this post was submitted on 21 Nov 2023
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

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Summary: A recent UK government inquiry into the challenges faced by the film and high-end television industry has recently received submissions from major Hollywood studios advocating for KYC (know your customer) rules for hosting providers, similar to banking regulations to identify money laundering. If adopted, this would help them to identify people hosting pirated content.

The submissions are united in identifying the same solution to this problem: the UK must implement a ‘Know Your Business Customer’ regime to compel commercial entities (including online intermediaries) to establish the true identity of their business customers as a precondition for selling, and receiving payment for, digital services.

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (6 children)

I've always wondered what the genuine 'cost' of pirating is. Like if someone from a developing country pirates then it doesn't count because they wouldn't have bought it any way due to the high price. And if someone from a developed country pirates, but there is no reasonable alternative, then that is void too. I wouldn't be surprised if that number was really low. Why go through the trouble of pirating if you can pay for it and get a reasonable service?

[–] [email protected] 16 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Why go through the trouble of pirating if you can pay for it and get a reasonable service?

That's why it's a service problem.
As a student (around 5-6 years ago) my friend and I both payed for a netflix account via gift cards because we wanted it and didn't have paypal or credit cards.

Now I pirate because there are way too many services, for too high of an asking price and fragmented catalog.
Want to see all the seasons of a show? Gotta subscribe to two or more services because one stroke a deal with the publisher while the 2nd got the other part.
Also censoring both in episode and by removing whole episodes, changing parts of something etc etc.

Fuck all the above. :|
I can just call up radarr, search the movie by the parameters I set up beforehand and decide what version I want and done.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Why go through the trouble of pirating if you can pay for it and get a reasonable service?

I literally don't know any platform other than Steam that dose anything reasonable with digital content.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 11 months ago

I'd argue Bandcamp does Artists set the price, and the files downloaded are .flac or mp3 without any DRM.

They got sold, which resulted in layoffs recently...so no telling how long it lasts. But right now, they're reasonable in my book.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Not only its cheaper but also the service is starting to get better than if you'd pay for it

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago

Louis Rossman's recent video on this is good.

And yeah, my Plex server doesn’t fuck me about the way the streaming services do.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 11 months ago

Here's my take on it. Things like Radarr, Sonarr, Jackett, etc offer a better service then Disney+, Netflix, Hulu, etc. Devs could charge for the *arrs and a lot of people would pay. Why? Because it's completely a la carte. Right now if there are say three shows I'm interested in then I could have to pay for three different streaming services. But not only that, I would also have to be concerned with whether or not that show is leaving the platform anytime soon. In the case of Hulu, not only do I have to worry about paying them but I also have to worry about paying them enough that I don't have to watch ads after paying them.

Likewise with video games, there are games that have DLCs that require previous DLCs to fully unlock what they include. In other words, it is paywalling already paywalled content. I don't have a problem with the content, I have a problem with the way they present the content.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago

Copyright today is shit tho. It'd be more logical to talk about how much it costs the public to maintain a fundamentally broken system to keep a few companies with a dysfunctional business model on life support.

Rights holders take people and organisations to court for a lot of shit that should be thrown straight out of court. But no no, the people who protect and protected the interests of organisations that benefit from copyright laws wrote the copyright laws. If they couldn't pass their extremist copyright laws locally, they'd try again nationally, then internationally, until their contradictory and ass-backwards copyright laws got passed. Other countries copied these laws.

  • Copyright laws implicit registration robs the public domain of works made by unidentifiable authors.
  • Copyright laws force the digital world to play by impossible rules.
  • Copyright laws forbid DRM circumvention, but that contradicts with existing copyright rights.
  • Copyright laws forbid digitization of analog media if the judge considers this untransformative or unfair use.
  • Copyright laws may allow snippet taxes for daring to use an excerpt of a news article without paying an arm and a leg.
  • Copyright laws may forbid fair use, banning reviews, etc.
  • Copyright laws force libraries to buy e-books under unfair conditions due to DRM and the digitization edge case.

... the list goes on. Copyright laws in their current form should be thrown in the trash and burned alive while we can. The EU Copyright Directive is so fundamentally broken that member states postpone enacting the directive into national laws, years after the set deadline. Member states copy and paste the directive, unwilling to spend the effort to revise existing laws to conform to the over-reaching copyright directive.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago (2 children)

I think there must be some legal worry if they don't enforce their copyright so they have to pretend to care about low level piracy.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

That seems like a reasonable explanation. It's just like when someone makes a picture of mickey mouse. Of course it's not a real issue but they'll still enforce copyright.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

That's trademark. Copyright isn't like that.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

In the us there is a 3 year statute of limitations by law. A 2014 supreme court decision stated that "laches" could still be applied in very narrow cases.

Copyright and other laws will be different for other countries.