The pirates are back - Anew study from the European Union’s Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) suggest that online piracy has increased for the first time in years. In fact, piracy rates have bee…::We analyze a new study where the EUIPO suggests online piracy is on the increase within the European Union.
I get movies and TV shows from the digital high seas because it’s easier, and I openly admit this with my real name on my Lemmy profile.
Currently, I’m subscribed to four streaming platforms: Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Crunchyroll, and Disney+. Despite this, I resort to pirating every piece of content I watch.
The simplicity of searching a title on Radarr or Sonarr and clicking ‘add’ vastly outshines the cumbersome process on legal platforms.
These sites are all flawed, tend to harbor more spyware than Windows and present a usability nightmare compared to the streamlined interface of Jellyfin.
In terms of ethics, my conscience is clear. If a movie or TV show isn’t available on the platforms I subscribe to, it’s a clear sign they aren’t interested in my money.
I see absolutely no problem with paying for what I watch; financial constraints aren’t the issue. The crux of the matter lies in the user experience, which is undeniably superior and hassle-free on the open waves of the digital ocean.
It’s awesome that so many people are using things like the services you mention, but even in the most basic old-school way that I dl things to watch I find it monumentally better than trying to deal with Netflix or whatever other service. I can have the full file, no buffering or compression, with all the settings of VLC no matter what the media is. And with my internet speed I can download things more quickly than I can even get snacks ready.
I’m old school and just use a private tracker… then plex everything to my TV. I tried using sonar but my dumb ass couldn’t set it up…
Same. It’s extra steps. But simpler. Although I am considering switching to jellyfin
If a movie or TV show isn’t available on the platforms I subscribe to, it’s a clear sign they aren’t interested in my money.
That’s always been my validation for pirating stuff that isn’t available in my region.
hopefully this is just a ‘blip’ and rates of theft begin to fall again as the economy recovers.
If not, we can expect to see legal channels raising their prices again to cover the losses caused by piracy.
This is a crazy thing to write. Every streaming service already has their prices set at whatever they think will maximize profit. If they raise prices in response to piracy, they’ll push even more people away.
If anything, piracy will serve as competition, and it will cause the streaming services to lower prices.
Piracy doesn’t compete on price. Maintaining a server, Internet, and VPN access has a cost beyond the technical knowledge needed to set it all up.
Piracy competes on service. Sick of ads? Sick of your favorite shows disappearing from your services? Tired of the Disney vault (they have the content but won’t let you stream it any more) problem? Can’t find the thing on any service? Like obscure and rare content? Like fan edits? Like to curate collections and playlists? Like HD on any and every device you own? Like easy offline content syncning for when you’re traveling to a spot with spotty Internet? Like sharing your library with friends and family? Tired managing multiple streaming subscriptions and navigating the content to find what you really want to watch? Your friendly neighborhood pirate community has a solution for you. Lower prices aren’t even in the top ten reasons lots of people pirate.
Wow they’re just straight up calling it theft now. They can’t even pretend to understand the difference.
That’s nothing new. “You wouldn’t steal a car” was in the 90s…
piracy will serve as competition
for shows sold exclusively to one streaming service then piracy is indeed the only competition
It’s not just streaming services that have turned to shit. Society as a whole has been enshittified because shareholders and directors are chasing the dollar.
Reddit started charging out of their butt for API access, and had killed off 95% of third party apps in the process.
YouTube is downright unusable without a Premium subscription or uBlock Origin. Every content creator meanwhile risks demonetization if their videos are too kid-friendly or too inappropriate, and now have to fill half their videos with endorsements for shitty mobile games like Raid: Shadow Legends if they want to break even.
Porn sites are now astroturfed by e-girls shilling their $20/month OnlyFans pages.
Online dating apps are now a carbon copy of one another, are owned by an oligopoly of big corporations and charge you the same price of four WoW subscriptions for basic features like unlimited swipes, seeing who liked you, etc.
Even real life sucks now. Enjoy paying 70% of your monthly income to pay off some filthy rich landlord’s mortgage while the rich continue to snap up properties, all while the wealthy continue to brainwash sheep into voting against their best interests.
2015: Share your Netflix between four people, everyone pays $4 per month, have access to 80% of all online content. The interface is shit but you keep up with it because it is cheap.
2023: You pay $20 for Netflix, pay $15 for Disney, pay $15 for Hulu, pay $10 for Amazon Prime, $15 for Discovery, $15 for Paramount, $15 for Youtube, have access to 50% of all online content. The interface is still shit and you wonder why you pay for that shit.
Joe Average: 🏴☠️😎🏴☠️😎🏴☠️😎🏴☠️😎🏴☠️😎🏴☠️ and the interface is easier than ever.
My 2013 Highest-End Smart-TV barely works with Youtube and no longer with anything else. But Burning Series still works marvellous. Another thing: “Consuming” pirated content is not “illegal” in Germany. It is a violation of private property which the rights owner can sue in a civil court. But as long as you don’t use P2P services where you also upload - which would indeed be a fellony - he can not detect what you do and can not take any action against you - so One-Click-Hosters and Warez-Streaming is totally safe. And if the rights owner could find out about you he could at most send you a cease-and-desist-order with a one-time-fee of at max $100 because it is a minor incident. As far as I know there was never a user of Warez-Streaming who paid anything.
The only bad thing: DNS is nowadays filtered at the big Telcos and Providers which means I have to change the DNS inside my Routers to Cloudflare and Google. Which are a lot faster anyway.
