this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2024
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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.