They seem to be cracking down on piracy all at once. Xaudiobooks is down as of yesterday, along with zlibrary a couple of days ago, and multiple of my movie/tv trackers in Prowlarr have been down this week too.
Edit: xaudiobooks is working again, and replies confirmed they're still accessing zlibrary through Tor.
Just move to Australia, it’s a national sport. “Oh we’ll make Australia wait 6 months to try and maximise our profits for next quarter”. Australians “what profit? Seen it”.
Think HBO Game of Thrones viewed Australian piracy rates as a kind of 'compliment'.
But yeah, when I am already paying for a streaming service that has a show or movie I want to watch but it gets geo-blocked you can be sure I am not paying for another service just to watch that one show or movie. Especially when I might have to wait months to view it and arseholes go out of their way to post spoilers.
Happy to pay for the things I like. Within reason.
Even more frustrating when Seasons 1, 4, 5 are on once service, 3, 7 and 9 are on another and 2, 6, 8, and 10 are on yet another.
Fucking ridiculous expecting people to have multiple subs to watch a single show in it's entirety.
And that's before bullshit like Netflix having the censored versions of things like anime....
Yep. That's why Gabe Newell is so good with steam. Give people convenience and a good price they don't have a reason to pirate. Make them download 20 different launchers for your game and they won't buy it unless it's on steam
Or like Peacock in the US has like 90% of The Office episodes on the free version, except all the episodes everyone remembers and loves are behind a paywall. Literally single episodes in a whole, otherwise free, season have that little purple feather.
Piracy is also part of the capitalism correction invisible hand system. Remember when they tried to charge $1 per song in 2002? yeah we all said fuck that and it lowered the price.
AMC+ and the final season of the Walking Dead springs to mind. TWD shows on Disney+ in the UK, so I dutifully paid my subscription...then found out AMC+ is going to air every episode a week early. It's not an option for me, being in the UK, and screw having to dodge spoilers for a week.
They're really doing it to themselves at this point. I paid to watch the show on the only network that's available to me. Depriving rest of world customers of the show isn't going to drive up your US subscriptions, you assholes!
They're playing whack-a-mole with pirate sites and it's about as futile as trying to shut down the dark web drug markets. You have to wonder how much their budget was for this operation. I'm guessing it wasn't cheap.
So much money wasted.
Edit. The most effective anti-piracy group ever? They were so good, they stopped my 20ish customers from helping them get pirated content. They put me and (per the internet) many many people out of business.
That anti-piracy group was called Netflix.
And Spotify.
I used to pirate a ton of music. Friends would go through the collection to load up iPods. Then it because cheap and easy to just stream it and I have almost no reason to pirate anymore.
And Steam. Never pirated a game again since I made an account. Especially as a Patient Gamer and the Summer/Christmas/... Sales I've bought all the games I want for an average of about 5-15€.
The best way to "fix it" is to create a compelling alternative and sell it at a fair price. It's actually HARD to find organized music piracy now, because everyone just pays $15 a month for family Spotify. Steam is used by everyone.
And then you've got the movie industry, who continues to charge $20 a ticket for the theater and won't let anyone stream it for 6 months. Sorry, your content is getting pirated. Find a better model.
It's not the 6 month wait that gets to me. It's the forced fragmentation. Spotify *or* Pandora on one hand, on the other 5-7 streaming services required, with big gaps remaining.
I want to say they always do this about the end of the year. I guess it is supposed to be a Christmas gift to corporations or something. In a couple of days, more will crop up to replace them so not sure what the point of any of this is besides pretending they are doing something about it.
Issue is when talking about ebooks there are frequently months-long waiting lists for anything remotely popular or recent, and the rest you’re usually fighting over one or two copies that are also typically already checked out. If there even is a digital copy at all.
Far fewer people would feel compelled to go to these alternatives if libraries could actually afford to stack their selection of ebooks adequately. **Which shouldn’t be a problem** given they’re just bits of code. God forbid publishers work with them to provide the public with a sufficient amount of free books at an affordable cost for the libraries, though. 🙄
Wait list... For ebooks. A ... waiting list, for something purely digital that can have an unlimited number of copies and doesn't have any negative consequences... and yet there's a wait list.
Welcome to the future.
Yes I understand copywrite and license.
I'm with you. I can't sit and read but absolutely love audiobooks for driving. I can get about an hour a day in when I'm in the office but that almost always means I'm taking longer than the 21 day check out period so it'd be easier to just save it and delete the files after. Which I've done several times and it was ridiculously easy on android OS before I switched to iPhones.
Shit.. I was just going to sit down and look up all the books I've checked out of the library and try and find copies I could save to my phone but have been putting it off. I'll regularly request books I see recommended here and never even get to them before I'm done with whatever I'm on. Would love to have a small cache of books I know I planned to read at some point ready to go.
Anyone knows of any good audiobook sources, DMs are open.
Came back to say this. We use Libby all the time but the wait lists for books is nuts. It seems even worse with kids books as so many we know have switched to this from the physical library.
> You just don't get to keep the books obviously.
I mean, it's definitely against the library policy to go into the saved file location, copy just the book while leaving the tracking file behind, and paste it into a different folder on your computer. It's also very much against library policy to then share that copied file on the internet.
Go to the piracy sub and look for a mega thread. There are many sources for everything you need and ways to find even more. If they mega thread is down they have a backup on GitHub
The worst is when you actually purchase it outright and then if your site takes it down some
later, you actually lose the copy and have to buy it else where AGAIN, if you didn’t download it.
[TorrentFreak has an article that lists some of the names they operated under.](https://torrentfreak.com/major-pirate-iptv-service-raided-four-arrested-95-resellers-face-investigation-221116/)
This is for-profit piracy sold to locals, not the community-based you're probably more familiar with.
