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Five Men Convicted of Operating Massive, Illegal Streaming Service That Allegedly Had More Content Than Netflix, Hulu, Vudu and Prime Video Combined (variety.com)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/aboringdystopia@lemmy.world
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It's disappointing that copyright infringement could cause these people to spend time in prison, but the predatory practices of the companies they where competing with are punished with no more then fines. A "cost of doing business" for the corporate aristocrats. This is the threat the upper class uses on the rest of us, and all too often do not suffer themselves.

"Rules for thee, but not for me" - Corporations

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[–] 86 points 2 years ago (2 children)

I like how a big part of the headline just explains exactly why people pirate things instead of obtaining legal access to them. No one wants to subscribe to netflix, hulu, vudu, and prime video, people just want one platform to watch everything

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  • [–] 22 points 2 years ago

    That was kind of my thought too. These people were offering a subscription based service that people were paying for. This shows pretty conclusively that people are willing to pay for content when it is conveniently packaged. When it’s broken apart and fragmented, piracy and alternative consumption method become more appealing.

    Could you imagine if the music industry operated in the same way? Instead of choosing whether to use Spotify, Apple Music, etc, you needed to have both just to consume a relatively small collection of popular music? That would be madness—and it’s madness for film and television content as well.

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  • [–] 7 points 2 years ago

    My main thought here is that if they were based out of a non-US location, maybe they could have kept on operating. If I were Cuban, I’d be looking to startup something like this and offer global services. Hardware is cheap so the main cost is bandwidth which has been coming down. You would have trouble with CDNs as they would get muscled out of supporting the platform but that could be overcome with geographic partners.

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    • [–] 42 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    i love that these collections will get easier to aggregate, maintain and copy around with storage becoming stupidly cheap and tiny. inevitably someday this will just be a local stash people wont need to stream at all.

    i once made a joke about having a 1gb hard drive while grooming my 40mb drive for storage.

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  • [–] 20 points 2 years ago (4 children)

    Already rocking one of those local stashes. My Plex is up to like 40 tb of movies and shows

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  • [–] 18 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Unless you already paid for a lifetime Plex pass, I highly recommend giving Jellyfin a try.

    They don't have NAT punchthrough like Plex, but they also aren't trying to push streaming content on you. It's just your library, and that's it.

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  • [–] 13 points 2 years ago

    Unless you already paid for a lifetime Plex pass, I highly recommend giving Jellyfin a try.

    Yep, bought a lifetime license like a decade ago when it was cheap. I've stuck with it since it's been simple for my family to use.

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  • [–] 13 points 2 years ago

    Same, also 20TB of TV shows that would probably be removed by a streaming company anyways. Adding Overseerr or Jellyseerr with all the other *arr services makes pirating easier than using the legal options.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago

    I'm around 200tb currently, working to move to a new server that will let me house 800tb worth of disks, before I consider getting a shelf to expand to.

    At this point. I don't know which is cheaper. The hardware, maintenance, and power or just paying all those subs.

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    • [–] 28 points 2 years ago

    Oh my God? Where? What is this system called, usenet?

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    [–] 16 points 2 years ago

    It's disappointing that copyright infringement could cause these people to spend time in prison, but the predatory practices of the companies they where competing with are punished with no more then fines.

    "What is the robbing of a bank, compared to the founding of a bank?" - Brecht

    Law is always part of an ideological whole, that stems from the material base. Justice will always feel different to the opposed classes, we have to force our justice or their justice is forced on us.

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    [–] 10 points 2 years ago

    It's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permission_culture - pay the protection money or the enforcers will come for you.

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