Download.
A simple solution is to stop consuming the work entirely. “Okay, you want to make it expensive and difficult to access your content, we’re going to stop liking your content. The market for your product has now completely ceased to exist.”
Very hard to convince people to buy things “legitimately” and have any trust in any of the “legit” options when they just go away so fucking easily. Stuff like anime has been a real weird example of both how horrible the corps on the Japanese side just squeeze every single fraction of a penny from stuff (fucking like two eps of a show on a modern DVD or even Blu-ray). But also feel zero reason to expand options in the first place. They were so fucking slow to get digital or streaming options. Same goes for the foreign outlets that get rights outside of J-land, but I am sure they were more likely to want to combat piracy via stuff like streaming. Funny thing about anime piracy is that it is literally the reason so many shows and movies were even seen and is the main reason so many people got into all of it. Back in the early 00’s when I made friends with people that had cable internet and ready to burn as many eps as they could fit on a CD-R and later DVD-/+R.
It was just so amazing to see all these shows that weren’t just completely altered by lazy US companies or ever likely to be translated. No US companies thought that Americans would ever understand or get into this weird Japanese stuff and not put money into it. But they sure started caring when torrents got going and the numbers were growing. One thing that has really pissed me off with legal digital copies of anime comes down to how it is still behind on basic shit. We have had multi-audio/subtitles on pirate copies and even on legitimate physical discs. But the legal versions of digital copies still have to be either bought in sub or dub. It is a slap in the face of fans to have to buy two different copies just to have multi-audio in Japanese and English. I thought that shit would have been left behind with VHS.
All of these companies demand our money and often charge prices that are just too high for their target audiences (especially teens that don’t have jobs like so many of us have lived through). And yet they seem to do everything possible to make the options for purchase so much less usable compared to pirate versions. I would take a fansub that might be a bit off but has actual passion for community and accessibility over legit copies every single time. But I am also more than happy to pay for things if I don’t keep being treated like I already stole it and should be grateful for being “allowed” to pay for it. I would love to pay for these things and know that the actual workers are able to live, and not just so overworked and not able to afford rent. But the entire media industry treats both the workers and the customers so fucking bad. They are making things worse for themselves by showing how we can’t trust our purchases to even be around from one day to another. So why shouldn’t we just take it and know that we will have it?
Given how lots of smaller shows and other things will never get re-prints or re-masters on modern media. It is also our jobs to preserve these things that the companies feel aren’t worth the money to do so if they aren’t. If I ever have kids, I would like to be able to know I can show them my favorites. Looks like I will also need to show them how to sail the digital seas and that “legit” options should always be treated as liars that steal your money AND take away what you paid for.
🏴☠️
Buttplug for your thoughts ～(つˆ0ˆ)つ｡☆
No US companies thought that Americans would ever understand or get into this weird Japanese stuff
I miss the subtitled “translator notes” about cultural things. US companies just change the meaning of things if there’s no easy equivalent.
Gintama has some of the funnier versions of those notes. Can be annoying if you don’t care as they take it to 11 covering most of the screen to explain a reference to a bank scandal in the 90s or other very specific stuff. Cracks me up with the level of care about making sure you are aware of something used in a quick joke that might not really matter. Such a nice way to see and know random info on Japanese slang words and phrases in the context of a moment.
This is why I never bought a subscription to these services.
i got suckered once on a different site that got shut down. never again.
Subscription is pretty different from buying. Pretty disingenuous to try to talk about them the same way. There’s no expectation of keeping access when you end a subscription.
I see patreon subscriptions all the time where you can subscribe, download all the content, and not subscribe again the next month.
I fail to see why just because it’s a big corporation that the expectation is different.
They’re charging people higher prices and refusing to allow them to keep their digital content? They’re basically just handing out the pirate hats and eye patches at this point.
And it is always Sony, why that company has to be so greedy and shitty?
How these companies don’t realize these incompetent decisions push formerly paying customers into piracy is actually beyond me.
Do every c-level employee in these companies have brain damage?
Not going to lie, i think most consumers will take this lying down and that’s what Sony is betting on. The amount that actually turn to piracy is so small, and the price hike easily makes up for the customers they’d lose. I’d say most people on Lemmy know how to pirate (if not are pirating already) so it’s a bit of an echo chamber here where we assume everybody is just going to pirate so as to stop lining Sony’s pockets.
@KravenTheHunter @trackcharlie plus, it gives them a reason to justify the higher prices because they have to be protected from all those big, bad pirates out there taking food out of their kids mouths by not paying their extortionary rental fees.
They’re actually counting on people to pirate stuff to create some weird sense of inflated value for their products.
In my experience the main issue with piracy is the ads.
Nothing better than trying to watch a show with my kid then having an ad pop-up with a girl fucking herself
Ever heard of BitTorrent? Just get the video and watch it locally
Use an adblocker.
Adblockers or torrents mate. I’ve not seen an ad in over 18 years.