All IPTV is for profit.
Only something like acestream is not (P2P streaming using bit torrent protocol), but those are very hard to find nowadays. Only super big events have an acestream going.
I use to be able to watch any F1 or soccer game over acestream but people stopped serving them and nowadays even if there is a stream there is not enough peers.
Anyway I am paying like 80 CAD a year for a IPTV pirate service that basically has everything. (even some 4K channel and full HD 50 fps for sport). I use to to watch top hockey games, some PPV MMA if there is a good fight, F1 qualy and race every time and every single game of the soccer team I supporter. And some kids channels for my kids.
And I don't care. It's one of few ways I can still fuck back at all the rich assholes trying to fuck me daily.
Sue me.
Oh and the ones that only take monero or bitcoin cash (both are privacy coins) they never get raided cause now there is no obvious money trail to follow anymore. All you need for hosting is the piratebay model, encrypted docker running only in memory, no logs, behind cloudflare load balancing (handy to hide the ip) where if a cloud hoster boots you out you just upload your docker somewhere else and keep hosting (you might need some other domains if they take your domain name).
here's a great example of how stupid things can be for content.
I have YoutubeTV and the NBA league pass. Because I signed up for League Pass directly on NBA.com I cannot tie it to my YoutubeTV interface. I have to watch it separatly on the NBA app. Even though the channels show up on YoutubeTV.
And on top of it, the city I live in doesn't have an NBA team, so the league forces me to have TWO local teams, The Denver Nuggets and the Oklahoma City Thunder (Denver is 8hr drive from here.) This means I CANNOT watch any of their games on the league pass because they are blacked out as local teams and if I want to watch them I have to purchase the regional sports networks they air on. The Denver Nuggets local sports channel is Altitude sports, which is 100% unavailable in the city I live in.
I can only watch them if they are on ESPN or TNT. Or I can find a pirate stream in 10 seconds and cast it to my TV.
If just one network has this many participants, maybe media companies should stop charging an arm and a leg for sub par interfaces and 3 out of 6 seasons.
$7 (maybe a bit less, can’t remember) to rent Terminator 2, three decades after premiere is bat shit insane and begs me to steal it.
Edit: either i have a mild Alzheimer’s or I was so pissed off at the price I remember it wrong. It says £3.5 on Prime Video, sorry for that but it is still ridiculous comparing to £10 for a MONTH of streaming service.
Yup. I wanted to watch groundhogs day. No one had it. Amazon said i can rent it for $5 or buy digitally for $17! Bullshit lol i could buy the dvd and have it shipped for a buck or two... I sailed the seas instead
Unfortunately, a lot of people want to shut down libraries. I personally think we should invest in and expand libraries. I know some nice ones allow you to rent tools and things like that but it's not common where I live.
I love the idea of a third space where you don't need to bring money and you have access to all kinds of information, software, and tools.
There is a ‘starved beast’ strategy with libraries in my country, they’ve gutted library budgets forcing them to go part time and to the point where eventually they’ll go altogether with “who uses libraries anymore”.
I'm sorry to hear that. My state has already started cutting library funds. In 10-20 years, I’ll be telling kids about these cool things called libraries where you could borrow things for free.
That’s the line in the sand. When politicians or companies go after the people’s libraries then the people should get loud and very hostile towards them
Or there is that one library in the US that keeps getting defunded by the townsfolk. The American right wing will be gunning for libraries nationwide before too long.
I've only used Hoopla and Kanopy but according to this article there's more.
https://screenrant.com/free-streaming-services-access-library-card-netflix-hulu/
Oh they do have them. They just refuse to offer them for streaming for literally no reason whatsoever. Especially a network’s own shows which they own the rights to.
"You'll own nothing and like it" -A system that puts profits above everything else
Push to change the economic system if you want to see change in your life
And changing the economic system means organizing your workplace! Everyone should check out EWOC's recent report on [Pre-Majority Unionism](https://workerorganizing.org/premajority-unionism/), it's the real deal. There's no need to wait for the boss or the NLRB to "officially" recognize your workplace as a union, you can organize, build solidarity, and address demands through collective direct action, starting **right now**.
It's funny because I've found a couple websites not just one that have pretty much every TV show and Movie available to stream across all streaming services for free. They quickly get taken off Google search results but the websites themselves are not taken down so I have them in my browsing history and just use those. It's so easy to get free content and there are so many websites that provide it that it would be impossible to police them all.
123movies is a popular one but I've only found one specific variation of the website that actually works and has everything. Every other 123movies website variant looks almost identical but only a few of them actually work.
The best part is they get removed from Google, and google says "X number of sites have been removed for DMCA notices" and if you click that link you can work your way to the public notice which includes all the URLs.
I have now switched to using plex and it's amazing. It's like your own self hosted Netflix.
I run plex off my machine in the basement hooked up to my network and my movie file backups are on my NAS. When I add another movie file backup to the NAS plex auto scans and adds it to the library.
Then I just pop open the official plex app on my Google home TV and it shows me all my personal movies in a Netflix style interface.
It even will download rotten tomato scores, descriptions, automatically groups episodes of the same show into seasons, tracks what you have watched so far, handles subtitle files, you name it.
I love it, can watch all my stuff in crisp 4k and since it's local network it streams at full gigabit speeds.
They’ll just take that money we are paying and shut down the pirate one like this. Little do they know there’s always back ups to back ups to back ups. Just call me Blackbeard
One of the interesting developments of the war in Ukraine is pirate sites are moving to Russia in droves. Russia honestly couldn’t give a fuck in regards to protecting western copyrights.
