Men. 🏴☠️
We only started pirating after Amazon refused to let us play movies we paid for because our hardware was too old for their DRM. It was a 2014 PC made of recycled parts. At the time, it was less than 10 years old. We pirated the same movie and realized it was easier to find, higher quality, and surprise, surprise, capable of playing on a PC we kept out of the landfill.
When I see anti piracy measures that punish people that don’t pirate, such as massive performance hits or privacy violating features, it makes me want to pirate more.
720 streams run from strange websites in timbucktoo have higher fidelity than the 4K stream I paid good money for.
Here’s a great price and you can share it with your friends. Wait not those friends. Wait your phone isn’t authorized anymore. Okay you authorized your phone but you need to authorize it again. Okay we just doubled the price and cut the quality again. Now you can’t watch the movies that you downloaded for offline viewing without an internet connection.
Netflix can take a long hard suck on my pudding factory, they’re never going to see another penny of my money again, and this is from somebody that goes back to the DVD days of Netflix.
I rented a car to do Uber with while I apply for jobs, and the car is an electric. They had no gas powered cars available.
It is such a pain in the ass. I’ve only had it for a couple of days, but so far I’ve spent 2.5 hours today waiting for charge, and about 5 hours driving passengers.
I’m ready. I want to download a car. Just need someone to point me in the right direction.
Men would literally rather maintain a seed ratio for private trackers and operate a seedbox than pay for movies.
TIL that I’m a man.
good
If I could pay a fair price for the product I’m getting off torrents (no drm media files I can use on any device I want) I’d consider it. I buy books off humble bundle like all the time.
“You wouldn’t put on a tricorn hat, would you?”
I actually would, if I could find a nice one…
“…and leave your job to sail the seas?”
… That’s an option? I didn’t even consider-
“And you certainly wouldn’t drink rum, and fire cannons, and carry a saber and tell silly parrot related puns.”
buys a tricorn hat
Steals a tricorn hat
FTFY
Downloads a Tricorner hat
You wouldn’t!
you wouldn’t go to the toilet in a policeman’s helmet
“You wouldn’t mail it to his grieving widow?!”
You wouldn’t then steal it again!
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If buying is not owning, copying is not stealing. Simple as that.
Whatever you need to tell yourself to sleep at night. It’s definitely stealing. This is a piracy community. Don’t feign moral superiority. They offer a product, you don’t want to buy the product so you find it for free elsewhere. A digital file that you experience for a cost is no different than a book you buy from a store, regardless of the state of ownership after the fact. And regardless if it’s a locally published author or a multi billion dollar studio, there’s a cost of entry. Semantics is all you’re arguing, not the legitimacy of piracy, when you share that copypasta.
“Theft” has a legal definition that at least in my jurisdiction is not met by downloading copyrighted materials. So, no, copying is not stealing.
Actually, even if you are an EU citizen, downloading copywritten material for free is very much considered theft. Ever read those FBI or Interpol statements at the beginning of films?
You are wrong. You are talking about copyright infringement, which is a civil matter and not a criminal one. That means the party whose rights have been infringed must prove that and sue you. But you won’t go to jail if convicted, you’ll have to pay damages. That’s why the Netherlands, for example, used to be safe for torrenting. It wasn’t legal, but copyright holders did not have the right to get account details from providers for IP addresses that were caught sharing content (sharing, not downloading) and thus had no one to sue. If it were a criminal matter, the state would be after you and they have a lot more rights.
In many places, downloading is legal. It’s the uploading that’s illegal.
It’s legally called “Copyright Infrigement” and it’s not even part of Criminal Law in most Legal Jurisdictions, unlike Theft.
You’re talking off your arse so hard that by now you must hovering on your own farts.
In this case, the phrase’s become more popular because people buy digital goods and, due to business shenanigans, they lose access to it, like buying a digital copy of a movie, “owning it”, then no longer being able to access it because Sony couldn’t be arsed to get the rights sorted out.
There’s also the numerous situations where you can’t legally own media, simply because it’s not up for sale, like the vast majority of content on streaming sites. There’s no way to own and consume some media except through the provider. It’s still illegal, it’s still an unauthorized copy, but in this case, it’s the only way to “own” something.
Despite crappy licensing agreements and the tenuous relationship between consumers and ownership of a thing, finding a way to circumvent paying for a thing that is for sale in one form or another, is theft.
By that definition making coffee at home and taking it with you to work instead of buying is theft.
Even further anytime you make a product or do a service yourself or get a free alternative (for example, open source software instead of a close-source alternative) instead of buying would be theft by that definition.
That’s not the legal definition of “theft”, it’s not even the historical or common sense definition of “theft”, it’s some kind of neo-Capitalist Dystopia definition of “theft” that only makes sense if you’re starting from a foundation of there being a “right to make money”.
