this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2024
857 points (98.0% liked)
Memes
45643 readers
1111 users here now
Rules:
- Be civil and nice.
- Try not to excessively repost, as a rule of thumb, wait at least 2 months to do it if you have to.
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Why pay corporate scum when you can not :| sorry not sorry people in the entertainment industry. You should negotiate better union terms.
Yes, it really does come to morals.
Like, would I really feel ok supporting an industry like that? With their shitty wages, horrible copyright practices, just evil corporate practices (nepotism, extortion, sexism, etc) - not exclusive to entertaining industry, but I can def chose not to support & fuel the suffering.
I want & do pay for small studio projects, FOSS initiatives, etc.
Let's normalise that so that such support may grow and change the world.
Long live there *arr services & their contribution to worlds culture & humanity through equality/comradeship.
Yep, supporting artists and not parasitic corporations is always preferable. Unfortunately, said parasitic conglomerates try to get their greedy piggy tendrils into everything they can
Yeah, it's really hard and often impossible to support the artists that you want.
A good movie, but most of the people involved made fixed wages (no sales) whilst 90+% of the protis goes to the studio and the lead actor and director (+ credited people that never even saw the project, but you know, money favours)?
Yeah, your money vote does not go to what you want to support/sponsor.
A publisher is selling a game that it got by buying a studio & getting rid of the devs? What's their added value? That's just capital yields, like landlording.
I have grown up with pirating. I didn't even know that you can pay for stuff for a while lol. Yet just the other day I bought the plushie DLC for portal revolution, caz it was an amazing experience, and it was a free passion project from the fans to the fans.
Yes, I do the anti-boycotting as much as I can too.
Also bought all the games I played growing up (the ones you can buy that is).
If it comes down to morals, don't pirate, boycott. If your actions can be perceived as indistinguishable from selfishness, they probably are. And the only message you're sending is "we need to crack down more on piracy" not any actual good.
No. You sound apologetic towards shareholders.
Morals are not the same as laws, lol.
And when something is part of the everyday life like this it isn't really the best thing to stay out of.
Also, boycotting something I wouldn't have payed for doesn't make sense. I don't even understand what you mean.
And what you call selfishness is the boycott here. That takes away from the megacorps (and not from the artists).
I don't wanna boycott people making series, I want way-too-big publishers & co to die.
Agreed. Don't know why you're saying that, since I didn't mention the law anywhere.
It is not. If you boycott something you aren't benefitting. You are making a sacrifice in order to enact a change. And critically, if corporations want you behave differently, in a boycott they give in to demands. With piracy, they try to crack down on piracy.
I'm sorry, how do the artists get paid when you pirate?
If that is genuinely what you want, all you have to do is not purchase the content. Pirating it does not help you kill giant publishers. All it does is make it shittier for the people funding your free entertainment.
As I said in a different comment, if this is actually a moral thing for you, for every dollar you save by not paying for the things you enjoy, donate it to a union. If you're not, it clearly wasn't really about the artists, it was about you getting free shit.
I have to say I mostly disagree with your points.
At that kind of profit margins only the dividends get financed.
And I do spent the money on donations (FOSS devs, Wiki, random research, animal stuff), tho I haven't though of donating to unions. I didn't even know that is a thing. It isn't where I live.
I understand they need to be financed, but the whole point of unions is to get a better bargaining position & thus finance. That shouldn't need money. You dont donate to the strog guy that already has the power, you donate to the poor. Ot perhaps like some sort of semi-political parties that help organise workers? But we have regulators that strongly encourage unions at certain company size or sector.
What you can donate to or finance is smol studios. That's boycotting the big studios, regardless of content consumption.
What are the margins, specifically? Do you do the research on every piece of media you take, or is "just kinda a feeling" that you believe enough for you to feel fine about what you do? And what is your line for at what point you'll grace them with your money?
It's great that you make donations, but do you make contributions in line with what you would have paid for the media to take? If so, I believe you that it's not about the money but a moral stance. If not, I don't believe that you aren't doing it for your own self interest.
I'm genuinely not sure what you're trying to say here. Are you saying that you don't think unions need money? Are you familiar with union dues? Or strike funds? Lobbyists or lawyers?
And are you saying that the unions are the "strog guys?" If so, then why are you saying that they don't make enough of a percent for it to justify you paying them for their work? If you want to pay to the poor or a charity, fine.