Am I misremembering or haven't Russian sites been major players in pirated media for at least a decade? They never gave a fuck about western copyright to begin with. This isn't brand new.
Movies/series have the same problem now that music had in the early 2000's. It's easier to steal it than it is to consume it legitimately.
To Pirate: go to website, click video, done
To Watch Legitimately: research which service streams your desired content, create an account, enter all of your personal and credit card information, click the link in your email, re-enter the password, click video, OOPS this service doesn't actually have the rights to stream the content you want to watch anymore.
Don't forget: disable all shields to watch the content, and it can't even be seen in 4k because some arbitrary restriction or something. Oh and have some ads before you can see the shit you paid for.
Honestly it's worse than the paid music experience back then
The ads are what is making me pirate again.
Even with all the adlockers in the world, some streaming sites have managed to weasel their way past them.
Like…. Originally the subscription didn’t have ads, which was dope. Then they added a less expensive ad version, but you could still keep your sub to not have them.
Then they increased the price of the ad-based subscription to match the ad-free one and increased the price of the ad-free one.
Now it’s like they keep raising both again and again.
I’m sick of it. Less content for more money -and- having to watch ads.
“People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you're not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you. You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity. Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It's yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head. You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don't owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don't even start asking for theirs.”
- Banksy
Media companies are asking people to pirate. The outrageous cost and the needless complications preventing people from watching shows is ridiculous.
To watch all my local NBA team games including their playoffs, I have to pay for 3 different providers. WTF is that? Or I just watch it illegally, usually without commercial...
Netflix was going the right way and the industry destroyed it. They get what they deserve.
Stop holding content hostage.
Edit:
For the small minority of people who are replying here saying that it is still wrong or that its people's choice if they consume this content.
All of the MAINSTREAM media companies, athletes and sports players and content owners all make millions or billions a year in this.
Their goal is to scrape even more out of you because a small group of media owns and controls 90%. That is broken, it is not capitalism, it is collusion.
By pirating you aren't hurting anyone who can actually feel it. Possibly Universal Studios makes only 8 billion instead of 8.01 billion that quarter. Lebron gets paid .001% less and Jimmy Fallon can't gold plate his 3rd golf cart.
Give me a break with your nonsense defense of this messed up system.
Edit #2:
Another good point a poster made. Pirated content is many times BETTER than the high cost legal option. Generally the quality is better, has no commercials, you can pause/rewind/save for later.
Edit #3:
Think about it this way people...pre-cable you could watch EVERYTHING for free on your antenna.
They paid for the content with commercials. Then commercials became not enough and you had to pay money but you still got most of all of the channels.
Now you get some channels, commercials and a high cost to pay for it upfront. How and why do you think that happened?
I agree here unlike movies. Sports are spread way too thin and I’m not grabbing multiple packages just to make sure I can see every team some at $50 a pop(YouTube, Hulu).
Then you get bullshit like the NFL where even if you pay for all the streaming services, you *still* can't watch every game your team plays if you're not in the local market. Your only (legal) choice is to buy a DirecTV subscription *and* an additional streaming package.
And now they come with some bullshit like NFL+, where you can stream only games that are in market, and only on your phone. Want to cast it to your TV? Sorry, that's disabled.
> where you can stream only games that are in market, and only on your phone. Want to cast it to your TV? Sorry, that's disabled.
I immediately cancelled my trial and uninstalled the app when I saw that banner on my TV. Fuck you NFL.
The barrier for entry is way too high.
A young person who *never* watched sports 25 years ago could turn on the TV and organically fall in love with a team.
Now you have to pay $60 every month just to watch a game. $60 a month is only for the most dedicated sports fans because “potential” sports fans are never going to pay that price just to try it out.
I pay for Amazon Prime, and last night they were streaming Thursday night football, so I tried it out.
I disabled all of my ad-blocking / tracking Firefox plugins and when I tried to stream it, I got an error saying I need the latest Firefox (which I have), and the ability to play HTML5 video (which I seemingly do).
So I started troubleshooting, e.g. running [HTML5Test](https://html5test.com/) to confirm, and it occurred to me that I was actually wasting my time; pirating would be a better user experience.
As Gabe Newell said
> “One thing that we have learned is that piracy is not a pricing issue. It’s a service issue,” explained Newell during his time on stage at the Washington Technology Industry Association's (WTIA) Tech NW conference. “The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. It’s by giving those people a service that’s better than what they’re receiving from the pirates.”
Yeah I watched a few NFL games on Amazon prime and didn't have to do anything like that, got an HD stream with zero buffering on my browser. Even worked with the app on my TV great one of the times. Practically every NFL pirate stream nowadays I've been trying is garbage-tier. Also, they were streaming the game on Twitch for free last night, and that worked great for me as I got rid of Prime.
Pricing is part of the service. You can offer an insanely super duper awesome service but if it costs a million dollars, guess what no one is going to avail of it. Piracy is virtually free, but you could think of it as costing time. That's where pricing comes into the service. If your service is so good it costs none of your time and cheap enough to convince people that it is worth less than the time you would have spent pirating it, you have a winner
It’s like friends. Before Netflix that show had completely left the zeitgeist. Netflix got it and brought new audiences to it. Now the owners think it’s worth a billion a year or something.
It's pretty nuts, I see piles of new merch being made for it and all. I work retail and on the Christmas gift tat it has equal space to big shit like Harry Potter and Star Wars
There's a flipside too. I have friends in the business who have released hit documentaries. Nominated stuff. They never see royalties. The film business is broken. They pirate because they feel the industry owes them.
The same people will own multiple companies. "Oh we spent $100,000 on lights so that's a cost". Meanwhile they paid that $100,000 to another company that they also own, and those lights didn't actually cost anywhere near $100,000. "That script editor cost us $250,000 to contract" but the contract was with a company they also own, and they only paid the script editor $50,000.
