I was dumb and bought Mythbusters on a PS4 many years ago. Can no longer watch it, they removed the content. Have HBO Max, they had Mythbusters on it, started watching it again. Midway through they started to remove content.
I bought a show, and can no longer watch it, can't even watch it on a streaming service, that I pay for, that owns the rights to the content.
I'm full on pirate now. I gave them money and they removed my ability to watch the content I paid for.
Plus with Mythbusters in particular the best version is only available illicitly. That is the fan-edit that removes all the fluff, and just streamlines the show into just the core Myths (inc. setup and testing).
That's a fiendish retort to the IP and copyright lawyers for attacking the older saying: "piracy isn't theft, it's piracy. Theft removes the original. Piracy takes a copy."
Now if I can't access my copy, somehow it's not to be recognized as theft.
>Is it piracy if it’s content you purchased in the past but access was removed? In my mind, it’s absolutely not.
I agree with you more than wholeheartedly :)
Allow me to re-interpret your one statement in the opposite way from what you intended anyway ;)
Well for someone who's not at all part of a paid-media consuming class, when they do make a copy from someone who has paid, there is no booty lost by anyone.
But if you are functioning as part of a paid-media consuming class, and you paid fair & square for the material as you see fit, and then it's taken away completely, you are "absolutely" the one who has been pirated, fully plundered and lost all the booty there was to lose.
No. AHRA format transfers only apply to music audio recordings. Video and audio-books aren't covered and can't be duplicated in any way without authorization. Technically even music transfers are illegal without implementing an SCMS type system to prohibit further generational copying but that has never been enforced.
Morals and ethics have no place in a court of law. Or, another way to think about it: morals and ethics cover human-to-human transactions. Legality covers human-to-corporate interactions.
Because corporations are not people. They are composed of people, but the people of a corporation are fungible and to consider them differently is, to my mind, a huge error.
For VHS yes but breaking DRM on Blu Rays is illegal and you have to do it to copy them. However, to my knowledge no one has ever been prosecuted for breaking the DRM on a blu ray. Unless they shared the copy online.
This seems like an obvious case of governmental corruption if the answer is "some law that 99.999% of people are harmed by, but makes a handful of hollywood billionaires richer".
If the current laws are bad (and they are) we should get rid of them with more consumer friendly ones. If congress is too corrupt to pass those laws, we as citizens should nullify them by collectively refusing to enforce them, whether as jurors, prosecutors, or employees of media or telecom companies.
Pirating is often higher quality because you're not streaming it. Always fun to realize that your streaming service has dropped you to 720p when the network is congested.
I think it’s also helpful to point out that the pirating interfaces have gotten _really_ good. Using Overseer, Radaar, and Sonaar together with Plex created such a seamless experience I was blown away the first time I saw it. Any movie or show across any service at the push of a button. It doesn’t even feel like pirating. It feels like any other service.
Plex is the core component. It allows you to turn a personal collection of digital media into a Netflix-style streaming service available on any of your devices. The UI is very polished and many of the more modern features you'd expect are there as well (such as automatically queueing the next episode of a show). You can also invite friends and family to access your library. Plex provides all of the metadata about the media such as artwork and even subtitles so you don't have to manage that yourself.
The rest of the things mentioned in that post are for discovery/finding and downloading media automatically. Overseerr is for recommendations (? never used it), Radarr and Sonarr automatically get new movies and shows from public trackers and add them to your Plex server.
You can run Plex server on a variety of hardware depending on how many streams you need to support simultaneously.
Subtitles downloaded by Plex are vulnerable to “poisoning”. One set I downloaded was parroting conspiracy theories at the intro and when the credits rolled.
- You add the TV shows you want to track, and when new episodes are released (or when it detects you're missing episodes/seasons) it automatically pings the torrent search indexer/s you've connected to find the torrent for that show.
- The indexer then sends back the torrent magnet info to Sonarr, and Sonarr then sends that to the torrent client you've connected it to which starts the download.
---
Radarr does the same thing as Sonarr, but with a focus on movies.
In terms of connecting torrent indexers to Sonarr + Radarr etc, you'd want to use either Prowlarr or Jackett to handle that.
---
So a general flow could be
Sonarr (tracks show and requests new episode) =>
Prowlarr (searches torrents and finds the torrent magnet link) =>
Sonarr (takes torrent magnet link and requests the download to start) =>
qbittorrent (starts the download) =>
JellyFin (scans your media downloads and gives you a media center/streaming interface to watch your shows on your devices)
---
Overseer is meant to combine the TV/Movie tracking with content discovery into one interface. This way, you can track your shows and find new ones, and it handles sending those requests over to Sonarr/Radarr.
- Sonarr/Radarr periodically scans the RSS feeds for all indexers you have configured and looks for episodes or movies you’re missing (or that can be upgraded).
- If it finds something you need, it grabs the item (magnet/torrent/nzb) and sends it to the appropriate download client. Note that you can configure multiple torrent or Usenet clients.
- Sonarr/Radarr monitors the download progress using the download client’s API.
- As soon as it completes, Sonarr/Radarr copies, moves, or hardlinks (best option for torrents) the file over to your library.
The key thing to note is that your *arr app is the central controller for the entire flow. The app will only stop looking at a particular media item once: a) the item cannot be upgraded any further, b) you have marked it as “unmonitored”, or c) you have removed the show or movie.
Because torrents have a very low bar to entry. I love piracy! But, I've tried a few times to get into the Usenet scene and I always get annoyed.
1. I have to pay for access to a usenet server. The entire point of piracy is that I'm not paying.
2. I need special, poorly documented, and practically undiscoverable tools to: access Usenet, download a file split over 2million posts, reassemble that file, extract the file from whatever esoteric compression algorithm the uploader decided was best that week.
3. I need to find a Usenet server that carries binaries, then, I need to find the individual groups that have the content I want.
On the other hand, thepiratebay has 99% of everything I want, and what it doesn't have I can usually find pretty quickly though Yandex or sharemania.
1. 10-15 dollars a month is not exorbitant and quite worth it with a media server.
2. sabnzbbd or nzgget are hardly poorly documented or undiscoverable.
3. you need to get an indexer which handles all those files over 2 million posts. the software in 2 will put them together for you with minimal effort.
i would recommend a premium indexer as they are quite cheap but there are free available.
i would also like to note that since you're not using a torrent you can't be done for distribution of copywritten material to the same scale as you can for a torrent.
