alt Hacker NewsJust pirate it. They can't tell you this but there's a quagmire of rights, licenses, agreements, treaties... and you can untangle this Goridan Knot by just pirating, especially media, for your own use.
There are pixel perfect 4k drm-free rips out there made by people who poured thousands of hours into understanding codecs. They will work on any platform, forever, you can stream them or play offline.
These rips can be freely distributed to friends and family, your kids will be able to play them, they're easy to back up. Physical media are a legacy solution.
And it doesn't stop you from getting a revocable or whatever other license the creators prefer to fund their work.
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That's what always gets me. Pirates get a superior product while paying customers get garbage. Netflix streams obscenely compressed "high definition" content while pirates get blu-ray remuxes painstakingly sourced from multiple Blu-Rays in order to select the best frames. Music industry releases compressed, clipping, horribly mastered tracks while pirates pull out all the stops to rip old vynils with insane equipment in order to get clean high dynamic range sound. Pirates keep playing at full speed while the genuine copy's obfuscated denuvo VM slowly churns and kicks them our when it fails to phone home to the corporation's dead servers. Nintendo makes some token effort to sell the same Mario ROM to people for the tenth time while pirates get cycle accurate emulators, ROM hacks, translations, save states, cheats, network multiplayer, graphics filters, universal compatibility, perfect A/V synchronization, fast forward, slow motion, frame advance, tool assisted speedruns, debuggers, disassemblers, anything you can think of.
I feel like a total moron every single time I "purchase" these things. The industry doesn't give a shit, only pirates do. Pirates spent thousands and thousands of dollars and absurd amounts of effort sourcing, scanning and cleaning up old Star Wars films. You'd think these trillionaire corporations would be able to exceed a bunch of enthusiast "pirates" in performance, but they don't give a shit. In fact they go out of their way to make everything worse by failing to make works available, badly editing or even censoring whatever they put out there and locking it all down with obnoxious DRM.
believe it or not, but pirated copies can be better a thousandfold than what paying customers get.
whenever I want to play Deathloop, I download it from torrents despite "owning" it on Steam, all because Denuvo really likes my SSD, and whenever I want to go online, then, well, yeah, I have to suffer. still, not regretting the purchase, cuz this money went to Arkane.
This 100%. The other day I was trying to re-watch Mr. Robot with my girlfriend. I found out it abandoned Netflix. I like the series enough to purchase a 1-month subscription if that means I can just press play and it watch it dubbed. I read somewhere I could find it in Disney+, only to later find it is not really there, and that actually there is no way to stream it from any service in my country. How did it get this bad?
Then you need a NAS, a backup process (backing up large collections of movies to S3 is actually pretty expensive). You need to keep your NAS up to date. You need to install / configure Plex, oops that's closed source now, uninstall that and get Jellyfin. Eventually your NAS hardware will be outdated and you'll have to get a new one and migrate your files over.
Even for technical people this is a pain over time. Nothing like just having a disc that can last 50+ years if properly stored.
Piracy also acts as a decentralised archive/backup of most stuff people care about. It's important we have this since mainstream media sources can be memory-holed at any moment.
Maybe the legal side will be solved one day, maybe it won't. It's not something a pirate cares about.
Exactly. I pirate eBooks and buy a physical copy when I come around to reading them.
Unrelated to the content: Claude really likes tags
I have a TrueNAS server with Jellyfin, but I'd still much rather have a physical blu-ray, especially if it's something with a Criterion release. I think the "inconvenience" of physical media is enjoyable. It makes me commit to actually watch a movie and not just have it on in the background while I look at my phone, much like how a physical record makes me commit to listening to a full album.
Remember the story of the man who died at Disneyworld, and Disney said his wife couldn't sue them because he agreed to the Disney+ TOS?
I think about that every time I open up Jellyfin
I’d be in favour of a law that if a product cannot reasonably be purchased legally obtaining it via other means is not piracy (e.g. in my country 80% of movies are not available simply because the market is too small, even though I would be ok with English - I still don’t want to pirate so I buy physical media)
When buying isn't owning...
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Yes, of course it's easier to pirate it. The problem is that its unethical (and illegal). That you find it inconvenient to pay for things you want is not a valid justification.
Another thing that always needs pointing out: that ad-free, copyable, unencumbered, pixel perfect 4K drm-free rip with multiple language audio streams, hand crafted accurate subtitles, chapter tags, and embedded poster art cannot be bought from the movie industry at any price. That's why piracy is a product problem, not a price problem. The industry refuses to produce and offer the superior product, so regardless of the price, piracy is the only way to get it.