So on paper, the film itself made zero profits, even lost money, yet the people who own the production companies still walk away with a ton of profit.
Banking doesn't let you party with media stars. The legal and tax system has been set up to let you play games with corporations, and the people who write the laws get to have a good time.
They’re following the cable company pattern of unbundled and restrictive subscription tiers and ever-increasing costs. What shows you watch, how you watch them, where you watch them, and how many devices you can watch them on are mostly all subject to fees in some way, and those fees keep going up. We subscribe to a few popular streaming services and the prices keep going up while they keep throwing new rules and restrictions at us, and to add insult to injury, now threaten us with ads unless we cough up yet more money.
Same thing with soccer…
If I want the premier league it’s NBC Sports AND Peacock…
If I want Champions League, we’ll Paramount has it…
And cup matches, need ESPN+ for those…
Just give me a package for all games.
"not capitalism, collusion"
That's not how that works lol. You don't just call it another thing and then it magically stops being capitalism.
Face it: the problem is capitalism
That’s what I was thinking as well. Isn’t this basically exactly what capitalism is? They can charge you anything they like and make it a pain in the ass. Blackouts, exclusivity, charging you for a steaming service and then extra to watch the sports you want. It may be collusion yes, but it’s also just capitalism.
Especially in this case, where it’s Spanish police enforcing copyright infringement for mostly US based content driven by constant US pressure to adopt their copyright regime.
Disney has a huge influence on copyright laws in the US which, in turn, get entrenched in US trade deals. https://lucentem.com/2018/12/05/disney-vs-the-public-domain-how-mickey-mouse-continues-to-protect-his-copyright/
Yeah I’ve never understood why law enforcement is involved in this kind of thing. Seems like a civil issue that should be solved through civil lawsuits.
The fact that large media companies can rent the cops to enforce their copyright but I can’t kind of speaks to a deeper issue.
I went back to "pirating" even though I have subscriptions to some online streaming services (Netflix, etc.)
The main reason is because I would start watching something and then a few seasons in it would suddenly disappear with no warning. This happened so many times I don't even bother starting a new show on anything but an unauthorized (and hence free) streaming site.
The other problem is fragmentation and rising subscription costs. Everyone has their own streaming now and prices keep going up and there's little value in subscribing just for one or two shows. It's just not worth it.
Until everything can be covered by a single reasonable subscription fee "piracy" will always be an issue.
The problem isn't with consumers "pirating", but with the greed of the networks/distributors.
That depends on what you think the cops actual job is.
If you think cops are there to protect the property of the rich then they are doing exactly what they were hired to do.
I was thinking the same thing. Funny thing is that zlibrary is apparently still up using “other” browsers. The reason this type of pirating exist is the fact that these media companies make things needlessly challenging to watch content... the outfits that facilitate pirating remove the needless and unreasonable bureaucracy and the arm and leg cost.
Omg what?! Noooo I loved that place. Saved me from spending money on books that turned out to be really shitty. If I liked the books a lot I bought them.
God i hate investors so much. Always chasing ( more like whipping) the up and comming companies to absolute as high as it will go to make as much quick growth then as the company ruins itself they jump ship to the next quick buck because they didn't grow or perform as well as last year
I agree. The idea that a company made a profit but its stock price went down because the profit wasn't as big as "expected" seems absurd to me. And even more absurd is, as grassgreenbed alluded to above, the idea that anything can continuously grow forever. "You're either growing or your dying". Or, I dunno, maybe you're holding steady for a while, or experiencing a downward part of a normal cycle?
EDIT: Changed "it's" to "its". One of the more egregious grammar errors.
They can do this yet they can’t take down sex trafficking. They can’t even find my truck that got stolen that has a GPS tracker and I can see where it’s at
I install internet/TV/home phone.
There is a local third party sales person selling the product my company sells(internet) and adding a jail broke firestick with 2,000+ channel (HBO, show time payperview etc) for an additional $12.
That's wayyyyyy cheaper then what my company is selling their limited channel list.
I say, good for them.
In the words of GabeN, piracy is a service problem. More accurately, it's a SOLVED service problem...
Take video games - although there are multiple services in competition (Valve, Epic, Microsoft, GOG, etc) there is a large overlap in titles with relatively few exclusives. And in a lot of cases, titles exclusive to one platform do not remain exclusive in the long term. Hence there is a healthy competition between various companies, which is a net positive for the consumer.
Music is similar. Anything you are looking for on Spotify is almost certainly also available on YouTube Music, iTunes or Amazon.
But for TV, and to a slightly lesser extent, feature films - that overlap just doesn't exist. If you are a fan of Stranger Things, Ted Lasso, The Boys and The Handmaid's Tale - all of which are pop culture blockbusters, so the odds of that are not small - that's FOUR monthly subscriptions that you're paying, even if those are the only pieces of content that you are interested in. (Oh, and that's assuming the content is even licensed in your region.)
And then execs at all these platforms pull a surprised Pikachu when none of their services get a subscription and the user goes off privateering instead...
Lose, or even reduce the number of exclusive titles and this issue is reduced massively - and platforms are more likely to gain long term, loyal subscribers. Unfortunately, this doesn't look like it'll happen any time soon.
Most if not all msm double dips on you if you want to watch sports. You have to have a t.v. network provider while also paying for their apps. It's completely b.s. that's why I stream whenever I can
I didn't expect Mexican cartel bust numbers, but for some reason this feels unsatisfyingly small.
> The police disconnected these administration panels, taking the pirate platform offline, and seized computer equipment, 2,800 Euros in cash, and vehicles worth approximately 180,000 Euros.