The interfaces are great but the setup process is still far beyond “plug and play” so the mainstream pirate probably still do it the cumbersome but simple way
The key part is that after I spent a couple of days getting the servers stood up, my tech illiterate husband can just go to this website, search for a movie, and it pops up in his jellyfin app after an hour or so.
I have a fairly complex system. I have a VM that tunnels traffic between my local network and my VPN. A second VM hosts all my radarr and torrent servers, which only has network access through the router VM. Files get stored on a shared zvol and jellyfin just automatically detects the new files.
The hardest part was the VPN routing. Setting up all the servarrs is basically plug and play. You run the installer script and then copy a key into all the instances you want talking to each other. It really couldn't get much simpler.
Syncler is pretty plug and play, just need to enter your subscription code ($2/month) and your torrent streaming service (realdebris/premiumize, $5/month)
I think the clunkyness of getting into torrenting media is a necessary evil to keep it from getting cracked down on. It's like antibiotics: the more people use them, the less effective they become.
That's not a great metaphor since they become technically more effective since p2p performance improves as the network grows assuming a minimum seed/leech ratio
Normally economists say competition leads to price reduction. There is obviously pretty aggressive competition in streaming, with at least 5 global players. I don't believe they have formed a cartel or collude to set price but its pretty clear that they aren't competing on price. If they are colluding the FTC can act. Where's the evidence? The lack of FCC oversight is a problem but they lobbying has apparently been extreme. No politicians want the headaches.
I think the IPR rules mean that because "house" is non substitutable, there actually isn't as much competition as people want: if you want to watch Hugh Laurie in "house" you have to pay whatever the IPR holders want.
It's not surprising people pirate content. I happen to think we were better off with FTA television.
There is no or very limited competition of streaming services because they do not share content. Almost everything is unique to each streaming service. And big copyright holders even carve out their content and create their own services ala Disney.
We would need compulsory licensing to get even a modicum of competition, and even then the licensing deals will work as a pricing cartel.
There can be no competition if there is copyright involved.
See the big difference between TV and music streaming. I can switch from Spotify to Apple Music without losing access to most of my songs, but Amazon can't show 'Netflix original' series.
I get that movie studio's don't want to 'flat rate' their premium content.
Online movie "purchases" seem to be better covered. You can buy/rent about the same movies from Apple, Amazon and some others but they cover a very small number of popular movies. Older movies like the Criterion collection needs yet another subscription which isn't even available in big parts of the world, especially in the EU there seems to be a copyright clusterf*ck of epic proportions where every member state has it's own rule, regulations and small time film licensing companies making it totally impossible to release niche content.
Combined with the demise of disc-based movies (I give it about 10 years before major movies are only streamable) I fully expect an increase in enthusiasts resorting to piracy. It really is a service problem...
This is just big studios trying to avoid the 1948 Paramount vs. USA situation, where they were banned from owning cinemas and thus creating market competition.
> There can be no competition if there is copyright involved.
Truth is there can almost never be real competition on any market that isn't raw materials, because there's IP (not just copyright, but patents and trademarks as well) almost everywhere else.
A lot of the time you don't care about it. E.g. it's unusual to care about the images on the packaging of your laundry detergent. Plenty of goods you buy are commodities.
That said, businesses absolutely hate this, which is why you see all kinds of methods being applied to uncommodify goods, or ensure they never become commodities in the first place. Exclusive licensing deals for media content is just one of the more egregious examples, but then there are all forms of soft bundling and integrations happening in physical space too.
That is not copyright but a geographical trademark. And trademarks are for the protection of consumers. Champagne is a type of sparkling wine made in the region of Champagne, France. If it isn't made in Champagne, France it, by definition, is not champagne. It's sparkling wine.
And this almost always comes with reduction in quality. A premium product gets watered down and Walmartified. Happens with cheeses or any other fancy foodstock.
Refusal of United States to recognize European geographical quality marks was one of the reasons why TTIP trade agreement failed (that together with United States wanting Europe to severely reform its legal base for the betterment of American corporations).
> They are competing with other entertainment. They are competing with other TV and movies. The only thing they aren’t competing on is the exact show.
I.e. the only thing they aren't competing on is the one that matters.
Shows are not substitutable. If I want to watch Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, I won't be interested in watching Mandalorian or The Boys instead. Especially if I've already seen the other two.
This is something I wish people who blame Disney for the perceived lack of variety in theaters would get. That funky little arthouse flick is not in competition with the latest MCU entry.
I'm not sitting there trying to decide between Avengers: Endgame and some Sundance premiere. And the denigration of people who like MCU/action movies in general that tends to come with these critiques is really not helpful. I like a good indie film and a good blockbuster. My life has room for Tangerine and Black Panther.
On the other hand, it leads to different streaming service spending money to invest in exclusive shows. Would Amazon have enough money to pay for the Expanse if not for competition? What about Apple Tv with For All Mankind?
Each streaming service has unique content. So each one is completely different. It isn’t like which grocery store has the better price for bananas. There’s no need for streaming services to compete on price because no one else has the same product.
Why is this the case, anyway? Music streaming services and ebook stores generally do compete on price or convenience and mostly all have the same content, and they have similar licensing agreements to movies and tv, right?
>Why is this the case, anyway? Music streaming services [...] mostly all have the same content,
Producing song tracks or books is "cheap" compared to tv & films.
Because tv series episodes cost more than $1 million each and movies productions can cost over $300 million, the studios are more tightfisted and financially incentivized to hold on to them exclusively for their own networks & streaming platforms instead of licensing it out to all the other streaming services.
Right now, the studios believe they can get more $$$ by using their exclusives to attract more subscribers rather than the sum of licensing money they could realistically negotiate from all their competitors. (The streaming competitors all want to underpay for licenses which contradicts the ip owners wanting max dollars.) E.g. Disney thought the old Netflix license contract was too much in favor of Netflix so Disney pulled their content and used it as "exclusives" on their own streaming service to attract subscription revenue. In other words, the early years of Netflix streaming where they seemingly had "everything" (that consumers look back on with fondness) ... was also the time period where Disney/HBO/etc thought they were getting financially shafted by Netflix.
