file on a computer, you're behind the times. It's as easy as Netflix on an Android TV with a remote these days.

[perpetuallunch]

Don’t all those apps also expose you to VPN services using your connection as a gateway, or enrol you in a botnet, or exfiltrate your watch history to this weeks popular bad-actor, or expose everything on your local network to the internet?

[kyriakos]

No there are services that provide global cdn access to torrents. Your provider sees https traffic from your closest cdn edge. You don't share back at any point. These things are a couple of steps more to setup than getting a Netflix subscription and work almost an any device.

[perpetuallunch]

So all of these free (or paid apps? I don’t know, I don’t use any) that offer access to pirated content…

They’re all above board? Not doing anything nefarious?

That’s obviously not an argument anyone would intentionally make.

[inigyou]

Or ask your savvy friend for a copy on DVD-R. That's quite easy.

[inigyou]

And to be clear: this was the original piracy, friend-to-friend networks. This was the original "scene" before torrenting and can still work this way with torrenting, or Usenet or whatever. We've just become more atomized and less group-oriented in general so chances are you aren't a member of a friend group that has a piracy guy, and you have to learn it yourself to get it done.

[theshackleford]

> mental overhead of navigating torrent websites, finding the correct file you want, downloading it with your torrent client behind the VPN they set up, and getting files to a point where they can watch it on TV to zero. When you think that stuff is fun you don’t count it

Heh, that’s what you think modern piracy is? How quaint. In reality I have my own “Netflix”, with access to effectively all media ever created and I click play. That’s it. That’s the entire process. No credit cards, no finding which service has it, no finding out that the service doesn’t have it in my country at this time, no ads. I punch in what I want to watch, I click play, and it plays.

> Nobody is ever going to convince me that pirating is actually easier than finding the thing I want to watch and putting it on my credit card.

Sounds like your problem. Though again, that’s already more steps than it is for me.

> which is that some people don’t want to pay for things

I was happy to pay, and did so for years. Then the services got worse, increasingly fragmented and ever increased in price as service got poorer. Now I’m no longer happy to pay; and have a superior service to boot. The industry successfully convinced me to give piracy up, before driving me back to it a decade later.

[yndoendo]

Issues and topics that are reduced to a single idea are oversimplified to were lost of reality can take hold.

Example, say person chooses to never fund Amazon. Amazon owns MGM. The only way that person can watch an MGM movie is through piracy. The only alternative would be to buy second hand content so MGM / Amazon do not get a finical cut.

As media corporations become more monopolistic, like Paramount buying Warner Bros, I could see more people pirating so they do not fund David Ellison and people like him.

[nradov]

So just watch something else. We have more video content available than anyone could possibly watch in a lifetime.

[casey2]

The main problem is that media doesn't cost enough. It's all bundled so the true price is hidden. I'd gladly play thousands to watch a movie/series if studios could take that signal and work with it. $15 or whatever is the same as free most of the content is for people who don't care (or care way to much about miscellaneous trivia)

[amluto]

I think there’s a difference between what people think they’re aiming at and what they actually aim at.

Media DRM makes it harder for the person who can already legally access it to use it or share it in an unapproved manner. Or maybe to avoid ads, but that’s pretty rare.

So DRMing a media file or stream has approximately no effect on the ability of a non-paying customer to get pirate it, because anyone searching for a pirated copy can find a DRM-free version anyway.

[tptacek]

DRM also intensively targets the new-release window during which much of the returns on any piece of IP are made; the latency with which high-quality copies hit mainstream sites has monetary value as well.

[tshaddox]

I think that's also wrong. I think that the primary reason media publishers use DRM is not to prevent copyright infringement. It's really to exert power over the entire ecosystem and use that power to implement rules around content distribution and use that are much more restrictive than the actual copyright law itself.

[bitwize]

To copyright owners, there really is no difference. In many countries, notably not the USA, copyright is bound up with the broader concept of authors' rights, including the right to control whether, where, when, and how a work is exhibited. Rightsholders in the U.S. still believe in authors' rights from a moral standpoint; Jack Valenti wanted to outlaw VCRs because he was afraid of the rise of bootleg tapes, sure, but he also believed that movies were intended to be shown in theaters, and maybe only much later, licensed for television. Copyright and control over the distribution network were indistinguishable to him.

[tshaddox]

Jack Valenti wanted to ban VCRs because he didn’t have more advanced DRM technology at that time. Publishers now have HDCP, so they don’t need to lobby the government to ban VCRs. They can just make sure to never license HDCP to any device manufactures that want to sell a recording device.

[dijksterhuis]

> Drm is not targeted at the hardcore pirate, it's targeted at a potentially larger percentage of people who would be tempted to get the thing for free if it was easy

spotify and netflix are both prime examples of making it easier for a larger population to access drm enabled content compared to pirated content (at the time they started getting popular anyway).

with the advent of streaming services you no longer needed to download potentially dodgy files to your computer (viruses/malware), wait for the download to finish, realise they’re a dodgy video cam recording of the cinema screening, download another one etc.

napster/limewire et. al were originally examples for the opposite case. pirating via those was super popular. there were fewer steps to access the media compared to going to a physical shop to buy a CD/DVD. (*)

(*) i can’t remember when the itunes store came along. might have been after these services? or around the same-ish time?

[DrewADesign]

“Locks only keep an honest man honest.”

-Most people’s grandfather

(I’m not saying these things are equal — just that this concept and the old saying share a perspective on securing things.)

[xboxnolifes]

While i agree, certain DRM (video streaming) has gotten to the point where its made getting a show legally, at 1080p+, more trouble than pirating. And not from lack of DRM. There's a certain good middle ground and I think we've passed it.

[Cider9986]

But why would this larger percentage of people rip it themselves when the hardcore pirate already did it and made it accessible[1]?

[1] https://fmhy.net/video#streaming-sites

[DrewADesign]

The average user would probably pay more for a different video streaming platform if their current one started requiring 4 or 5 more clicks per view. “Complex set of steps” for most people could involve finding a website that wasn’t explicitly advertised to them, using an interface that wasn’t AB tested into oblivion, and inexplicably having to “update their flash player” every single time they want to watch Barney Miller. Never mind bit torrent: you might as well ask them to build themselves a TV from scratch. They could figure it out— they aren’t (necessarily) dumb— but they really don’t want to have to figure it out. They just want it to work without friction.

[MattPalmer1086]

But its all available easily with the DRM already stripped off by the hard core pirates.

My best friend used to download pirated movies all the time - because it was easier than trying to get what he wanted by legal channels. It wasnt even the cost. When Netflix took off, he stopped pirating and paid the subscription.

[ACCount37]

The point is: DRM is circumvented once, by some grizzled pirate captain. Everyone else just gets to plunder their downloads DRM free, nice and easy.

DRM is ineffective because the pirate uploaders are competent enough to break it, and an average end user only downloads - rank and file pirates wouldn't make their own releases even if DRM never existed and making them was easy.

[inigyou]

But it is easy to get the thing for free, because the free one doesn't have DRM.

[sandworm101]

>> complex set of steps for doing so is enough to deter that target audience.

Finding and playing what I want via netflix or amazon is far far more complex than downloading and playing a video from a pirate website. Want to watch the original non-upgraded Star Wars, good luck even finding it on any streaming service. But it is instantly available via any number of pirate sites.