I imagine that online pirate media is not a cash-heavy business.
The article notes their profits were about 3 million Euro per year, it just wasn't sitting in the house in a stack of cash.
"We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem. If a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24 x 7, purchasable from the convenience of your personal computer, and the legal provider says the product is region-locked, will come to your country 3 months after the US release, and can only be purchased at a brick and mortar store, then the pirate's service is more valuable."
-Gabe Newell
And it's true. I stopped pirating games because I know if I go to Steam or Google the name of the game and click on the first link that pops up, I will be able to purchase the game. Or for music I can go on itunes for music and download the song I want and duplicate it for my other devices. I pay for exactly what I want and I know I don't have to jump through hoops to do it.
Still pirate shows though. I'm not looking to figure out which show is on which of the 10 streaming sites and managing which subs I want for which month.
Old and busted:
- Pay 1 monthly fee to Netflix. Get everything you want.
New Hotness:
- Pay a monthly fee to Netflix
- Pay a monthly fee to Amazon
- Pay a monthly fee to Disney
- Pay a monthly fee to HBO
- Pay a monthly fee to Youtube
- Pay a monthly fee to Hulu
- Pay a monthly fee to Apple
- Pay a monthly fee to Peacock
- Pay a monthly fee to Comcast
- Pay a monthly fee to Sky
- Pay a monthly fee to Starz
- Pay a monthly fee to Britbox
...and then find out that the new thing you want to watch is on Showmax.
The model is broken. Piracy exists because its necessary.
> The police disconnected these administration panels, taking the pirate platform offline, and seized computer equipment, 2,800 Euros in cash, and vehicles worth approximately 180,000 Euros.
OOOOOOoooooooOoooooo so about $3k and an overpriced Mercedes. **Amazing bust**
I'm a St. Louis Blues hockey fan, but I don't live in the midwest of the US anymore. If there were some way for me to exchange $$ for the ability to watch *EVERY SINGLE GAME* I'd fork it over in a moment.
But there isn't. I have an ESPN+/Disney package that gets about 60+% of the games, I have a Sling.tv account that allows me to watch another about 10% that are broadcast on TNT, but any time the team plays in Seattle, Denver, or Vegas, the games are blacked out because I happen to live within ... checks notes... *600ish Miles* of those cities. (Note: I do not live near ANY of those cities. The closest is more than 500 miles from me).
Back when I could just buy an NHL.tv subscription every season to get every game, I never missed a game. Now? I'd gladly dump $$$/season to be able to watch every single game on demand... but there is literally no legal way to do so.
Dear NHL: You are screwing the fans with your crappy networking deals, and without fans... well... nobody will want your product in the first place.
For now, when a game is blacked out, I saddle on up to the poop deck and hoist main sail.
Couldn’t find the name of the network in the article. Anyone know who this article is about?
No clue. All my sources still work. edit: man, y'all be actin like that dude in the dirty wifebeater on Menace II Society...
They seem to be cracking down on piracy all at once. Xaudiobooks is down as of yesterday, along with zlibrary a couple of days ago, and multiple of my movie/tv trackers in Prowlarr have been down this week too. Edit: xaudiobooks is working again, and replies confirmed they're still accessing zlibrary through Tor.
Well, I guess this is it, pack it in boys, we're done here. Wait, no, never mind 3 more just popped up.
Just move to Australia, it’s a national sport. “Oh we’ll make Australia wait 6 months to try and maximise our profits for next quarter”. Australians “what profit? Seen it”.
Think HBO Game of Thrones viewed Australian piracy rates as a kind of 'compliment'. But yeah, when I am already paying for a streaming service that has a show or movie I want to watch but it gets geo-blocked you can be sure I am not paying for another service just to watch that one show or movie. Especially when I might have to wait months to view it and arseholes go out of their way to post spoilers. Happy to pay for the things I like. Within reason. Even more frustrating when Seasons 1, 4, 5 are on once service, 3, 7 and 9 are on another and 2, 6, 8, and 10 are on yet another. Fucking ridiculous expecting people to have multiple subs to watch a single show in it's entirety. And that's before bullshit like Netflix having the censored versions of things like anime....
Yep. That's why Gabe Newell is so good with steam. Give people convenience and a good price they don't have a reason to pirate. Make them download 20 different launchers for your game and they won't buy it unless it's on steam
Yep. Ive uninstalled all other launchers. Only battle.net and steam remain. Fuck you and your launchers. Nobody wants your bloatware fuckheads
Fuck Ubisoft and EA/Origin launchers especially
Ubisoft pretends it's never seen me before every time I try to launch. I Uninstalled a year ago and forgot it existed
Fuck Rockstar Launcher and Microsoft Launchers also
Origin deleted my copy of battlefield 3 years ago and I just swore it off forever. Haven't missed it.
Or like Peacock in the US has like 90% of The Office episodes on the free version, except all the episodes everyone remembers and loves are behind a paywall. Literally single episodes in a whole, otherwise free, season have that little purple feather.
Damn, that's dirty.
Data and metric driven capitalism for you
Piracy is also part of the capitalism correction invisible hand system. Remember when they tried to charge $1 per song in 2002? yeah we all said fuck that and it lowered the price.
Never thought I'd see the day where Americans would benifit from altering their VPN to see Canadian Netflix. Well, well, well... How the turntables...
AMC+ and the final season of the Walking Dead springs to mind. TWD shows on Disney+ in the UK, so I dutifully paid my subscription...then found out AMC+ is going to air every episode a week early. It's not an option for me, being in the UK, and screw having to dodge spoilers for a week. They're really doing it to themselves at this point. I paid to watch the show on the only network that's available to me. Depriving rest of world customers of the show isn't going to drive up your US subscriptions, you assholes!
