I was gonna say, the article says that streaming ruined media preservation for an entire generation, but guess what, the pirates were preserving it anyway.
For our generation, sure, but there’s an entire generation of internet users that have never known a world without streaming services, and never got in to physical media, archived media, or piracy. A lot of them grew up with mobile devices only and hardly ever used desktop or laptop computers.
I was talking to some of my younger coworkers about music the other day. I mentioned something about the hundreds of gigabytes of music, all in FLAC, ALAC, and high quality mp3, and the question I got was “why? Why not just use spotify/Apple Music?” Well what happens when music from your favorite artist gets taken down because it wasn’t profitable? What happens when your favorite show gets cancelled and pulled because it wasn’t profitable?
So much data would have been flat out gone without piracy.
Reminds me of the diagram Techdirt made a couple of years ago over available books on Amazon based on year written. There was giant dip at the point where copyright kicks in that only goes up again close to the current year.
Copyright on the scale of lifetime + 75 years only helps the publishers of the most popular creators. Everyone else get screwed over. Including the creators.
While I’m not a fan of nostalgia-mining or the constant remastering and remaking of games
... but in the same sentence has nothing but good things to say about constant tinkering and overhauling:
companies are still keeping some popular older games accessible by relaunching them with better graphics, fine-tuned gameplay, and even added scenes
Dude sounds like he's just speaking out of two sides of his mouth.
By the way, this is also why they are against game preservation. Artificially making the $thing unavailable is a sure fire way to sell it again 'remade'.
It's weird that they mention games getting rereleased over and over. But that's really the popular games. The less popular games, like the unpopular shows and movies, just get abandoned. Hell, with companies closing or splitting, they might not even know who owns a lot of them.
Piracy has always offered a simpler and more user-friendly alternative to the official methods of consuming movies and series.
And today, with tools like Jellyfin or Plex, everything is more accessible and at least centralized, so you don't need 15 platforms (you just need to know where to look to get the content).
In the case of games, the presence of anti-tampering solutions like Denuvo is a significant concern. These solutions not only consume a considerable amount of system resources but also ironically make pirated versions more playable on less powerful platforms.
Unless companies adopt a new mindset and approach, piracy is likely to continue thriving and evolving.
Yup, this is the same fight the Music labels fought in the late 90's and early 00's. Piracy offers a far superior user experience and a lower price point. With the chances of facing punishment low enough that most people expect to get away with it. The content producers could solve the problem, but none of them want to, as that would mean lower profits per person. So, we're stuck in a cycle of companies whining about piracy while not actually addressing the incentives which drive people to it.
It's kinda funny that, what people want is a lot like the old cable TV model, without the bullshit of contracts and bundles. Imagine a single service, when you can get all the content from all the producers for one price. Ya, that's cable TV. The problems were that cable TV had regional monopolies (in the US), consumers got locked into expensive contracts which discouraged free choice and it was largely impossible to say, "I want channels X, Y and C. But not Z, A or B." Your choices were "Here's every channel known to man for the low, well not that low, price of hundreds of dollars per month; or, you can get two of the channels you want, but not that other one you really want." It's no wonder that people jumped ship when streaming came along. Oh and as a bonus problem, time shifting content on cable was chock full of "fuck you".
I was a reasonably early cord cutter. Went with an OTA antenna for a few years, followed by YouTube TV and finally just axing live TV all together. I've done the math a few times and even with costs creeping up, and subscribing to half a dozen services, the costs for streaming still beat the stuffing out of what I was paying for cable. Back when I cut the cord, I was up around $200/month for all the channels I wanted (and a shit-ton I didn't). With the services I have now, I'm closer to $100/month. And I had to pay an "early termination" fee back then to break my contract. Given that history, anyone asking for a return to that type of model can go get fucked. Ya, it's a PITA when content is pulled or I have to fumble between several different services to find something to watch. But, I'd rather have the freedom to trim and adjust services at a whim, than be locked back into that bullshit.
And all this is why rising piracy doesn't surprise me either. The current system is broke. The system which came before it was broke even worse. And it's been pretty well established that piracy on the internet is a low risk action with an end result that puts the official way to shame. Piracy isn't a price problem, its a service delivery problem. You can never compete with piracy on price, just on service. And the content companies aren't doing that. Video content needs a Steam like service to create a service offering which is, at least, as good as the service piracy is offering. And while some people won't use an official service at any price, it's still early enough that many potential pirates could be swayed to pay a reasonable cost for a good service. But, that might mean lower costs and companies not having exclusive access to viewership data. And they won't allow that until market forces make their refusal untenable.
Holy fuck, I just wanted to read this article and the website nearly gave me an aneurysm! Who the fuck ever thought an uncloseable animated border ad would be a good idea?
Someone pirate the article for the rest of us. Jesus
Piracy as a protest should be a legitimate strategy and not be illegal. There has to be some counter-measure to prevent the centralisation of ownership, the predatory and unethical practices like abuse of labour, selling shoddy or even broken products, not to mention conditioning children to become cash cows - or "whales".
I include reverse engineering servers in that equation.
I had this realization about 5 years ago and just started building out my Plex server. Today I have over 10 TB of movies and shows on there and we love it. Being able to watch any show from any platform is a breeze, and with my file server I can download torrents anywhere and they instantly move to my seedbox and start downloading, so it's super easy to add new content. Fuck streaming services.
Yesterday I finished automating my seedbox and oh my, it's so so good. I gave my family their Plex accounts and they're so happy getting any movie or tv show they want in two clicks in any device they have. Plex->Overseerr->Radarr/Sonarr->Download, it was so satisfying to set up, a lot of fun too haha. I even set up a Telegram bot so they know when their requests are available.
That's cool! My setup isn't quite so automated, but I do like to really curate the content that's on there. IE ensuring it has the proper codecs for audio and video, has subs, is good quality, etc. But I can download the torrent files from any device, they get sent to my seedbox via a VPN no matter where I am, then the torrent program starts downloading. Then I can just drag and drop into my plex folder, which scans every 6 hours for new stuff.
You don't own the games. You can't trade them. If they get removed from the platform you are SOL. Also it affected physical games as well. Why did I have to install Steam (that was green steam btw) to play Empire Total War?
I'll stick to torrenting, besides a game is like 10% of my salary. Nope.
I completely disagree. You still own the games in Steam, and you can download them forever as long as you have your account. It's not like streaming services that can just remove stuff. I think you may not understand the difference.
I presume this is in jest, but to be honest I feel like there is less risk of bad operators consuming my computing power and data when pirating than using legit services these days (ads, marketing, poor software etc...). I actually pirate content that I pay for as it gets all my content into a single location, and easily tracks what I have watched, and is better for taking it offline.
I'd like to say I was half-joking but some of the games and movies I've pirated have directly affected the performance of my CPU (like 100% CPU usage under light loads)
Edit: I was wrong about movies having mining software packed in but I'm leaving the original comment up
Ah, well I've got a lot to learn then. I was one of those that typically just hopped on The Bay, picked a regular uploader and stuck with them there, but I did not know there were stealthier communities dedicated to this. Thank you for the wake up though