Music doesn't have the same economics so the content owners are more willing to syndicate across all music streaming platforms. Nevertheless, there are a few "exclusive" arrangements such as Garth Brooks only offering his studio albums on Amazon Music and rejecting Spotify and Apple Music. It's definitely not the norm compared to tv & movies.
> Music streaming services and ebook stores generally do compete on price or convenience and mostly all have the same content, and they have similar licensing agreements to movies and tv, right?
Broadly music licensing was dealt with by collective management because a) music is cheaper and has fewer rightsowners as they are simpler works and b) because radio was the primary means of consumption rather than single asset sales. And such collective schemes generally had legal backing.
And ultimately the music model doesn't work - Spotify is slowly drowning financially, which is why they are so desperate to try and do other things where they can get exclusivity - first their push for exclusive podcasts and now their push for exclusive training courses and audiobooks.
Because book and music publishers generally don't run their own streaming services. We're back to the equivalent of when movie studios owned their own theatre chains. Something that was eventually found to be a violation of antitrust law[1].
Music streaming has started to splinter though. Apple has had some exclusive content for years. Spotify has exclusive podcasts and clearly prioritizes record label artists over indies.
Within the next year, I expect some of these streaming services to wholly own AI artists and promote them to users so they don’t have to pay any royalties.
I would also add that people actually like movies and shows. But Netflix and the finance bro's who run Hollywood now seem hell bent on just taking quick speculative punts on shows and then running away after 1 season and no advertisement.
Personally, I'd be happier if there wasn't multiple streamers and just one big marketplace I could access. And for a lot of people that's bit torrent.
And the practice of cancelling shows from Netflix is why I keep cancelling my subscription and waiting for them to have a show I actually like that has more than 1 season before I resubscribe.
I have apple tv (because I like For all mankind, Acapulco, Trying, Severance and liked Ted Lasso) and I keep my subscription because they haven't casually cancelled something I liked immediately after engaging my interest. I have Disney plus because we want our son to speak Cantonese and Disney has actually invested in dubbing their cartoons in Cantonese despite the relatively small size of the market.
Netflix just pisses me off and doesn't make me want to keep paying.
I have bittorrent for things that are not available by streaming (and it amazes me how much content is available thanks to private trackers like PTP) but if a company invests money in providing me with a show I like (Apple TV, amazon occasionally) or preserving a language I care about, I'm going to vote with my wallet for this behavior.
Amazon seems to be the closest thing, with its studio channel subscription modules. If only it wasn't world-eating Amazon!
(and if only the implementation did not suck: there are shows on "BBC player", of all things, that I can't get with an English audio track, only an atrocious German dub. Some even start perfectly fine and then surprise-switch to dub only in some later season)
Currently only Netflix is profitable, e.g. Disney lost more than a billion on Disney+. Not sure how they can keep this up if people keep moving to piracy.
Hollywood accounting makes it very hard to trust tales of "losses".
The money has just been siphoned away to a tax haven somewhere through overpaying for e.g. renting a property or licensing some IP. The money wasn't really "lost", it was just not taxed.
I'll believe the poor rich people who are struggling to buy their third yacht when they open up their accounts books and show where all the money comes from and where it goes to. As long as they keep it secret, I'll assume it's because they don't like paying taxes.
> I don't believe they have formed a cartel or collude to set price but its pretty clear that they aren't competing on price.
Sure they are.
It's just that they were competing on price so much that every service was operating on a loss making basis until interest rates went up and that became unsustainable.
You don't need collusion for interest rates skyrocketing to lead to unprofitable services needing to raise pricing at the same time.
Totally relatable as streaming issues often are kafkaesque due to licensing, shoddy platform maintenance etc. I can really see a resurgence of physical media at some point. Personally I'd be collecting UHD BDs even more if it weren't for "4K remasters" which rely on AI image reconstruction way too heavily.
When I started working and was no longer a broke student, I started streaming or renting content. I guess I’m a bit of an outlier in that I rarely buy (or want to buy any content). However, when I can’t find the content on any platforms… what to do? Tbp is my next port of call. I was trying to find Harold and Kumar last week and it actually wasn’t available on any platforms available in my country :(
Not just pricing, but that's a big part of it. Streaming services tend to have garbage UI's, content that gets removed after x amount of time, and filled with ads (sometimes unskippable). The user experience can be so much better with pirating.
This, too, though I imagine most people learned to endure garbage UI. But seriously, Netflix with its minimally functional, feature-less UI is the golden standard of streaming services. It seems that the bigger the company behind the service, the worse it gets. Like, you could hardly find a porn site with worse players than Disney+, and the thing is less snappy than a pirate streaming service with a cryptominer running in the background.
I sometimes wonder how it's even possible to do such a bad job - even modern web software isn't that unperformant by default, someone had to put in extra work to make it this bad.
The reason why I pirate stuff even while paying for streaming services is because it's too often that I find something I want on Amazon Prime, only for it to then say "This video is unavailable".
Before the streaming boom I would've gone through the ripping and having a library to maintain, but after streaming I feel stuffed and don't care anymore. Nothing that is being made now or for the last couple of years I care about. You destroyed and watered down every IP and you're back to your dirty tricks again. It's too bad, but for a while there was peace.
Me personally, I've moved on with my life.
For me, the reason is not found the films in the streaming platforms.
And another problem (for people foreign languages, non-english) the original dubbing of the film is lost (for copyrights or the original dub audio film was in low quality (VHS or something)) and the film in the streaming platform is with a new dubbing (and normaly it does not give old high spirits).
Even streaming a film in the original language can be hard. If you want to stream the English version of a Hollywood movie, you often can't do it from your country. It might only be distributed in e.g. German or Italian.
Although off-topic because it is in the computer games, not films, the worst example of lost dubbing is the spanish voices of old edition Baldurs Gate 2. The new version of this game for GNU/Linux, Android has a new spanish dubbing and it is bloody worst.
Streaming services are too pricey and the addition to an ad tier model has pushed me back into limited piracy. Whether it’s Netflix asking if I want to register this device or if I am traveling , to max streaming and ad for its own service I already pay before each show … old school Kodi loaded up is more and more appealing.
I think one of the reasons as well is that it's easier to find that content that you wanna watch, sometimes tracking which streaming service has a movie or show that you looking for is almost impossible.