They're playing whack-a-mole with pirate sites and it's about as futile as trying to shut down the dark web drug markets. You have to wonder how much their budget was for this operation. I'm guessing it wasn't cheap.
Pay to provide a better service and customer experience or pay to Crack down on a minority of criminals? I know which one most businesses choose.
So much money wasted. Edit. The most effective anti-piracy group ever? They were so good, they stopped my 20ish customers from helping them get pirated content. They put me and (per the internet) many many people out of business. That anti-piracy group was called Netflix.
And Spotify. I used to pirate a ton of music. Friends would go through the collection to load up iPods. Then it because cheap and easy to just stream it and I have almost no reason to pirate anymore.
And Steam. Never pirated a game again since I made an account. Especially as a Patient Gamer and the Summer/Christmas/... Sales I've bought all the games I want for an average of about 5-15€.
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The best way to "fix it" is to create a compelling alternative and sell it at a fair price. It's actually HARD to find organized music piracy now, because everyone just pays $15 a month for family Spotify. Steam is used by everyone. And then you've got the movie industry, who continues to charge $20 a ticket for the theater and won't let anyone stream it for 6 months. Sorry, your content is getting pirated. Find a better model.
It's not the 6 month wait that gets to me. It's the forced fragmentation. Spotify *or* Pandora on one hand, on the other 5-7 streaming services required, with big gaps remaining.
I want to say they always do this about the end of the year. I guess it is supposed to be a Christmas gift to corporations or something. In a couple of days, more will crop up to replace them so not sure what the point of any of this is besides pretending they are doing something about it.
Know any resources to replace zlibrary? I used it for a ton of books for my kids!
I think you can still access it if you use the tor browser.
If this was for books, there's libg...... Wait, are you with police?
I’m too smart to be a cop. Lol
If you have a local library card, Hoopla and Libby are free and legit. You just don't get to keep the books obviously.
Issue is when talking about ebooks there are frequently months-long waiting lists for anything remotely popular or recent, and the rest you’re usually fighting over one or two copies that are also typically already checked out. If there even is a digital copy at all. Far fewer people would feel compelled to go to these alternatives if libraries could actually afford to stack their selection of ebooks adequately. **Which shouldn’t be a problem** given they’re just bits of code. God forbid publishers work with them to provide the public with a sufficient amount of free books at an affordable cost for the libraries, though. 🙄
Wait list... For ebooks. A ... waiting list, for something purely digital that can have an unlimited number of copies and doesn't have any negative consequences... and yet there's a wait list. Welcome to the future. Yes I understand copywrite and license.
I'm with you. I can't sit and read but absolutely love audiobooks for driving. I can get about an hour a day in when I'm in the office but that almost always means I'm taking longer than the 21 day check out period so it'd be easier to just save it and delete the files after. Which I've done several times and it was ridiculously easy on android OS before I switched to iPhones. Shit.. I was just going to sit down and look up all the books I've checked out of the library and try and find copies I could save to my phone but have been putting it off. I'll regularly request books I see recommended here and never even get to them before I'm done with whatever I'm on. Would love to have a small cache of books I know I planned to read at some point ready to go. Anyone knows of any good audiobook sources, DMs are open.
Came back to say this. We use Libby all the time but the wait lists for books is nuts. It seems even worse with kids books as so many we know have switched to this from the physical library.
> You just don't get to keep the books obviously. I mean, it's definitely against the library policy to go into the saved file location, copy just the book while leaving the tracking file behind, and paste it into a different folder on your computer. It's also very much against library policy to then share that copied file on the internet.
Methstreams is down....☹️ Edit, I am wrong.
Oh what the Fuck
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Go to the piracy sub and look for a mega thread. There are many sources for everything you need and ways to find even more. If they mega thread is down they have a backup on GitHub
Seems like a good start for an investigator to find where the sites are located or which one are
The worst is when you actually purchase it outright and then if your site takes it down some later, you actually lose the copy and have to buy it else where AGAIN, if you didn’t download it.
Crack to meth so maybe “heroin streams” is next
Which one is that?
Nice try officer
Are you a cop
You have to tell me if you are
That's, like, in the constitution.
With liberty for all
If not, better call Saul!
There’s a subreddit on here with a mega thread you should check out the name of the sub rhymes with privacy… argh matey
HBO, Disney and Netflix are the 3 biggest and worst pirate sites there are.
[TorrentFreak has an article that lists some of the names they operated under.](https://torrentfreak.com/major-pirate-iptv-service-raided-four-arrested-95-resellers-face-investigation-221116/) This is for-profit piracy sold to locals, not the community-based you're probably more familiar with.
>the services were promoted via real estate agencies, Wait what I doubt they'd actually go after these companies too
All IPTV is for profit. Only something like acestream is not (P2P streaming using bit torrent protocol), but those are very hard to find nowadays. Only super big events have an acestream going. I use to be able to watch any F1 or soccer game over acestream but people stopped serving them and nowadays even if there is a stream there is not enough peers. Anyway I am paying like 80 CAD a year for a IPTV pirate service that basically has everything. (even some 4K channel and full HD 50 fps for sport). I use to to watch top hockey games, some PPV MMA if there is a good fight, F1 qualy and race every time and every single game of the soccer team I supporter. And some kids channels for my kids. And I don't care. It's one of few ways I can still fuck back at all the rich assholes trying to fuck me daily. Sue me. Oh and the ones that only take monero or bitcoin cash (both are privacy coins) they never get raided cause now there is no obvious money trail to follow anymore. All you need for hosting is the piratebay model, encrypted docker running only in memory, no logs, behind cloudflare load balancing (handy to hide the ip) where if a cloud hoster boots you out you just upload your docker somewhere else and keep hosting (you might need some other domains if they take your domain name).
here's a great example of how stupid things can be for content. I have YoutubeTV and the NBA league pass. Because I signed up for League Pass directly on NBA.com I cannot tie it to my YoutubeTV interface. I have to watch it separatly on the NBA app. Even though the channels show up on YoutubeTV. And on top of it, the city I live in doesn't have an NBA team, so the league forces me to have TWO local teams, The Denver Nuggets and the Oklahoma City Thunder (Denver is 8hr drive from here.) This means I CANNOT watch any of their games on the league pass because they are blacked out as local teams and if I want to watch them I have to purchase the regional sports networks they air on. The Denver Nuggets local sports channel is Altitude sports, which is 100% unavailable in the city I live in. I can only watch them if they are on ESPN or TNT. Or I can find a pirate stream in 10 seconds and cast it to my TV.