How dare you cook dinner for yourself when McDonald’s is right there? How will the franchise owners or the brand owners be able to buy meals for their children!?
Look man, I get that piracy isnt an ethically clean solution, but the current state of legal digital media is nowhere near ethically clean either, and I’m far more likely to root for a person than I am for a corporation. Especially since its because of corporations that the digital ownership sphere is so fucked
Ever been to a library? Try it. They don’t bite.
I will gladly take a position of moral superiority, because copyright has evolved from a very limited monopoly, intended to encourage creativity while balancing public access, into a licence for corporations to seek rent.
So, call it stealing if you like, I will sleep well tonight regardless.
You’re taking a thing that costs money, for free. I don’t see how it’s anything other than stealing.
If you go to a theme park, and they want $20 for you to enter, and you decide you don’t want to pay, you’ll be in violation of their rules. Those that did pay will leave the park at the end of the day with a great experience, but with no presumption of ownership of the park. This is analogous to piracy by copying a movie. You didn’t want to pay the entrance fee, so you found a way to have the same enjoyment for free. The people that paid for their media, however shitty the licensing agreement is, received the agreed upon service with no presumption of ownership.
I’m not here to defend streaming services or crappy licensing deals, but to pretend that it’s not stealing, gaslighting everyone here into following your train of thought, is the definition of unearned moral superiority. You’re not entitled to free media.
It’s like refusing to pay the $20 park entrance fee and then making your own copy of the park in your backyard. Is that stealing $20 from the park?
I mean it’s still possibly copyright and/or trademark infringement, but…
He didn’t take the movie/music from them. They still have it. It still exists on their tape/film/drive. If you are going to argue, at least argue in good faith, with words that mean what you are trying to say.
The only theft going on is the ongoing theft from the public domain, due to corruption of copyright law by special interests enabled by law for hire. Your analogy is irrelevant as the marginal cost of operating a park for an extra visitor is not zero.
It’s not stealing unless you delete the original when you download it. It’s forgery at best
It’s copyright infringement.
I prefer the term appropriation:
the action of taking something for one’s own use, typically without the owner’s permission
Still doesn’t fit, because you’re not taking anything, you’re making a copy.
Cocksucking cabin is over there --> https://www.motionpictures.org/
Trolls ripped me a new one for saying that. I hope they wont do the same to you. But yes I agree.
I started this meme and have been having a ball watching it go wild. 😁
FYI, the original context was about a software company that bricked it’s customers’ lifetime licenses to force them into a subscription model.
I‘m pretty sure I remember the article about the incident.
It’s a Louis Rossmann video.
Thats possible! Thanks for sharing.
If your business model needs undercover advocates to fake grassroots legitimacy you may have a problem.
Whos going to tell them?
Bankruptcy court?
I think bribing politicians to make it illegal to own anything is more likely.
But stealing is not owning so QED
I can’t find it now, but there was that one text post that went something like “1. Copying a movie costs the studio money, 2. Download a movie, 3. Make 1000 copies, 4. Studio goes bankrupt”
I saw one where it went:
- Publish a copyrighted work
- Sell it for 10 bucks
- Have a friend pirate it 100 million times
- Declare bankruptcy
- Have the friend delete his copies
- You’re a billionaire now
You mean to tell me, people have “you can’t tell me what to do” attitude, especially among men?
I only torrent if the show or movie I want to watch is unavailable on Netflix, and I don’t want to pay for subscription to another streaming service if such shows are available in another. I’m not made of money.
So peculiar how it was easy to attract customers by having a single streaming service with plenty of content, a sane price, and no ads; and yet it is difficult to attract customers by having dozens of services with minimal content, inflating subscriptions, and also ads. Why are customers so hard to understand?
Netflix would have loved to have kept everything on their platform, but once they proved it was profitable, everyone yanked their stuff off and made their own streaming services. Of course, Netflix has shown that it would have become enshittified regardless.
I would gladly pay good money to just download an MP4, but they have never given me that option.
Like GOG, but for movies. GOM?
Hello, yes i would like to buy high res music files, please show me a store that has a large catalog that I can choose from. Oh there are non?
I guess I’ll have to look else where
Qobuz and Bandcamp have almost everything
I’ve been using bandcamp mostly for the indie artists i listen to, seems like Qobuz has a pretty decent selection of more mainstream artists
There’s qobuz but they don’t have everything
Also Bandcamp.
Bot they also don’t have a lot (i buy from both those sites btw)
Qobuz has a lot of DRM-free high-res music.
