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Do they not know the concept of piracy? That's like Walmart and Target backing a new bill to stop shoplifting.
They could just make a better service. Between the password sharing, and everything being scattered everywhere, what did they expect? I'm going to pay for half a dozen services and still not get to watch what I want? Or I may be able to watch it and pay for the privilege to see ubskippable ads? You can only beat us with so many sticks before we stop feeling it. Come back with a carrot.
It's much harder when all your ISPs and the world's largest DNS resolvers block the IPs or resolving the DNS, which is what this dystopian bill proposes. Make no mistake, this is Orwellian censorship masquerading as piracy protection.
Corporate legislation, making America Great as always.
Best laws money can buy!
Oh. Making something illegal illegal again? That’ll be effective.
It's a slippery slope. Soon they will make doing illegal things a crime.
But not if they're the ones doing the illegal stuff, apparently.
They could take it a step further and threaten penalties for doing illegal things.
If you read the bill, heavily sponsored by the MPA, part of it is about forcing ISPs (and presumably US based VPNs) to block the DNS/URLs of "foreign criminal" sites.
It's laying the groundwork for a Great American Firewall.
If you use a US-based VPN, you fucked up yourself.
Viva la Mullvad. I was sick of being bullied into buying more to get a deal. It may not be the cheapest, but I love that it's the same price across the board.
Plus, the only way you're going to get anything cheaper is by locking into a 1-3 year plan when you may not even need it every month.
So many long games are being played now, it's like everything is laying groundwork for something else. Would be nice for laws to just do what they do.
Freedomwall
Wouldn't be the first wall he put up in the name of freedom
DoH!
You can't legislate piracy away...
But they can make up excuses for their arsenal for whenever they want to ban a site they don't like from common eyes.
"It was banned because it was pornography"
"It was banned because it was displaying pirated content"
"It was banned because it harmed the public good"
They want control over what the common people can see, hear, say, and think.
Yeah, but for every dictator there's countless intelligent revolutionaries. Especially when it comes to the internet.
They're really shooting themselves in the foot trying to deny us/force overcharge the very thing they use to make us complacent in the first place: media.
If they were smart they'd ignore this bill. It would just bring attention to their attempt to essentially seize the internet and for what? For us just to get around it again anyway?
Not to mention if they enforce US VPNs to conform it'll just result in more currency leaving the country. No wonder this fucking floundering economy is all our fault.
Governing is like holding a marble to the table with your thumb. The more you press down, the more likely that marble is to shoot out and break your shit.
The people who create these services will always be more clever and quick to implement workarounds than politicians. It's a futile battle.
Want to avoid piracy? Make getting things easier and more convenient.
Back when Netflix was £5-10 depending on tier, had a load of content, and an account could be shared between a few trusted people, I practically gave up pirating. Now it's £18 per month for 4K (and due to rise), and doesn't have those other positives going for it, I've abandoned it in favour of Radarr+Sonarr+Plex, and am having a better experience.
For video games, I predominantly buy from Steam, because it's a good service, and so far I have not seen any evidence that Valve are going to fuck me over. They've made gaming and all the things ancillary to it a lot more convenient. So I happily pay. If they embrace enshittification, guess what I'll do?
The only games I do pirate are Nintendo/Sega games that haven't been sold in decades. Why? Because there's no feasible other way to buy them and keep them!
I don't pirate music because Spotify. For all the issues I have with it (and boy do I have a few), it still has almost every song I search for, is fairly priced, and hasn't clamped down on account sharing in the same way Netflix/Disney/etc have. I'm part of a family where we split the cost. All the music I could possibly want for £2.20 per month? Fine by me! If that goes away, I go away, yarr harr.
Not to mention Valve spearheaded major development for making Linux gaming like 200% better than it used to be, with development of Proton and everything, and giving all those work back to the entire gaming community as open source products entirely for free, bring in momentum for an entire industry.
That's a company you support.
I'm so fucking glad Valve isn't beholden to shareholders.
Oh no!
Anyway.
We only pirate TV because it's easier and cheaper. If you actually had a catch all service (like old Netflix) for a low price, people would stop. Oh wait, we had that but greed got in the way again...
I used to be perfectly happy with Netflix and Google music + YouTube Red, but corporations were too greedy
I now use a mix of free Kodi TV, patched YouTube apps, rip music off tidal, and self host media on a lifetime premium Plex server.
As has often been reiterated: piracy is a service problem. If what you get by paying more is an inferior service, then people don’t want to pay for that service.
100% true, haven't pirated a single game since I started using Steam and actually having a paycheck since about 10 years ago
They don’t care. They don’t want to innovate, they want to force you to pay them for nothing in return.
This falls under enshitification, no?
Yes
It is impossible to ban piracy. The whole concept is that it's not legal to begin with.
I bet Lars Ulrich is so proud that he killed music piracy back when he killed napster.
Except wait.....no he didn't he killed A service. Meaning singular. The concept of piracy moved on. We got limewire and torrents.
The ONLY thing that has slowed (if not stopped) music piracy is making the content readily and easily available in a convienent consumption method at a reasonable price.
Shocking, I know.
The invention of iTunes CHARGING money for music in a (at the time) new more convienent method of music consumption at a reasonable price did leaps and bounds more to destroy piracy than Napsters downfall ever could.
Now if only video services would learn this lession. Because it's the same lession. I don't know how they missed the memo on this.
Put your video in one centralized place. Make it hassle free to watch. Charge a reasonable price. Piracy dies overnight.
And just to prove it, show of hands. Who here would go through the effort and risk of pirating, if Netflix had everything you wanted to watch, for $5 a month? Who here would say no, and still pirate? Reply below and tell me if you would still pirate with those conditions?
But instead, netflix is pushing $20 a month, and the video hosting is fractured among multiple hosts, all of which overcharge, AND want to serve ads.
Oh hey, right on cue. It's a skull and bones flag approaching.
Word... this is why I used spotify for a long time, when it used to be a good service... pirating wasn't worth the hassle.
now almost everything is worth the hassle
I remember as kids we shared music by Bluetooth or copying files on a memory stick. You are not stopping that.
I would still pirate. I like to have the files instead of proprietary apps
"Effectively kill piracy" - Sure guys, this time it'll work.
They already banned pornhub and pornographers. Fascists are going to fash.
I'm curious how effective those bans have been. Is free porn difficult to access in states that have added verification laws or has it only affected the larger players that get attention while the ones that most people don't usually think immediately of fly under the radar?
You hit the nail on the head, it's just the biggest sites
This is dumb considering that these types of streaming sites are how I actually discover anime and become a fan enough that i want to purchase merch. I pay for Crunchy Roll, but sometimes I want to check out stuff from other services. If I had to rely sheerly on legal services I wouldn't watch or discover half of what I did.
Legal services are also pretty inferior. I wanted to watch A certain Scientific Railgun.. Season 1 was dubbed, but season 2 on the service wasn't... I literally had to track it down on some streaming site to get access to what I'm paying for.
Yeah because pirates are notorious for giving up immediately when you make their jobs a little harder.
Make something people want to buy. That will help more.
EDIT On the anime and manga. Quite a few Japanese companies don't or refuse to officially release stuff in the west. Most of the ones who do, get fucked with by bad localizers.
This is why you run servers outside of five eye countries
Sounds like their strategy is to force US companies to block access to piracy sites.
I already run my torrent client through a non-US VPN so this can literally be bypassed by adding this to my prowlarr docker compose:
network_mode: service:gluetun