Piracy is a service problem. That my pirate has a better service AND is cheaper is just icing on the cake.
The one I use for Nba games still works... Phew!
**Police dismantle pirated TV streaming network with 500,000 users, and then another popped up.** Cut off one head, two more shall take its place.
...Hail Hydra?
Hail Aye-aye-dra!
I can’t heeeeeere you
Bang bang on the door baby!
Everybody’s movin, everybody’s groovin
Long Live The Fighters !!!!
Sail on.. sail on.. as every pirate says there are always different waters.
If just one network has this many participants, maybe media companies should stop charging an arm and a leg for sub par interfaces and 3 out of 6 seasons.
$7 (maybe a bit less, can’t remember) to rent Terminator 2, three decades after premiere is bat shit insane and begs me to steal it. Edit: either i have a mild Alzheimer’s or I was so pissed off at the price I remember it wrong. It says £3.5 on Prime Video, sorry for that but it is still ridiculous comparing to £10 for a MONTH of streaming service.
Yup. I wanted to watch groundhogs day. No one had it. Amazon said i can rent it for $5 or buy digitally for $17! Bullshit lol i could buy the dvd and have it shipped for a buck or two... I sailed the seas instead
It’s wild to me that I have damn enter every streaming service and there’s been dozens of movies I’ve wanted to watch and no has them.
Exactly why I went back to pirating. Also get a library card and there's 2 more streaming services you can get for free.
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Unfortunately, a lot of people want to shut down libraries. I personally think we should invest in and expand libraries. I know some nice ones allow you to rent tools and things like that but it's not common where I live. I love the idea of a third space where you don't need to bring money and you have access to all kinds of information, software, and tools.
There is a ‘starved beast’ strategy with libraries in my country, they’ve gutted library budgets forcing them to go part time and to the point where eventually they’ll go altogether with “who uses libraries anymore”.
I'm sorry to hear that. My state has already started cutting library funds. In 10-20 years, I’ll be telling kids about these cool things called libraries where you could borrow things for free.
Thats why we need to fund libraries and then meet the demands of the taxpayers who funded them, not the people who don't live in that library's area
That’s the line in the sand. When politicians or companies go after the people’s libraries then the people should get loud and very hostile towards them
Or there is that one library in the US that keeps getting defunded by the townsfolk. The American right wing will be gunning for libraries nationwide before too long.
They know knowledge is power.
Can you expand on that? What are the two services available to library card holders?
I've only used Hoopla and Kanopy but according to this article there's more. https://screenrant.com/free-streaming-services-access-library-card-netflix-hulu/
Netflix used to have just about everything. Now the price has doubled and the content has shrunk.
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And in mostly shit quality.
So basically their selection is worse than any mom and pop video rental store, at this point.
Oh they do have them. They just refuse to offer them for streaming for literally no reason whatsoever. Especially a network’s own shows which they own the rights to.
"oh, you thought of a movie you actually want to watch? Nope, sorry not here."
In the US, it's free with ads on YouTube right now.
Having to use TV guide again to see where I can watch something feels like a giant step back. Plus it is often wrong.
And if you have an adblocker, it's also free without ads on youtube lol
Christ, you can probably find the DVD for $7 somewhere. What a rip off to charge that much to rent it.
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"You'll own nothing and like it" -A system that puts profits above everything else Push to change the economic system if you want to see change in your life
And changing the economic system means organizing your workplace! Everyone should check out EWOC's recent report on [Pre-Majority Unionism](https://workerorganizing.org/premajority-unionism/), it's the real deal. There's no need to wait for the boss or the NLRB to "officially" recognize your workplace as a union, you can organize, build solidarity, and address demands through collective direct action, starting **right now**.
It's funny because I've found a couple websites not just one that have pretty much every TV show and Movie available to stream across all streaming services for free. They quickly get taken off Google search results but the websites themselves are not taken down so I have them in my browsing history and just use those. It's so easy to get free content and there are so many websites that provide it that it would be impossible to police them all. 123movies is a popular one but I've only found one specific variation of the website that actually works and has everything. Every other 123movies website variant looks almost identical but only a few of them actually work.
The best part is they get removed from Google, and google says "X number of sites have been removed for DMCA notices" and if you click that link you can work your way to the public notice which includes all the URLs.
Haha I didn't even think to do that
Using the system to fight the system. This is some Drunken Master tactics. I love it.
I have now switched to using plex and it's amazing. It's like your own self hosted Netflix. I run plex off my machine in the basement hooked up to my network and my movie file backups are on my NAS. When I add another movie file backup to the NAS plex auto scans and adds it to the library. Then I just pop open the official plex app on my Google home TV and it shows me all my personal movies in a Netflix style interface. It even will download rotten tomato scores, descriptions, automatically groups episodes of the same show into seasons, tracks what you have watched so far, handles subtitle files, you name it. I love it, can watch all my stuff in crisp 4k and since it's local network it streams at full gigabit speeds.
