I’m currently watching The Practice. One of my favorite shows. Over the years it’s been on Netflix, prime, and shit like peacock and tubi. I can’t keep up with all that. Right now it’s in Amazon prime which I have but can’t watch because I have a “business” account and according to Amazon I shouldn’t be watching shows and movies on a “business” account.
Soooo… To the high seas I go. Not that I don’t want to pay for it but because it’s so much easier.
And now I’ll have the show for whenever I want to watch it.
We have literal Nazis stealing all our private information right this second…but THIS is the bill that gets to the floor?
Fiddling while Rome burns.
I don’t think you understand. Rome burning is the distraction. Shit like this is the real goal. The U.S. will be lucky if it hasn’t collapsed to neo-feudalism in the next four years.
is anime a form of Piracy?! One Piece I guess?!
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!
Stop hiking prices on streaming services and making them awful to use while ending sales of physical media and I won’t pirate content.
Totally on board.
Physical media meant straightforward ownership. I have it and I will have it. The distributor I bought from went out of business? I don’t notice, my copy still works. My distributor turns out not to have had the rights to sell it to me? Well that’s bad but it’s done and I have my copy. I start a series and I know I can finish it before the rights move to some other distributor.
Netflix early streaming days were magic. One service had rights to pretty much everything and was relatively affordable. Now each service has a tiny fraction of old Netflix and each one costs more than twice what Netflix streaming did. Frankly paying 3x the netflix price would have been fine if the trend continued except for pricing, but alas, here we are. Also, there’s no amount of money to pay to some of these services to make them shut up with ads, even with ‘ad-free’ offerings/plans.
I checked it again and its STILL at 0 Cosponsors and sitting in the committees inbox if it wasn’t already rejected.
Even if it passed making piracy super extra illegal+ it’s targeting google and cloud flare to block access to sites within 15 days that could still easily be reached outside their boundaries. It’s political theater for mpaa riaa etc industry association lobbyists to show they got something for their bribes.
Brilliant. Make murder illegal now.
Wasting their time
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?
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.
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.
Best laws money can buy!
Same with freedom lol.
Oh. Making something illegal illegal again? That’ll be effective.
It’ll be super duper illegal
It’s a slippery slope. Soon they will make doing illegal things a crime.
Brb connecting to a Chinese VPN so I can access content outside of the US Firewall.
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.
I’m locked into ExpressVPN for a year but I was thinking about switching to Mullvad shortly. ExpessVPN isn’t bad but being in the British Virgin Islands does give me a bit of anxiety.
Mullvad has a lot of perks. Like I mentioned, no deals for buying yearly. Get it month by month for the same price. No account connections. You get an ID number and that’s it. That ID is your password and username. Pay with nearly anything. Crypto, card, money services, even mail in physical cash.
There’s a lot to love about it, and it hands down has some of the fastest tunnels I’ve used. Nord was always half my internet speed no matter what I connected to. You don’t even need Google Play if you want to use it on android. It’s open source, so grab it right on F-Droid. Easily supports any OS. If you don’t want a GUI, there’s a CLI alternative, too.
This advertisement was not paid for by Mullvad VPN.
Thanks! Honestly the only reason I paid for yearly was because I’ve had it for like five years now and I got sick of paying $12 every month.
Plus the one benefit I like is I paid extra for a dedicated IP (mostly used for my streamer since it has better luck with my streaming services like Prime UK; though I’m ending Prime at the end of the year)
Yeah, I canceled Prime a few years back and it hasn’t hurt me at all. You really get nothing in return, except maybe Prime Day deals and even then you can find the deals elsewhere. I’ve taken to cutting out the middleman and ordering through the product’s actual website to better support them.
Mullvad has been €5 since 2009. Comes to a little over $6. $12 is just highway robbery. You won’t regret the switch.
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
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?
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 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!”
I don’t really watch TV much in the first place of my own choice. A few things my partner wants to watch but that’s about it. Music I get download with yt-dpl -x, I think that was it anyway as I set an alias for it
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
I miss my $8 a month google music + YouTube red… I wonder if people got to keep the legacy price for YouTube premium
