Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

I watch a lot of movies, usually around 150+ per year. Apple offers one newish movie as the .99 rental per week which I'm happy to pay for but when they come asking for $25 for a digital rental for the rest of the new stuff... Get the fuck outta here.

It's crazy that I can subscribe to Spotify and get virtually the entire history of music but video services have completely fractured the model into tiny shards. I will continue to watch my 150+ movies a year whether the studios want to offer a reasonable price or not.

I'm curious, here in America all the police dramas on TV are largely pro-police narratives, with storylines that paint defense lawyers, internal affairs, those who invoke their right to silence or a lawyer, etc, as people who make the good guy's job harder rather than a system to combat police abuse of power. Are European police dramas any different in that respect? I don't know the differences between how police operate in the US vs in European countries, but I'm curious if it's still largely an overly pro-cop narrative

Honestly I don't think piracy is great. I would rather pay a fair price for easily discoverable content, own it forever on all mediums, and have the bulk of the money go to the creatives who made it so they can pay their bills and feed their families. I don't watch a lot and the little I do should be affordable. I don't feel compelled to collect it all.

But then I go to introduce one of my kids to all the age appropriate comics/graphic novels I bought on Comixology for an older sibling. But Comixology closed down and all the content moved into Kindle with a heap of all ages content, not all appropriate. And Amazon are too cheap to offer family sharing outside the US. So hundreds of dollars in Bezos pocket with no way to put it on a device for my kid. I could waste time breaking the DRM or pirate but I am leaning towards a return to dead trees.

Netflix is crap and getting worse, jumped ship ages ago. Disney is killing genre movies and tv with all their marvel/star wars IP. Both are driven by algorithms and greed and recycle IP instead of taking risks.

I've been slowly growing a smallish server with content, I find growing the numbers to be almost more fun than actually consuming the content I have gained possession of.

Engrenages is the best French cop show.

(unrelated to piracy, though I agree with the main point of the post) I loved Le Bureau des Légendes! Are these shows well-subtitled/dubbed? That's what prevents me from sharing them with my English-speaking friends usually, the language barrier is too great and it's not as usual to watch a subtitled French show than a kdrama f.e

So many kids living in poverty that would've never been able to afford such content have their days slightly less miserable because of piracy. Its not like the corporations are losing a penny, those kids would never be able to pay for it anyways, not in this world of extreme under-regulated capitalism.

(Also, in a perfect world, there wouldn't be poverty, and there would be a fair system to reward the actual content creators, not just the corporation that happens to owns the rights to the concept of that particular Movie/TV Show)

Piracy was likely the only way myself and a large number of my friends graduated college, so yeah.

It's been an interesting full loop. The first rise of P2P file sharing was obviously much more convenient than the combination of broadcast TV and slow-to-release and expensive physical media and the legal fight against it proved pretty useless, beyond shutting down the most obvious for-profit services. Then streaming tipped the scale of convenience, where it was simpler and easier to have an affordable Netflix account than it was to dig through sketchy sites to seek out torrents and only find out later that half of them were actually gay porn.

The history is well known, the question, I guess, is what the next loop around the enshittification path will look like. Are we always doomed to run in circles seeking the optimal experience or can we agree on what it is and deliver it in a somewhat stable fashion at some point?

Me too! The sad thing is that the whole system is set up to prevent people from being able to really choose what to watch. Even within a liberal framework, you'd be forgiven for thinking that the optimum system would be something like 'person decides they want to watch a show with x characteristics, they discover options based on user reviews or a Wikipedia deep dive or w/e, then they click play and the appropriate rights holder is compensated'. It's never just been about compensation though. They can't have users going straight for the good stuff, otherwise what will they do with all the slop?

It makes me very sad tbh. My Dad watches movies all the time, but it's always some average-to-poor Netflix original, because that's what the app surfaces for him.

For anyone else interested in Line of Duty.......