There are sites [1] dedicated just to searching all the streaming services for you to find the thing you’re looking for that I’ve used and work pretty well, but it’s kind of ridiculous that they even need to exist.
1. justwatch.com (perfect name for the frustration)
For me it isnt about price, I happily pay for Disney+ and Hulu bundle. And Apple TV+ but that is part of my Apple One subscription.
My problem is where things are, I don't subscribe to Netflix because they seem determined to not work with the Apple TV app which is my primary way of watching things. Most of my content is in there. I want all of my stuff to be together and we have a solution but Netflix refuses to support it.
Now annoyingly, this problem is not actually fixed by pirating. But I am at least not supporting their behavior.
On top of this, I'd like more options to stream in 4K, but without the concurrent streams option. I don't need 4 streams if I'm the only one using my account
Expense doesn't factor in for some people. Running Plex/Jellyfin/Emby/etc + arr's can be many times more expensive (even in the long run) than just paying monthly. The UI/UX is a huge reason.
With a home media server you get:
Consistent UI/controls
* All content in one app
* Download content to any device without restriction for offline viewing
* Instant, full quality playback on LAN
* Ability to screen capture/record segments of a show to share (not for pirating but for memes and the like) *
* Old/unpopular/"censored" content is always available. **
* I maintain that blacking out screen capture by streaming services is one of the stupidest and most self-sabotaging things they could do. Why these services don't build in meme/annotation tools or clip export is beyond me. You have people ready and willing to advertise your show _for free_ and you cut off your nose to spite your face.
** No I don't think blackface is ok to do but anyone who can't see that 30 Rock is making fun of people doing blackface is missing the point completely. Also covering up what was said/done in the past does not prevent us from making the same mistakes again. It's a white-washing (sometimes quite literally) that benefits no one.
I'm sure I'm missing a few other points but for some people it's _never_ really been about price or if it was initially about price it's not anymore, or so I've heard...
It's not that the individual services are expecsive per se it's just that theres too many of them. I don't want to sub to yet another service just for one show.
It's not about the price for me, it's about the bullshit content deals. For instance, between my paramount and Amazon subscriptions, I get to watch NFL maybe 60% of days there are games. They expect me to buy a third (massive) subscription to close the remaining gap? No thank you, I'll just watch in lower resolution/frames for free.
F1, on the other hand, absolutely nailed the content deal and get $85/yr from me.. even though previously I'd been pirating every race for over a decade. As soon as they make a good offer I take it. Simple as.
Except for Germany, where Sky got an exclusive deal and expect you to pay 28€ per month for the privilege. I'm grandfathered in the yearly 65€ subscription of F1TV and as soon as I am no longer allowed to renew I'll probably forget that the sport exists.
Honestly I find it impossible to find a consistently good library of content in one place.
Netflix might have a few good old movies for example, and then 1 show, Amazon prime will have other exclusives Disney etc.
It's insane to expect people to pay for them all just for a few. They are using the Game console distribution model.
Console exclusives / Content exclusives.. It's a bad model from the start, looking at spotify on the other hand and even podcasts are a great example of the shared distributed model.
the latest expression for game studios at least is : "If buying it means I don't own it, then pirating it means I didn't steal it."
Well plain reason seems to me is because they can.
I mean I don’t see people grabbing apartments because rent is expensive or leaving restaurants without paying after meals beach food is expensive. Same for school/ college fees and that’s really expensive.
In most cases people will do all sorts of unsanctioned things if they can get away with it.
Yes, but then why can they get away with it? Perhaps because there's an unspoken general understanding among people, legislation and law enforcement, that individual-level IP rights enforcement is mostly bullshit, and IP is in large part just a necessary evil to keep the status quo from breaking too fast. Artificial scarcity is not exactly morally defensible in the first place.
I wouldn’t say they are too expensive but they are capricious. Just because you pay doesn’t mean you can watch something. Content is always appearing and disappearing.
I used to never pirate, paid for everything.
I was dumb and bought Mythbusters on a PS4 many years ago. Can no longer watch it, they removed the content. Have HBO Max, they had Mythbusters on it, started watching it again. Midway through they started to remove content.
I bought a show, and can no longer watch it, can't even watch it on a streaming service, that I pay for, that owns the rights to the content.
I'm full on pirate now. I gave them money and they removed my ability to watch the content I paid for.
Plus with Mythbusters in particular the best version is only available illicitly. That is the fan-edit that removes all the fluff, and just streamlines the show into just the core Myths (inc. setup and testing).
Same with Top Gear - The Superleggera fan edit - and Avatar The Last Airbender - the fan upscale project.
"If buying isn't owning, then pirating isn't stealing."
And for a great illustration of the complexity of our current situation, see this videogamedunkey video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvhv7bgmz64
That's a fiendish retort to the IP and copyright lawyers for attacking the older saying: "piracy isn't theft, it's piracy. Theft removes the original. Piracy takes a copy."
Now if I can't access my copy, somehow it's not to be recognized as theft.
What's going on with MythBusters that is leading to "removing the content"?
Despite all the buttons you clicked that say, "Buy! Buy! Buy!" you actually only ever leased access to the show.
But if the buttons said, "Lease! Lease! Lease!" everyone would go "WTF!" so they say, "Buy!" instead and no one reads the small print.
Is it piracy if it’s content you purchased in the past but access was removed? In my mind, it’s absolutely not.
This is just plain double-dipping bullshit.
>Is it piracy if it’s content you purchased in the past but access was removed? In my mind, it’s absolutely not.
I agree with you more than wholeheartedly :)
Allow me to re-interpret your one statement in the opposite way from what you intended anyway ;)
Well for someone who's not at all part of a paid-media consuming class, when they do make a copy from someone who has paid, there is no booty lost by anyone.
But if you are functioning as part of a paid-media consuming class, and you paid fair & square for the material as you see fit, and then it's taken away completely, you are "absolutely" the one who has been pirated, fully plundered and lost all the booty there was to lose.
No doubt about the depth of the bullshit.
If you bought a VHS you don't have automatic rights to a BluRay copy.
But you do have the right to transcribe your VHS copy to bluray yourself. Format conversion is not illegal.
No. AHRA format transfers only apply to music audio recordings. Video and audio-books aren't covered and can't be duplicated in any way without authorization. Technically even music transfers are illegal without implementing an SCMS type system to prohibit further generational copying but that has never been enforced.