Oh thanks i haven’t heard of that store I’ll check em out
The media corps have people hooked on non downloadable streaming services. Today’s youth don’t know what an mp3 or a flac file is. Hell, a lot of them have never owned a CD. They’re buying vinyl records (lol) and don’t even own a vinyl record player.
gnutella
You could use streamrip to download high quality FLACs from Tidal and Qobuz if you have a subscription.
Bandcamp now is most user friendly, but even the creators cheat by deleting their 1$ offerings, and Yes I hate bundles of 600 albums for a price of 1$
I have just the song for this
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Thanks, i needed this 🙏
You’re very welcome 🙂
No shit. How have they not figured this out 15 years ago when every DVD had non-skippable anti-piracy messages?
I thought it was sorted 35 years ago when they put the FBI warnings on VCR tapes.
It poses a significant challenge to creative economies worldwide, costing industries billions annually.
Other studies found, that piracy actually increases sales, offsetting the (always oversestimated) loss of revenue.
So, no, that’s a lie.
The real challenge to creative economies are the billionaires sucking all the profit from album sales or deleting television shows from the face of the earth for a tax writeoff.
Agreed. I copied that exact quote to see if someone called it out already. Also this one:
educational messages tend to try and educate the consumer on the moral and economic damage of piracy.
Citation fucking needed.
As an anecdotal example, I pay for Netflix, Spotify, Prime, and Kindle Unlimited (and CBC Gem partly through taxes), I regularly buy videogames and ebooks (and pay for a library with taxes), and I buy phone apps. I’m paying as much as I comfortably can for media in various forms.
I also pirate TV/film content, books, games, apps, operating systems, etc. A lot.
But about half the TV/film piracy is content I have already paid to get streaming access to simply because it’s easier to pirate than figure out which service it’s on, and the other half is mostly freely available on YouTube at garbage quality.
The content industry, net everything, is getting all the cash out of me that they ever will. Piracy has 0 net effect on my media spending; I’d just consume different content, content at a lower quality, spend more time on Where To Stream, and get books from the library a bit more often.
You wouldn’t download an anti-piracy message.
Unironically, I have that ad saved under comedic commercials.
For a while when I had trailers enabled on Plex I would put the anti-piracy one up lol
One of my favourite anecdotes is that the agency stole the music in that ad. After a lot of effort the guy that made it finally got them to pay royalties.
We had an ad that actually said “piracy funds terrorism” here in the UK. Made me laugh my arse off.
I’m curious now, what was the justification for that claim?
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This is a return to office movement all over again hahaha
The conclusion doesn’t follow the study.
Threatening messages decrease piracy by women by over 50%, while increasing piracy by men by 18%.
So, unless there are three times as many male pirates as female, those messages are effective at reducing piracy.
I would suspect there are many times more male pirates than female.
Why?
Because of the technical skill required for pirating and the tech industry being mostly men currently.
My wife set up an ARR stack, because she didn’t like downloading individual episodes. It’s not that hard.
The point is that your wife is in the minority. The vast majority of people wouldn’t consider torrenting, let alone *arrs. People with a greater willingness to tinker and learn technical stuff are the ones who’ll consider it, and that group is overwhelmingly composed of men as of right now.
I’m seeing 3:1 male female from this source, but I figure data collection on torrent users is tricky: https://marketsplash.com/torrent-statistics/
Result of gender stereotypes affecting the behaviour of female and male children, so male children grow up to be more encouraged to learn about technology and engage in risk taking behaviour.
Also inclination to risk taking behaviour is much higher in biological men than biological women, which would also give a potential reason why this advertisment works on women but not on men.
As always these attributions only represent the average of the women and men populations as a whole. Ofc. there is risk averse men and tech savvy women.
The word cis or cisgender is right there my friend. Trans people are still biological, after all.
If I put the over/under at 10x male pirate to female, are you taking the under?
46% of pirates in the UK were women in 2018.
Based on what data?
University of Amsterdam Institute for Information Law, indirectly sourced from here: https://dataprot.net/statistics/piracy-statistics/
I guess we’ll just have to take their word for it since they don’t actually link to anything or provide the data. In fact, that whole statement doesn’t even appear to be attributed to the University of Amsterdam. It appears the preceding statement about 25-34 year olds pirating is what’s attributed to the university.
Bittorrent is also only a portion of pirating, but that’s showing 3:1 globally, https://marketsplash.com/torrent-statistics/
Complete garbage website. Tons of conflicting info, suppositions, and when you bother to look at the sources, their claims quickly fall apart. For example,
In 2022, pirate website visits hit a record of 215 billion.9
-9. “Average Teenager’s iPod Has 800 Illegal Music Tracks” by The Times - written June 2008
So, unless there are three times as many male pirates as female, those messages are effective at reducing piracy.
That would not surprise me at all.