My fundamental point is, if you pirate a $20 movie/game/whatever and you don't donate $20 to whatever cause you feel is worthwhile, and instead keep that money for yourself, you are pirating because you want things without having to pay for it. Full stop. Anything else is just trying to justify your free shit.
Whatever helps you sleep at night.
That literally doesn't make sense here.
my guy, they were already paid for their time, this isn't a small indie production.
You didn't answer the question. Where did the money come from that paid for their time?
the studios that originally produced the content, the people that are paying for streaming services, and if it's a movie, the box office earnings.
And physical media sales, if any.
So, in summary, their income comes from people buying their stuff. So I ask again, how do artists get paid when you pirate? Or is your stance that you want the artists to get paid, you just want other people to do it for you?
how does a business get paid when they fuck up and have to take a loss. How does a business get paid when they have no customers, this is literally rolled into the economics. There are very few situations where this should be a problem, unless you're withholding some draconian amount of control over the media.
If you're mega corpo billion dollar industry collapses because it can't release products that people won't pay for, that doesn't exactly sound like my problem.
Everybody needs money to live. A lot of people are fine paying a bit of money to get access to media they like. Not everyone though, and you know what? That's ok, it's free marketing. A commonly reiterated statement is that people who pirate things, aren't people who are going to pay for something to begin with. However they are significantly more likely to pay for it after the fact. Or for future releases coming from the same entity. It's still net positive income at the end of the day. Most people don't want .WAV files, or .MKVs they want to watch the content. And that's what they'll do.
unless you bring in archival, in which case piracy is actually morally good, because of how often content just fucking disappears from the market.
Archival and piracy are different. For you to pirate, there was already an archival copy. Mission accomplished. You downloading a copy without paying for it is not you helping preservation.
is it not the case that the more archival copies there are of something the more likely it is to survive?
There is a rather simple paradox, in the world of online and digital archival where, unless you archive it, nobody else has any reason to archive it. I could simply not archive any of the stuff i have archived, under the pretense that someone else probably already archived it, but that's just a guess and i have no idea whether or not that's the case.
Once i archive something, it's possible someone else has already archived it, but i being a known archiver of that material (or not, most archives are private) also substantiates that same paradox.
And besides, let's say i am archiving, how am i supposed to verify the integrity of my archival copy? Am i not supposed to consume it? That's the most effective and reliable way to determine the integrity of an archive. Sure i could use hashes or checksums, but those are only are reliable as the original creation of the hash/checksum.
No, it is not. Compare 10,000,000 copies of something that only live on some random people's phones or 1 copy in the library of Congress where it is someone's job to manage and preserve it. 50 years from now I think it's way more likely that the Library of Congress one is still around than the random ones.
No. Consuming it is neither efficient nor reliable. How would you even know when you consume it that it is the original?
And none of this justifies the piracy itself as opposed to buying it and archiving it? Or if you don't have the capabilities or means, buying a copy and then pirating that said copy as the archive.
now compare 10 billion copies of something that people have archived across the world all over the internet, in various different states. Now compare it to the exactly zero copies that the library of congress has because it's a random fucking video game, and the library of congress doesn't generally archive those. Also most of their shit is physical. I.E. difficult to access.
you're not wrong, but it's also important to remember that you should test backups, this also means you should do some amount of consumption on your archived content to make sure it's functional and working appropriately.
How do i know it's original? Simple, thanks to general internet consensus and the archival work of other people, it's easy to cross reference. For example, there is a known unreleased boards of canada album "play by numbers" that was never released, only snippets of songs were released, however at some point someone compiled a "play by numbers" album that was fake, and then released it, it's commonly known among boc fans looking into archived material that it exists, and is out there. There was a recent hoax done by binasty where he faked hooper bay, and people thought it was legit, and then he revealed it. Again, it's community consensus. These things are much easier to do now, than they are in the future from now.
A lot of archivists have strict standards around how they archive things as well, generally it's more about the content itself, rather than it's relevance to any one particular thing.
you must be relatively privileged if you think that's trivially accessible. Why do you think lost media is a thing? How does one archive that? What about unreleased media? That's literally impossible.