Isn’t this discussion about that’s ethical and moral, rather that what’s legal?
Morals and ethics have no place in a court of law. Or, another way to think about it: morals and ethics cover human-to-human transactions. Legality covers human-to-corporate interactions.
Because corporations are not people. They are composed of people, but the people of a corporation are fungible and to consider them differently is, to my mind, a huge error.
So is it unethical or immoral to copy your VHS tape you bought to a BluRay disc?
For VHS yes but breaking DRM on Blu Rays is illegal and you have to do it to copy them. However, to my knowledge no one has ever been prosecuted for breaking the DRM on a blu ray. Unless they shared the copy online.
Says who, or why not?
This seems like an obvious case of governmental corruption if the answer is "some law that 99.999% of people are harmed by, but makes a handful of hollywood billionaires richer".
If the current laws are bad (and they are) we should get rid of them with more consumer friendly ones. If congress is too corrupt to pass those laws, we as citizens should nullify them by collectively refusing to enforce them, whether as jurors, prosecutors, or employees of media or telecom companies.
It's the other way around dude, many of these "digital purchases" were high quality, but pirating doesn't always have this quality.
Pirating is often higher quality because you're not streaming it. Always fun to realize that your streaming service has dropped you to 720p when the network is congested.
I think it’s also helpful to point out that the pirating interfaces have gotten _really_ good. Using Overseer, Radaar, and Sonaar together with Plex created such a seamless experience I was blown away the first time I saw it. Any movie or show across any service at the push of a button. It doesn’t even feel like pirating. It feels like any other service.
there is also real debrid -> don't even have to store any content locally just stream
Could you please high-level describe how you use all these together?
What hardware are you using for this? Would a raspberry pi connected to the TV work?
Plex is the core component. It allows you to turn a personal collection of digital media into a Netflix-style streaming service available on any of your devices. The UI is very polished and many of the more modern features you'd expect are there as well (such as automatically queueing the next episode of a show). You can also invite friends and family to access your library. Plex provides all of the metadata about the media such as artwork and even subtitles so you don't have to manage that yourself.
The rest of the things mentioned in that post are for discovery/finding and downloading media automatically. Overseerr is for recommendations (? never used it), Radarr and Sonarr automatically get new movies and shows from public trackers and add them to your Plex server.
You can run Plex server on a variety of hardware depending on how many streams you need to support simultaneously.
Just a small note: any media server is the core component. Plex is one popular option, but Emby and Jellyfin (open source) are viable options too.
Overseerr/Jellyseerr is for automatically handling requests. This is only useful if you share access to your server with family or friends.
Subtitles downloaded by Plex are vulnerable to “poisoning”. One set I downloaded was parroting conspiracy theories at the intro and when the credits rolled.
In general, it’s better to run Bazarr for subtitles.
So it's like the FBI warning not to copy DVDs?
Sonaar:
- You add the TV shows you want to track, and when new episodes are released (or when it detects you're missing episodes/seasons) it automatically pings the torrent search indexer/s you've connected to find the torrent for that show.
- The indexer then sends back the torrent magnet info to Sonarr, and Sonarr then sends that to the torrent client you've connected it to which starts the download.
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Radarr does the same thing as Sonarr, but with a focus on movies.
In terms of connecting torrent indexers to Sonarr + Radarr etc, you'd want to use either Prowlarr or Jackett to handle that.
---
So a general flow could be Sonarr (tracks show and requests new episode) =>
Prowlarr (searches torrents and finds the torrent magnet link) =>
Sonarr (takes torrent magnet link and requests the download to start) =>
qbittorrent (starts the download) =>
JellyFin (scans your media downloads and gives you a media center/streaming interface to watch your shows on your devices)
---
Overseer is meant to combine the TV/Movie tracking with content discovery into one interface. This way, you can track your shows and find new ones, and it handles sending those requests over to Sonarr/Radarr.
https://wiki.servarr.com/
Some more details on how the flow works:
- Sonarr/Radarr periodically scans the RSS feeds for all indexers you have configured and looks for episodes or movies you’re missing (or that can be upgraded).
- If it finds something you need, it grabs the item (magnet/torrent/nzb) and sends it to the appropriate download client. Note that you can configure multiple torrent or Usenet clients.
- Sonarr/Radarr monitors the download progress using the download client’s API.
- As soon as it completes, Sonarr/Radarr copies, moves, or hardlinks (best option for torrents) the file over to your library.
The key thing to note is that your *arr app is the central controller for the entire flow. The app will only stop looking at a particular media item once: a) the item cannot be upgraded any further, b) you have marked it as “unmonitored”, or c) you have removed the show or movie.
Why do you torrent instead of using Usenet?
Because torrents have a very low bar to entry. I love piracy! But, I've tried a few times to get into the Usenet scene and I always get annoyed.
1. I have to pay for access to a usenet server. The entire point of piracy is that I'm not paying.
2. I need special, poorly documented, and practically undiscoverable tools to: access Usenet, download a file split over 2million posts, reassemble that file, extract the file from whatever esoteric compression algorithm the uploader decided was best that week.
3. I need to find a Usenet server that carries binaries, then, I need to find the individual groups that have the content I want.
On the other hand, thepiratebay has 99% of everything I want, and what it doesn't have I can usually find pretty quickly though Yandex or sharemania.
1. 10-15 dollars a month is not exorbitant and quite worth it with a media server.
2. sabnzbbd or nzgget are hardly poorly documented or undiscoverable.
3. you need to get an indexer which handles all those files over 2 million posts. the software in 2 will put them together for you with minimal effort.
i would recommend a premium indexer as they are quite cheap but there are free available.
i would also like to note that since you're not using a torrent you can't be done for distribution of copywritten material to the same scale as you can for a torrent.
That's just my personal preference, but this whole setup can be done with Usenet too.
you can find many examples like this and also tutorials, using last decades search engines
https://gist.github.com/Webreaper/81ecda3ecc45fa61a16dfc90cf...
The interfaces are great but the setup process is still far beyond “plug and play” so the mainstream pirate probably still do it the cumbersome but simple way
It really isn't that bad either, though.
The key part is that after I spent a couple of days getting the servers stood up, my tech illiterate husband can just go to this website, search for a movie, and it pops up in his jellyfin app after an hour or so.