I’ve been meaning to look into adblockers but I really only use these sites for shit that’s not on streaming services so I don’t really think about it until it arises
It’s 2024 man, tormenting a movie takes about 10 minutes and then you neither have to worry about ads nor connectivity for the rest of the movie
I’m gonna be honest, I’ve tried torrenting before and maybe I’m just an idiot (most likely), but I’ve never been good at figuring out which fuckin button is the actual download button and I’m tired of ghosting my pc
Sounds like 90% of your problem is ads then. Or going to shitty sites. Get on a decent tracker - even the good old one - and have an adblocker installed
If you set up qbittorrent with the built-in search you can torrent stuff without ever opening your browser
Why do you have torment it? What has it ever done wrong to you? 😭
/j
Or just get it so you don’t have ads on YouTube
Do adblockers work on smart TVs? That’s the only time I use YouTube.
If your TV is Android based then there’s the SmartTube app. YouTube without the ads and tracking.
Firefox + ublock origin would be your best scenario for privacy and security. Privacy because all these ads track your page loads and attempt to generate a unique id for your browser based on your loading time of certain pixels, and security because nearly half of all ads (and more than half of all links on google search and nearly all ads on google search) are viral loads just waiting for an accidental click.
I’ve been pirating for years and never encountered an ad beyond subtitle ads. Is this anime specific or something?
Nah the anime sites I use either don’t have ads or have normal ads.
It’s the movie sites I use that have constant explicit pop-ups
You’re not using adblocker?
Edit: Just read the other commenter. Where do you watch shows with your kids? TV or Computer? If it’s on Desktop or Laptop it’s easy af, but Smart TV less so but not impossible.
Ah, I stick to torrenting. Pirate stream websites have always seemed sketchy to me.
Because their best interest is to appease shareholders and not excellent service. The problem which will emerge in 5 years time is a problem for the next CEO.
They don’t care about losing customers to piracy just like fast-food restaurants don’t care about losing people to grocery stores.
They’ve realized it’s more profitable to take further advantage of an ever-shrinking pool of customers.
If you can charge 1 customer twice the price of what you could charge 2, then you make more money because you require less overhead.
I definitely agree with you but I’m not sure how far they can take this in an economic situation that is currently devolving into a major recession and has all the macroeconomic factors of an incoming second depression.
If anyone has this stuff it would be good to add them to i2p too.
so they’re going to refund all the people that purchased this stuff, right?
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I’m pretty sure it all goes to Crunchyroll. I don’t think you’re actually losing anything, just having it moved to a different platform
(edit): Nevermind, I didn’t know digitally redeemed blu-rays and stuff were a thing. You’ll lose those if you have em but tbh I can’t imagine very many people do.
We need to stop calling it “purchasing”
I think in legal terms it’s even called licensing.
Long term rental or at-will ownership for US people.
If paying for digital content isn’t ownership, then downloading it for free isn’t piracy.
We need to prosecute companies (and their executives, personally) who fraudulently misrepresent it as “purchasing.”
Buying a digital copy of something you cannot download is an oxymoron. It only makes sense if you subscribe to a service.
So steam, basically? Less likely that they’ll be shutting down anytime soon, but still.
Whether its “allowed” or not, I assume you I own every file from my steam library.
Not a good comparison. With Steam, you download the games to your computer. If Valve ever went out of business, they could unDRM the games, or you could crack them.
Either way, you download the games onto your computer. That’s not the case with Funimation.
That’s why it’s better to buy from gog
Why? You also buy licenses from GOG, despite their and their shills’ best efforts to make you believe otherwise.
It’s completely DRM free. You download the game and that’s it, you can run it from your computer forever
The only difference with Steam is that you have to crack the game files, and Steam DRM is notably easy to bypass. Either way, once you have the files you have it.
Is it? I should look into that
I literally wouldn’t advocate “sailing the high seas” if companies didn’t all aggressively accelerate enshittification and run toward consumer-hostile, short-term, endlessly greedy practices. And then there’sthis, which is on another level. Storage is crazy-cheap these days, people…
I forgot Funimation even existed tbh. I’ve been torrenting for ages now and I have no use for Funimation or Crunchyroll. Yo the seven seas guys!
For smart people, piracy is a financial problem.
Why pay more for things you can get for free? It’s not like the businesses you’re supporting wouldn’t rob you blind if they thought they could get away with it.
Even the ‘creators’ don’t get the vast majority of the money you spend; their landlords do. When they make more money, rent goes up.
I wish this generation wasn’t full of useful idiots with more money than sense.
Class action lawsuit for contract violations
Pretty much guaranteed “buying” those eps was done under a user agreement that said something like, “You don’t own this and we can revoke your license whenever we want for whatever reason we want.”
There’s pretty much zero percent chance there isn’t a class-action waiver in the old license agreement. Maybe an arbitration clause too, but that could actually be good, since Sony would probably have to pay the arbiters win or lose, so if enough people actually pursue it it could cost them a boatload.