Sure you could buy a copy and then pirate it, it's a valid strategy that a lot of people engage in. But in my case my primary target for archival work is YT content, it's mostly what i watch, and i find it to be an interesting space to work in. I've considered archiving blu rays. But it just doesn't seem feasible for me. For one thing i'd need a bluray drive and those are upwards of 100 USD. I'd have to stuff that in one of my machines, which would be rather tedious and time consuming. I'd need ripping software, MakeMKV exists (the discs are encrypted and it's the onyl software out there that decrypts them), but it's just one thing, and if that ever fucking explodes we're dead in the water for a bit. It's technically paid software, so the license for it is another 60 USD. Though it's in "free access beta" right now, so there's that. I'd also need physical media to archive. That gets expensive really quickly, shorter shows are often about 50 USD for a boxset. Assuming it's any good that adds quite a bit already, larger box sets are easily 100 USD. Hard to find boxsets are going to be hundreds of USD. Movies are quite a bit cheaper.
Oh but we're not done yet, not only is it a rather expensive endeavor. You also have to invest time and hardware into demystifying the fuckery they engage in with these releases. It's not uncommon for movies to have random bullshit files that don't exist, names that don't make any fucking sense, and broken metadata. Same for shows, although it's worse, because it rips as one big giant chunk of video, which you then have to split up manually you would think metadata makes that easy, but no, it's broken too. I've seen timestamps in metadata that regularly send you to a scene with a power pole in them. Almost like they paid some poor fuck to make bullshit timestamps throughout it just to piss us off or something.
And once you're done segmenting the content, you also have to transode it, unless you want to store the raw uncompressed files, which usually means using hardware encoding, doing that to a modern standard is going to require at least an arc a380 or whatever that card is, which retails for 150 USD, though i hear it was going used for 90 bucks a while ago, unsure if that's still true, or an nvidia GPU which are famously really cheap and easy to get a hold of. There are probably dedicated hw accelerators out there, but those are usually for professional work, so good luck with that. You could do software encoding, but if you want reasonable file sizes, and at reasonable quality levels, in HEVC encoding or similar, you're going to be waiting for weeks minimum.
Granted a few those are just the name of the game, it should come as no surprise to you why people don't fucking like doing this shit. I'd be more open to spending the money on it if it wasn't such a fucking disaster and they didn't try to fight us every fucking step of the way.
Oh btw, yt archival is rather trivial, you either paste a link into yt-dlp and wait, or you stuff it into something like tube archivist, and let it do it's own thing. It's really just that simple.
sell me a bluray for a reasonable price or stop fucking encrypting them and i will buy your content :)
There's few things that piss me off as much as self-righteous pirates. You want to say you're doing this out of a moral stand? Boycott. Give specifics for what union terms would be good enough for you to deign to pay people for their work. Check with the actual people in the industry for if they would prefer you pay or pirate. For every dollar you're not paying, donate it to a union.
Or just admit you're pirating selfishly because you can get cool stuff for free and rely on other people to fund.
yet piracy is what made the music industry be reasonable...
And netflix is what killed piracy originally...
HMM...
Source?
And more importantly, did Netflix pay the creators a greater amount for the relatively little amount of money they were charging you? Was Netflix more moral because of their treatment of employees? Is that why it allegedly killed piracy?
What's that? No? It was just convenient and cheap? I guess it is, once again, just about you not wanting to pay money for things other people make.
spotify basically killing services like limewire? Netflix being incredibly popular because it was a good service?
Piracy is literally just a basic supply and demand driving force. You supply content that's easily accessible, for a fair price and people will pay for it, it's as simple as that.
I can't say much about netflix originals, but any of the licensed content would've already been paid for. Netflix currently sucks, and that's not really what we're talking about, though there is a conversation to be had there.
if this was the case why would we see piracy decline over the last decade, only to see it increase noticeably in the last 4-5 years or so.
I thought you said that "piracy made the music industry be reasonable." Spotify basically killing limewire is not evidence of that any more than saying radio made the music industry be reasonable since it's just as killed.
Look up "residuals"
Because streaming services have been charging more for less content, as the content owners have come to realize how much streaming cannibalizes purchases from other revenue streams.
I'm not trying to argue that people don't pirate less when there are cheap convenient services available. I agree with that. But that's just people behaving in their own self-interest, not some moral good about fighting big companies or other stuff pirates say to feel better about it.