I have a fairly complex system. I have a VM that tunnels traffic between my local network and my VPN. A second VM hosts all my radarr and torrent servers, which only has network access through the router VM. Files get stored on a shared zvol and jellyfin just automatically detects the new files.
The hardest part was the VPN routing. Setting up all the servarrs is basically plug and play. You run the installer script and then copy a key into all the instances you want talking to each other. It really couldn't get much simpler.
Syncler is pretty plug and play, just need to enter your subscription code ($2/month) and your torrent streaming service (realdebris/premiumize, $5/month)
I think the clunkyness of getting into torrenting media is a necessary evil to keep it from getting cracked down on. It's like antibiotics: the more people use them, the less effective they become.
That's not a great metaphor since they become technically more effective since p2p performance improves as the network grows assuming a minimum seed/leech ratio
Normally economists say competition leads to price reduction. There is obviously pretty aggressive competition in streaming, with at least 5 global players. I don't believe they have formed a cartel or collude to set price but its pretty clear that they aren't competing on price. If they are colluding the FTC can act. Where's the evidence? The lack of FCC oversight is a problem but they lobbying has apparently been extreme. No politicians want the headaches.
I think the IPR rules mean that because "house" is non substitutable, there actually isn't as much competition as people want: if you want to watch Hugh Laurie in "house" you have to pay whatever the IPR holders want.
It's not surprising people pirate content. I happen to think we were better off with FTA television.
There is no or very limited competition of streaming services because they do not share content. Almost everything is unique to each streaming service. And big copyright holders even carve out their content and create their own services ala Disney.
We would need compulsory licensing to get even a modicum of competition, and even then the licensing deals will work as a pricing cartel.
There can be no competition if there is copyright involved.
See the big difference between TV and music streaming. I can switch from Spotify to Apple Music without losing access to most of my songs, but Amazon can't show 'Netflix original' series.
I get that movie studio's don't want to 'flat rate' their premium content. Online movie "purchases" seem to be better covered. You can buy/rent about the same movies from Apple, Amazon and some others but they cover a very small number of popular movies. Older movies like the Criterion collection needs yet another subscription which isn't even available in big parts of the world, especially in the EU there seems to be a copyright clusterf*ck of epic proportions where every member state has it's own rule, regulations and small time film licensing companies making it totally impossible to release niche content. Combined with the demise of disc-based movies (I give it about 10 years before major movies are only streamable) I fully expect an increase in enthusiasts resorting to piracy. It really is a service problem...
This is just big studios trying to avoid the 1948 Paramount vs. USA situation, where they were banned from owning cinemas and thus creating market competition.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Paramount_Pic....
They're trying to not make that mistake again and being forced to actually... compete!
> There can be no competition if there is copyright involved.
Truth is there can almost never be real competition on any market that isn't raw materials, because there's IP (not just copyright, but patents and trademarks as well) almost everywhere else.
A lot of the time you don't care about it. E.g. it's unusual to care about the images on the packaging of your laundry detergent. Plenty of goods you buy are commodities.
That said, businesses absolutely hate this, which is why you see all kinds of methods being applied to uncommodify goods, or ensure they never become commodities in the first place. Exclusive licensing deals for media content is just one of the more egregious examples, but then there are all forms of soft bundling and integrations happening in physical space too.
> E.g. it's unusual to care about the images on the packaging of your laundry detergent. Plenty of goods you buy are commodities.
Laundry detergent companies have actually been spending billions in ads over multiple decades to manipulate you into caring about it though.
> That said, businesses absolutely hate this, which is why you see all kinds of methods being applied to uncommodify goods
Exactly.
And, for raw materials, you have geographical-delimited "copyright" zones, a-la "it's champagne only if it comes from this region in France".
The free market is only for the plebs.
That is not copyright but a geographical trademark. And trademarks are for the protection of consumers. Champagne is a type of sparkling wine made in the region of Champagne, France. If it isn't made in Champagne, France it, by definition, is not champagne. It's sparkling wine.
And this almost always comes with reduction in quality. A premium product gets watered down and Walmartified. Happens with cheeses or any other fancy foodstock.
Refusal of United States to recognize European geographical quality marks was one of the reasons why TTIP trade agreement failed (that together with United States wanting Europe to severely reform its legal base for the betterment of American corporations).
Just... don't buy champagne and buy sparkling wine instead?
Disney has a monopoly on streaming Disney properties online, and is abusing it to the detriment of America consumers.
That's a lawsuit from the anti-trust commission that I'd love to see. They can't own movie theaters, after all.
They are competing with other entertainment. They are competing with other TV and movies. The only thing they aren’t competing on is the exact show.
I think it’s pretty exciting; competing to offer better product can lead to better results than competing to offer cheaper product.
> They are competing with other entertainment. They are competing with other TV and movies. The only thing they aren’t competing on is the exact show.
I.e. the only thing they aren't competing on is the one that matters.
Shows are not substitutable. If I want to watch Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, I won't be interested in watching Mandalorian or The Boys instead. Especially if I've already seen the other two.
This is something I wish people who blame Disney for the perceived lack of variety in theaters would get. That funky little arthouse flick is not in competition with the latest MCU entry.
I'm not sitting there trying to decide between Avengers: Endgame and some Sundance premiere. And the denigration of people who like MCU/action movies in general that tends to come with these critiques is really not helpful. I like a good indie film and a good blockbuster. My life has room for Tangerine and Black Panther.
On the other hand, it leads to different streaming service spending money to invest in exclusive shows. Would Amazon have enough money to pay for the Expanse if not for competition? What about Apple Tv with For All Mankind?
Each streaming service has unique content. So each one is completely different. It isn’t like which grocery store has the better price for bananas. There’s no need for streaming services to compete on price because no one else has the same product.
Why is this the case, anyway? Music streaming services and ebook stores generally do compete on price or convenience and mostly all have the same content, and they have similar licensing agreements to movies and tv, right?
>Why is this the case, anyway? Music streaming services [...] mostly all have the same content,
Producing song tracks or books is "cheap" compared to tv & films.
Because tv series episodes cost more than $1 million each and movies productions can cost over $300 million, the studios are more tightfisted and financially incentivized to hold on to them exclusively for their own networks & streaming platforms instead of licensing it out to all the other streaming services.