It’s not that they didn’t try. Way back when Napster was still a thing, some power users with shelves full of downloaded music got mail with outrageous fines upwards of 25,000€. The music studios just lost these cases in front of court because they couldn’t proof that it’s an appropriate request.
At least that’s what I think how it went down. Quite a while ago, so memory’s foggy.
I was always wondering why so few people don’t complain about the interface. It’s abysmal. An absolute minimum of functionality in an unintuitive layout that’s always changing. What the absolute fuck. And all streaming services adopted it.
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Yeah, because it’s easier and cheaper to open up the stream.io app and watch whatever I want whenever I want, than to subscribe to multitudes of platforms of which the majority of the content is garbage.
I have subscriptions (and shared subscriptions) to… seven services that I can think of in 20 seconds.
Yet, time and time again, I try to figure out if what I want to watch is covered by one of them (not trivial to figure out), and end up falling back on piracy probably around 50% of the time.
Now that every fucking content owner has its own subscription plan, it makes subscriptions pointless because it’s spread so damn thin.
try to figure out if what I want to watch is covered by one of them
Justwatch.com, my dude.
Doesn’t always work. I’m not in the US. So shows that it says are on a service, aren’t in my country, or if it’s on a service, it doesn’t know because it’s on that service in my country and not the us. For me, Justwatch.com, has been more miss than hit. Sometimes, asking google works, but some services that are available in my country won’t integrate with Google in my country, but if use a VPN for the us on my Android TV it loads all the US features and the integration starts working and everything is correct. So yeah, unless you’re in the US, the experience of figuring out where it is what you want to watch is more miss than hit.
Oh yes this is so true. I have stopped trying to research where each is that I want to watch; if it’s not on netflix or prime video I just download it.
Justwatch has localised results for me in Australia. If your browser is anonymized it may default to US listings. You can change it in the URL path using your country code, e.g. instead of justwatch.com/us/ I go to justwatch.com/au/ and it’s been totally accurate
I use the mobile and tv app.
Cancel all those subs man. They are eating your money without return. It’s better to download the specific show you want to watch.
I believe it was Gabe Newell who said the best way to avoid piracy is by making legitimate purchasing easier and/or better.
In the early history of streaming services, you could get access to a lot of content in a straightforward way for not much money. People started doing that instead of pirating. The corporations got greedy, they made the services worse and increased the price to the point that piracy is preferable again.
And I don’t have the least amount of sympathy. Yarr matey.
I mean, if people can’t afford to get the content they want, and you make shitty products with limited content, then piracy is the only way to get some of the content. So why not just get all of it that way, especially since the services are more user unfriendly than pirating is inconvenient.
Stremio isn’t perfect, but with the Torrentio plugin it has been going great. I also sometimes find content with qBitorrent and the Search plugin. It’s just so easy to find what I want at the quality I want to watch.
Only thing I’ve been paying for since 2012 has been a VPN. Problem solved.
Source form the EUIPO since it is not linked in the article: https://www.euipo.europa.eu/en/publications/online-copyright-infringement-in-eu-2023
Guess what’s also been increasing? Prices.
Guess what also has refused to go up? Wages
Guess what also been increasing? The number of streaming platforms trying to out bid their competitors. You know what else is increasing? The number of streaming platforms going after account sharing and they wonder why people are going back to piracy. Piracy is king and no one will be able to stop it.
That’s what I’m worried about….billionaires will convince governments (who haven’t banned them yet) a “think of the children act” which will ban VPNs
Yeah, it’s scary. France and the UK are already well on their way to heading down that path.
VPN is basically just a encrypted channel between 2 systems, while one of them forward traffic to the internet and unless they block/filter every encrypted connection, there is no way to block it at mass…
It can’t be impossible because certain countries have been trying. Hasn’t China already been fining people for using VPNs?
Well, at some point people will remember that it’s possible to share things via USB stick or a drive.
Man, those were the times… Borrowing hard drives from friends, burning CDs, sharing lists of who has what…
Way too many businesses rely on VPNs to ban them.
Well….how does China and Russia and other authoritarian shitholes that have banned them operate?
I don’t know about China, but Russia has not banned VPNs. They banned specific VPN services. I’m guessing it’s similar in China. And there are plenty of grey and black market VPN services for people in those countries to use. And they use them.
Oh you sweet child. They only need to ban them for citizens, not for business / shareholders.
Hmmmmm. Let’s see here.
People don’t like cable, because it’s too expensive and inconvenient
People start pirating
People like having 2-3 streaming services that show everything, without ads, for much cheaper even combined than cable. They stop pirating.
People don’t like having 20-30 streaming services that show only a little in each service, NOW WITH ADS!?!?! and that become MUCH more expensive than cable ever was.
People start pirating again…
I wonder what happened?!?!
After reading this and some comments, what I’ve gleaned is that the article is bullshit and piracy truly acts as a competitor in 2 areas - service and content. Many shows are exclusive to a particular platform and therefore the platforms do not need to compete in that area. For the service side of things, I think there has been genuine innovation but it has become stagnant in the last few years and they are referring to old bad practices.
It feels like there is active collusion but perhaps it’s just a result of a poorly regulated industry which allows for pseudo-monopolies. My hope would be for regulation mandating that all content must have a second provider, i.e. no more exclusive shows. Give me stranger things on Amazon prime as well. This would force each streaming company to complete for users and still allow the creators to get paid appropriately. I don’t know if this would end up making streaming services unviable but it’s certainly a lot faster and more consumer friendly.
Would love to hear about the potential downside to this proposal.
The downside would be getting less content and perhaps worse content, as the platforms would not spend the exorbitant levels on content anymore.