I accept that people do selfish things, just as I accept when people jump the turnstile in the subway without paying their share. What I don't accept is the self-righteous pirates who try to act like they're doing something good for society, like I should be thanking them for downloading the shows I helped pay for, and pretending that it has no impact whatsoever on the people who depend on that for their income.
why do you think people were pirating music instead of buying albums? Why do you think spotify immediately picked up lots of users instead of people just pirating, it's basic free market swings.
yeah, and people don't like getting stiffed.
you could argue it's self interest based, but fucking anything anybody does ever is self interest based. There is no world where someone does something that isn't self interest based in even the littlest of quantities.
I'm not saying it's moral, you can argue about the morality of it all you want, but at the end of the day, i think archival is more morally respectable than killing content and removing it from the market permanently for no other reason than "haha funny"
Killing people is morally bad, killing people who kill other people is morally good. (generally)
my primary argument is that it's basic market forces driving it, arguing about morals is just appeal to the corporation for producing bad market products. If you want to appeal to someone, go donate money to the unions for actors or whatever. Go support an indie film, go donate money directly to people whom you like and support.
how can you disagree with this? There are SO many examples of piracy done for the good of either, the public, or human history.
For example, there used to be a website that hosted all kinds of repair and service manuals for medical devices. It was DMCAd and then taken down. This website, arguably helped to save the lives of tens of thousands, probably hundreds of thousands of people throughout the years.
What about libgen? The entire purposes of this project is to bring works into the field of public access for nothing other then the benefit of the common person.
What about the darkweb for people who live in places that are overly persecutory, not exactly piracy, but distributing religious works in places where religion is restricted is equally as important for internet pirates as is archiving a culturally relevant TV show.
what if for example, you were, idk let's say, watching community, the iconic TV show, on a streaming service, because to my knowledge, they don't produce blurays of it anymore (it's on amazon, but i've seen it disappear before so) or maybe you just don't like blurays because optical media sucks, and bluray players are terrible. Or perhaps, like me you like a heavily integrated content system that you have full control over. Such that you can watch the content in full resolution, without being restricted, or being hit with a terrible UI, or having to deal with a logged in service, that has to have internet access. Sure you could rip a bluray, but if you think that's easy you've never tried.
Only to discover that they've pulled a few episodes, and they're considered to be "lost media" or something. Now what? You're gonna buy the bluray, and deal with using a secondary form of media just for the one episode that they pulled?
What about shows like mythbusters, which to my knowledge, have NEVER been released on physical media (though i believe they recently sold the video rights to another corpo, so maybe that already happened, or it will happen soon? IDK)
here's a fun fact, discovery+ is a terrible platform, genuinely awful video player, better hope you don't want to do any player customization what so ever. Maybe you don't feel like watching it stretched? Oops, too bad, you can only watch it stretched.
Also to be clear, i'm not saying you should thank me for shit you don't care about, that's fine. You'll find something someone archived some day and be happy that it was archived by someone like me, and really appreciate the work they've done. I'm just saying you probably shouldn't be so defensive about it. Pirates are defensive about it because the industry fucking sucks. The law fucking sucks, and politics fucking sucks. We're doing what we can the best that we can. It's not about people like you, it's about corpos like disney.
there have been a few studies regarding this topic, there was one study in the EU that was done, and it's circulated on the darknet every so often, claiming that piracy has a minimal impact. For music artists? A lot of them have material on bandcamp, or independently released services. And it's also just a fucking wav file I'm perfectly ok with paying money for music from an artist that i like and support. Primarily because it's just a WAV file, and i can just put it into a music player. That's all i need. A lot of people go to shows and buy merch or other physical garb. I'd give money directly to artists if they let me. Numerous times artists have released their music on torrents, and had it be rather successful.
There are also artists with rather hard to find albums and titles like woob, who pull entire albums. The collectors CD market is a little bit fucked. I'm not paying some random dude 50 USD for a CD of one album just because it's rare. That money doesn't even support the artist.
My single favorite thing about the internet, is that if i decided that i wanted to learn about metal casting in the early 1900's and late 1800's that i can pull up the internet archive, find some material written about it that's been archived, and then just fucking read it. There's all kinds of shit out there that's akin to that, which arguably constitutes as piracy, but is for the public good regardless.
