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 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), 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.
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?
Both. But we already knew the point wasn’t to ban free press, but ID people online like the Koreas.
You hit the nail on the head, it’s just the biggest sites
Someone I know told me their usual site is no verification, but sometimes finding content through Google on the big sites triggers an ID verification.
Make something people want to buy. That will help more.
It’s crazy that Netflix originally knew this back in the 2010s. Somehow, over the years, they managed to forget this little nugget of wisdom.
They didn’t forget, they simply became big enough they can act like every other corporation.
“Effectively kill piracy” - Sure guys, this time it’ll work.
why they gotta make the headline almost sound like they gon’ ban anime, don’t do us dirty man
But wouldn’t that go against freedom of expression and the internet?
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The current administration is seemingly trying to kill the very concept of free speech and expression.
It might. If it causes undue burden on ISPs or services like Cloudflare, for example, the law will probably be scrapped by some part of Congress or a judge.
And even if it somehow survives all of that, a VPN with a server in another country will make this bill pointless.
Anyone offhandedly know how this would affect Usenet
I imagine it’s possible but it sounds like they’re going after low hanging fruit like streaming sites and it also states that they can’t prevent people from using VPNs to get around the blocking.
Usenet is perfectly controllable for this kind of thing.
Also it’s not intended for sharing binaries, that’s bad behavior.
I can see something new, distributed (no servers), but with Usenet’s feel and paradigm, being the pinnacle of piracy. But there is no such thing.
Effectively kill anime 😀
Piracy ☹️
I don’t currently sail the high seas, but clamping down on access and making it harder to enjoy content, increasing prices, blocking account sharing, and adding unskippable ads and promos make me want to pirate, just out of spite!
Brilliant. Make murder illegal now.
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.
Then we have to build a community DNS 🤷🏻♀️ you can’t really block free internet
It’s hard and complex, but they can. And they aim to.
I mean, why not onion routing and tor?
Tor can be blocked.
We’ve been able to chat with people inside failed/repressive states forever even though their governments very much want to block it. Blocking communication between people who want to talk is incredibly difficult. They can make it hard but I’m not sure they can stop it completely.
North Korea was able to stop it. Granted, they literally just don’t allow any of the tech in the hands of the average person with threat of torture or death. But dystopian is as dystopian does.
I see your point, though, and it’ll likely always be possible to bypass those controls, at least for people with the know-how. But that’s not the average citizen. Let’s do what we can to ensure it doesn’t come to this in the first place.
Corporate legislation, making America Great as always.
Best laws money can buy!
Not in this particular case, not yet, you can view it’s status HERE and it’s still at 0 cosponsors.
Hard to discuss this bill since the text isn’t even on there yet. But apparently companies expressing approval have seen it.
Difficulty aside, it’s currently a non-bill as far as anybody should be concerned. There is a lot going on and this isn’t really something until it gets more representatives behind it.
I mean ffs the new admin struck down Net Neutrality already, where are the people concerned by that?
They weren’t worried about it last time and they’re not worried about it now.
My only faith in the system is that they will screw over such a wide number of people that it’ll piss people off enough to care.
This is why you run servers outside of five eye countries
I have heard that phrase before, but I am unsure what it denotes specifically.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes
Basically countries part of (or allied) with the countries that are part of the UKUSA agreement.
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…
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
Why just pay one service a small fee for ad free streaming, when you can pay a lot of services a large fee for ad supported streaming?
I miss my $8 a month google music + YouTube red… I wonder if people got to keep the legacy price for YouTube premium
If you actually had a catch all service
I believe this used to be called cable tv.
But before you reply, yeah, I know cable didn’t get everything. And you had to pay extra for Disney, HBO, etc. And on top of the exorbitant price there were always tons of commercials. That’s all true.
But I do remember a time right around 2005, when everyone was saying “if only there were a-la-carte options, for people who only want sports, or only want movies”. My point being, there’s no winning and the grass is always greener somewhere.
And for what it’s worth, I basically agree with you. I use Plex, I have a few friends who also run Plex servers and we all share content. That’s the best catch all I’ve ever found.
The problem with cable was it was not on demand and contained ads.
I would never, ever pay for cable even in today’s world if it was $10 a month because of the overwhelming amount of ads.
Just you wait till you see the arr stack (radarr, sonarr, lidarr, etc.)
I really only hoard music media on Plex as I already have friends who collect movies on Plex and I use streaming services like Ororo.tv and Otaku for everything else
I tried Lidarr but I find that it is inconsistent enough that it is just a find-and-grab utility for me.
I much prefer ripping tidal tracks on my phone using a tidal-dl in termix and then just using a ftp to my Pi when I get home
… You know that feeling when you get nerd sniped. 😭
FWIW, Lidarr works the worst out of the arr stack for me too. I don’t know if there’s just not enough well indexed material in my sources or what, but yeah, not great.
If your entire experience with the arr stack has been Lidarr so far, give it another shot! Sonarr and Radarr work absolutely perfectly. It’s just such a nice feeling to open Jellyfin (or I guess Plex) on the TV and go “oh nice new episode is out!”
If you’re in a private tracker like RED or OPS it works very well, but I agree that public trackers are not well indexed enough
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
Aren’t most torrent sites not based in the US to begin with?
Has never stopped the world bully from bullying others: https://legalnewsfeed.com/2024/07/09/z-library-administrators-flee-house-arrest-in-argentina-ahead-of-u-s-extradition/
True, but I think the world bully is about to find out that it isn’t the world bully anymore now that it’s bullying itself.
This is about foreign websites
It’s going after ISPs, Google, Cloudflare that allow access to them
Also it’s great to see the Democrats prioritizing this atm