Right now, the studios believe they can get more $$$ by using their exclusives to attract more subscribers rather than the sum of licensing money they could realistically negotiate from all their competitors. (The streaming competitors all want to underpay for licenses which contradicts the ip owners wanting max dollars.) E.g. Disney thought the old Netflix license contract was too much in favor of Netflix so Disney pulled their content and used it as "exclusives" on their own streaming service to attract subscription revenue. In other words, the early years of Netflix streaming where they seemingly had "everything" (that consumers look back on with fondness) ... was also the time period where Disney/HBO/etc thought they were getting financially shafted by Netflix.
Music doesn't have the same economics so the content owners are more willing to syndicate across all music streaming platforms. Nevertheless, there are a few "exclusive" arrangements such as Garth Brooks only offering his studio albums on Amazon Music and rejecting Spotify and Apple Music. It's definitely not the norm compared to tv & movies.
> Music streaming services and ebook stores generally do compete on price or convenience and mostly all have the same content, and they have similar licensing agreements to movies and tv, right?
Broadly music licensing was dealt with by collective management because a) music is cheaper and has fewer rightsowners as they are simpler works and b) because radio was the primary means of consumption rather than single asset sales. And such collective schemes generally had legal backing.
And ultimately the music model doesn't work - Spotify is slowly drowning financially, which is why they are so desperate to try and do other things where they can get exclusivity - first their push for exclusive podcasts and now their push for exclusive training courses and audiobooks.
Because book and music publishers generally don't run their own streaming services. We're back to the equivalent of when movie studios owned their own theatre chains. Something that was eventually found to be a violation of antitrust law[1].
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Paramount_P....
Music streaming has started to splinter though. Apple has had some exclusive content for years. Spotify has exclusive podcasts and clearly prioritizes record label artists over indies.
Within the next year, I expect some of these streaming services to wholly own AI artists and promote them to users so they don’t have to pay any royalties.
Theres a lot less money in music. The current spend on tv/film couldnt be justified by just a single streaming service.
I would also add that people actually like movies and shows. But Netflix and the finance bro's who run Hollywood now seem hell bent on just taking quick speculative punts on shows and then running away after 1 season and no advertisement.
Personally, I'd be happier if there wasn't multiple streamers and just one big marketplace I could access. And for a lot of people that's bit torrent.
And the practice of cancelling shows from Netflix is why I keep cancelling my subscription and waiting for them to have a show I actually like that has more than 1 season before I resubscribe.
I have apple tv (because I like For all mankind, Acapulco, Trying, Severance and liked Ted Lasso) and I keep my subscription because they haven't casually cancelled something I liked immediately after engaging my interest. I have Disney plus because we want our son to speak Cantonese and Disney has actually invested in dubbing their cartoons in Cantonese despite the relatively small size of the market.
Netflix just pisses me off and doesn't make me want to keep paying.
I have bittorrent for things that are not available by streaming (and it amazes me how much content is available thanks to private trackers like PTP) but if a company invests money in providing me with a show I like (Apple TV, amazon occasionally) or preserving a language I care about, I'm going to vote with my wallet for this behavior.
Amazon seems to be the closest thing, with its studio channel subscription modules. If only it wasn't world-eating Amazon!
(and if only the implementation did not suck: there are shows on "BBC player", of all things, that I can't get with an English audio track, only an atrocious German dub. Some even start perfectly fine and then surprise-switch to dub only in some later season)
Currently only Netflix is profitable, e.g. Disney lost more than a billion on Disney+. Not sure how they can keep this up if people keep moving to piracy.
Hollywood accounting makes it very hard to trust tales of "losses".
The money has just been siphoned away to a tax haven somewhere through overpaying for e.g. renting a property or licensing some IP. The money wasn't really "lost", it was just not taxed.
Are you certain of this?
I know Hollywood Accounting is a thing for movie production, but I haven't heard any evidence that it's being used for streaming services.
If nothing else, I'd expect a risk of this being treated as securities fraud if streaming service P&L is broken out in public-company reports.
I'll believe the poor rich people who are struggling to buy their third yacht when they open up their accounts books and show where all the money comes from and where it goes to. As long as they keep it secret, I'll assume it's because they don't like paying taxes.
This article[0] indicates that Disney removed shows to write them off.
[0]: https://gizmodo.com/disney-streaming-cuts-tax-writeoffs-1850...
> Hollywood accounting makes it very hard to trust tales of "losses".
Hollywood accounting applies to individual titles.
It doesn't apply to entire services - why would you tell your shareholders that you are making a loss to depress the stock price?
This applies to individual titles, but the not the service as a whole. The streamers are all losing money as seen in their earnings reports.
Apparently Paramount+ failed so spectacularly that it ended up dragging the company down financially, and now they're cancelling Star Trek shows.
They keep chasing the Paramount channel and it keeps failing. You'd think sooner or later they would accept they do best in syndication.
> I don't believe they have formed a cartel or collude to set price but its pretty clear that they aren't competing on price.
Sure they are.
It's just that they were competing on price so much that every service was operating on a loss making basis until interest rates went up and that became unsustainable.
You don't need collusion for interest rates skyrocketing to lead to unprofitable services needing to raise pricing at the same time.
Totally relatable as streaming issues often are kafkaesque due to licensing, shoddy platform maintenance etc. I can really see a resurgence of physical media at some point. Personally I'd be collecting UHD BDs even more if it weren't for "4K remasters" which rely on AI image reconstruction way too heavily.
When I started working and was no longer a broke student, I started streaming or renting content. I guess I’m a bit of an outlier in that I rarely buy (or want to buy any content). However, when I can’t find the content on any platforms… what to do? Tbp is my next port of call. I was trying to find Harold and Kumar last week and it actually wasn’t available on any platforms available in my country :(
Not just pricing, but that's a big part of it. Streaming services tend to have garbage UI's, content that gets removed after x amount of time, and filled with ads (sometimes unskippable). The user experience can be so much better with pirating.
> Streaming services tend to have garbage UI's, content that gets removed after x amount of time, and filled with ads
And forced mandatory subtitles in the wrong language. (Netflix)
Actually had to install a chrome plugin to remove subtitles.
This, too, though I imagine most people learned to endure garbage UI. But seriously, Netflix with its minimally functional, feature-less UI is the golden standard of streaming services. It seems that the bigger the company behind the service, the worse it gets. Like, you could hardly find a porn site with worse players than Disney+, and the thing is less snappy than a pirate streaming service with a cryptominer running in the background.