I want an engineering tables book? That's just fucking out there, and i can have it. A book about machining? Again it's all just out there.
Steam, case in point. You can find cracked games fairly easily, there's even games entirely lacking drm that could be passed around effortlessly
But steam is very convenient, the prices are reasonable, and they have good customer support. That's enough that even people who pirate switch games buy pc games on the same device
Which is my point. People do things which are cheap and convenient because it is in their self interest. They stop pirating for selfish reasons just as they were pirating for selfish reasons.
Which is why I can't stand self-righteous pirates who try and convince themselves and everyone else that they aren't actually doing it selfishly, they're doing it for some fabricated moral good and we should be thanking them for their service, that they're fighting corporations somehow, and pretending that they aren't withholding money from the people who spent the time making the things they enjoy.
I'm not going to say pirating is some morally superior act, but there is something to be said for refusing to support companies that have user-hostile distribution
And I don't think that act is cheapened by accessing the content anyways - yes, you are not contributing to the creators while enjoying their content. If you weren't going to pay into the stream that they get a small part of anyways, then you're not costing them anything - if you wouldn't have bought it and didn't, it's the same result on their end either way
Ultimately it goes back to piracy being a problem of accessibility, and rejecting an inaccessible service is the moral part, I see the piracy in this context as just neutral
The problem is when people claim they were never going to buy an awful lot of content. If someone spends a significant amount of time playing, or consuming, pirated content, I call bullshit. They would have bought at least some of it if they weren't getting so much stuff for free. Considering the rewards and lack of consequences, I doubt the vast majority of people pirating are being really honest with themselves about what they "would never have" paid for, and instead use it as a simple excuse for bad behavior.
And rejecting a service you don't consider worth it isn't moral. That's just basic capitalism and self-interest. That's the standard decision to not buy something, which is a decision people make literally dozens of times when they go in the store. And pirating that content anyways certainly doesn't make it any more moral.
There's many reasons people pirate - sometimes it's a matter of means & availability, sometimes it's a matter of controlling their paid-for content (like people who actually buy switch games but want to run them on their steam deck), and sometimes it's basically a hobby
Some people would surely buy some games if piracy wasn't on the table (assuming the terms were unacceptable to them), but I used to rewatch the same things and play the same games endlessly. I think the vast majority would do without
This seems to be our core difference. I don't think capitalism is a moral system, and "enlightened self interest" only works with equity of opportunity and fierce competition - that's not the world we live in. And even then, I don't think it's a very ethical moral framework
I see supporting a service hostile to users as immoral - it's like enabling an abuser, however slight, you're contributing to behaviors that are a detriment to others
Very little of that justifies it to me. For means & availability, this isn't a mother stealing baby formula. Pirated content isn't a need (though I'd make an exception for things like school books). There's plenty of content made to be free and available, as well as libraries. And I'm completely fine with people pirating copies of paid-for content; there's an argument to be made that that isn't actually piracy and is personal archiving. It probably doesn't need to be said that "hobby" is not a justification in the least, just like people who shoplift for the thrill.
To me the real crux is that you believe that not doing something immoral is the same thing as doing something moral. Me sitting here is moral because I'm not murdering someone. Yay me. I'm also not blackmailing, gaslighting, stealing, etc. etc. Me sitting here might be the most moral thing anyone has ever done.
To me the case for the absence of activity actually being moral is it requires some amount of sacrifice to continue to do the right thing. Avoiding going to Walmart to support a local business, even if you pay more and it's further away. The difference between not wanting to see a movie and boycotting it. There's nothing moral about not going to a movie you didn't want to see. But I think it is moral to avoid going to a movie you wanted to because of labor practices; you made a sacrifice in support of your beliefs. If you then go and pirate said movie, it's indistinguishable from selfish behavior.
As I've said in other spots, if it's genuinely about not supporting hostile services and not about self-interest, donate however much you're saving by pirating to a union or charity. That's completely fair. But if not, all I see is people acting in their self interest and trying to justify it by saying that they are doing a bad thing to bad people so it's okay (and maybe they're doing a little bad to some good people as well, but that's a price you're willing to have them pay for you).
You should be focusing on the hedge funds and billionaire families. Not directing your REEing energy at me.
Great response, totally makes sense and justifies everything you said.