I sometimes wonder how it's even possible to do such a bad job - even modern web software isn't that unperformant by default, someone had to put in extra work to make it this bad.
The reason why I pirate stuff even while paying for streaming services is because it's too often that I find something I want on Amazon Prime, only for it to then say "This video is unavailable".
Before the streaming boom I would've gone through the ripping and having a library to maintain, but after streaming I feel stuffed and don't care anymore. Nothing that is being made now or for the last couple of years I care about. You destroyed and watered down every IP and you're back to your dirty tricks again. It's too bad, but for a while there was peace. Me personally, I've moved on with my life.
For me, the reason is not found the films in the streaming platforms.
And another problem (for people foreign languages, non-english) the original dubbing of the film is lost (for copyrights or the original dub audio film was in low quality (VHS or something)) and the film in the streaming platform is with a new dubbing (and normaly it does not give old high spirits).
Even streaming a film in the original language can be hard. If you want to stream the English version of a Hollywood movie, you often can't do it from your country. It might only be distributed in e.g. German or Italian.
Although off-topic because it is in the computer games, not films, the worst example of lost dubbing is the spanish voices of old edition Baldurs Gate 2. The new version of this game for GNU/Linux, Android has a new spanish dubbing and it is bloody worst.
Streaming services are too pricey and the addition to an ad tier model has pushed me back into limited piracy. Whether it’s Netflix asking if I want to register this device or if I am traveling , to max streaming and ad for its own service I already pay before each show … old school Kodi loaded up is more and more appealing.
I think one of the reasons as well is that it's easier to find that content that you wanna watch, sometimes tracking which streaming service has a movie or show that you looking for is almost impossible.
There are sites [1] dedicated just to searching all the streaming services for you to find the thing you’re looking for that I’ve used and work pretty well, but it’s kind of ridiculous that they even need to exist.
1. justwatch.com (perfect name for the frustration)
Google has a useful "Where to watch" feature in their results for a lot of TV shows.
For me it isnt about price, I happily pay for Disney+ and Hulu bundle. And Apple TV+ but that is part of my Apple One subscription.
My problem is where things are, I don't subscribe to Netflix because they seem determined to not work with the Apple TV app which is my primary way of watching things. Most of my content is in there. I want all of my stuff to be together and we have a solution but Netflix refuses to support it.
Now annoyingly, this problem is not actually fixed by pirating. But I am at least not supporting their behavior.
Can they have more grades of subscriptions? I don't want to pay for a full month of unlimited streaming when I only want to watch a few hours
On top of this, I'd like more options to stream in 4K, but without the concurrent streams option. I don't need 4 streams if I'm the only one using my account
Agreed
Also random episodes disappearing for reasons. And series disappearing halfway while you're watching them.
Expense doesn't factor in for some people. Running Plex/Jellyfin/Emby/etc + arr's can be many times more expensive (even in the long run) than just paying monthly. The UI/UX is a huge reason.
With a home media server you get:
Consistent UI/controls
* All content in one app
* Download content to any device without restriction for offline viewing
* Instant, full quality playback on LAN
* Ability to screen capture/record segments of a show to share (not for pirating but for memes and the like) *
* Old/unpopular/"censored" content is always available. **
* I maintain that blacking out screen capture by streaming services is one of the stupidest and most self-sabotaging things they could do. Why these services don't build in meme/annotation tools or clip export is beyond me. You have people ready and willing to advertise your show _for free_ and you cut off your nose to spite your face.
** No I don't think blackface is ok to do but anyone who can't see that 30 Rock is making fun of people doing blackface is missing the point completely. Also covering up what was said/done in the past does not prevent us from making the same mistakes again. It's a white-washing (sometimes quite literally) that benefits no one.
I'm sure I'm missing a few other points but for some people it's _never_ really been about price or if it was initially about price it's not anymore, or so I've heard...
It's not that the individual services are expecsive per se it's just that theres too many of them. I don't want to sub to yet another service just for one show.
Expensive? How about complexity.
https://www.pokemon.com/us/animation/where-to-watch-pokemon-...
It's not about the price for me, it's about the bullshit content deals. For instance, between my paramount and Amazon subscriptions, I get to watch NFL maybe 60% of days there are games. They expect me to buy a third (massive) subscription to close the remaining gap? No thank you, I'll just watch in lower resolution/frames for free.
F1, on the other hand, absolutely nailed the content deal and get $85/yr from me.. even though previously I'd been pirating every race for over a decade. As soon as they make a good offer I take it. Simple as.
Except for Germany, where Sky got an exclusive deal and expect you to pay 28€ per month for the privilege. I'm grandfathered in the yearly 65€ subscription of F1TV and as soon as I am no longer allowed to renew I'll probably forget that the sport exists.
Honestly I find it impossible to find a consistently good library of content in one place.
Netflix might have a few good old movies for example, and then 1 show, Amazon prime will have other exclusives Disney etc.
It's insane to expect people to pay for them all just for a few. They are using the Game console distribution model.
Console exclusives / Content exclusives.. It's a bad model from the start, looking at spotify on the other hand and even podcasts are a great example of the shared distributed model.
the latest expression for game studios at least is : "If buying it means I don't own it, then pirating it means I didn't steal it."
There is another major reason why bittorrent shoud be used: interop. "Streaming services" broke noscript/basic (x)html interoperability.
That can’t account for more than 0.1% of piracy. Not that many people care.
Technical interop pre-empt even DRMs by law, it has to be dealed in court.
Who would have thunk?
Well plain reason seems to me is because they can.
I mean I don’t see people grabbing apartments because rent is expensive or leaving restaurants without paying after meals beach food is expensive. Same for school/ college fees and that’s really expensive.
In most cases people will do all sorts of unsanctioned things if they can get away with it.
Yes, but then why can they get away with it? Perhaps because there's an unspoken general understanding among people, legislation and law enforcement, that individual-level IP rights enforcement is mostly bullshit, and IP is in large part just a necessary evil to keep the status quo from breaking too fast. Artificial scarcity is not exactly morally defensible in the first place.
Never change, torrentfreak, never change
I wouldn’t say they are too expensive but they are capricious. Just because you pay doesn’t mean you can watch something. Content is always appearing and disappearing.