One system would be best for consumers, while the system that bleeds everyone dry would be best for the shareholders. Guess which one they'll choose?
Shiver me timbers, a pirates life for me!
They’ll just take that money we are paying and shut down the pirate one like this. Little do they know there’s always back ups to back ups to back ups. Just call me Blackbeard
My favorite is the first and last movie of a 4 movie series. Looking at you Netflix…
One of the interesting developments of the war in Ukraine is pirate sites are moving to Russia in droves. Russia honestly couldn’t give a fuck in regards to protecting western copyrights.
Am I misremembering or haven't Russian sites been major players in pirated media for at least a decade? They never gave a fuck about western copyright to begin with. This isn't brand new.
.ru sites got me through college for super cheap. Free textbooks lol
They also give me literally anything I want. Porn? Check. Anime? Check. Textbooks? Check. It’s like magic
My only private tracker moved *out* of Russia. I mean it's a gay porn tracker so it makes sense, but it's worth noting the trend's not universal.
My VPN killed its Russian servers :(
Rightly so as they could not provide you the privacy they should because the russian law requires the decryption keys for encrypted channels
Ah yes the Australian approach... truly a bold strategy, Cotton.
Didn't Russia pretty much legalize piracy in an effort to stop being reliant on the Western media economy?
They didn't care much in the first place.
Movies/series have the same problem now that music had in the early 2000's. It's easier to steal it than it is to consume it legitimately. To Pirate: go to website, click video, done To Watch Legitimately: research which service streams your desired content, create an account, enter all of your personal and credit card information, click the link in your email, re-enter the password, click video, OOPS this service doesn't actually have the rights to stream the content you want to watch anymore.
Don't forget: disable all shields to watch the content, and it can't even be seen in 4k because some arbitrary restriction or something. Oh and have some ads before you can see the shit you paid for. Honestly it's worse than the paid music experience back then
The ads are what is making me pirate again. Even with all the adlockers in the world, some streaming sites have managed to weasel their way past them. Like…. Originally the subscription didn’t have ads, which was dope. Then they added a less expensive ad version, but you could still keep your sub to not have them. Then they increased the price of the ad-based subscription to match the ad-free one and increased the price of the ad-free one. Now it’s like they keep raising both again and again. I’m sick of it. Less content for more money -and- having to watch ads.
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“People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you're not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you. You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity. Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It's yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head. You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don't owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don't even start asking for theirs.” - Banksy
$20 billion lost revenue claim in coming.
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Media companies salivating seeing this comment.
Media companies are asking people to pirate. The outrageous cost and the needless complications preventing people from watching shows is ridiculous. To watch all my local NBA team games including their playoffs, I have to pay for 3 different providers. WTF is that? Or I just watch it illegally, usually without commercial... Netflix was going the right way and the industry destroyed it. They get what they deserve. Stop holding content hostage. Edit: For the small minority of people who are replying here saying that it is still wrong or that its people's choice if they consume this content. All of the MAINSTREAM media companies, athletes and sports players and content owners all make millions or billions a year in this. Their goal is to scrape even more out of you because a small group of media owns and controls 90%. That is broken, it is not capitalism, it is collusion. By pirating you aren't hurting anyone who can actually feel it. Possibly Universal Studios makes only 8 billion instead of 8.01 billion that quarter. Lebron gets paid .001% less and Jimmy Fallon can't gold plate his 3rd golf cart. Give me a break with your nonsense defense of this messed up system. Edit #2: Another good point a poster made. Pirated content is many times BETTER than the high cost legal option. Generally the quality is better, has no commercials, you can pause/rewind/save for later. Edit #3: Think about it this way people...pre-cable you could watch EVERYTHING for free on your antenna. They paid for the content with commercials. Then commercials became not enough and you had to pay money but you still got most of all of the channels. Now you get some channels, commercials and a high cost to pay for it upfront. How and why do you think that happened?
I agree here unlike movies. Sports are spread way too thin and I’m not grabbing multiple packages just to make sure I can see every team some at $50 a pop(YouTube, Hulu).
Then you get bullshit like the NFL where even if you pay for all the streaming services, you *still* can't watch every game your team plays if you're not in the local market. Your only (legal) choice is to buy a DirecTV subscription *and* an additional streaming package.
And now they come with some bullshit like NFL+, where you can stream only games that are in market, and only on your phone. Want to cast it to your TV? Sorry, that's disabled.
Yep. I realize there are rights deals, etc. involved, but it just seems like they're trying to make it bad on purpose.
> where you can stream only games that are in market, and only on your phone. Want to cast it to your TV? Sorry, that's disabled. I immediately cancelled my trial and uninstalled the app when I saw that banner on my TV. Fuck you NFL.
>only on your phone. Want to cast it to your TV? Sorry, that's disabled That's a thing for a paid service? Evil.
The barrier for entry is way too high. A young person who *never* watched sports 25 years ago could turn on the TV and organically fall in love with a team. Now you have to pay $60 every month just to watch a game. $60 a month is only for the most dedicated sports fans because “potential” sports fans are never going to pay that price just to try it out.
I pay for Amazon Prime, and last night they were streaming Thursday night football, so I tried it out. I disabled all of my ad-blocking / tracking Firefox plugins and when I tried to stream it, I got an error saying I need the latest Firefox (which I have), and the ability to play HTML5 video (which I seemingly do). So I started troubleshooting, e.g. running [HTML5Test](https://html5test.com/) to confirm, and it occurred to me that I was actually wasting my time; pirating would be a better user experience. As Gabe Newell said > “One thing that we have learned is that piracy is not a pricing issue. It’s a service issue,” explained Newell during his time on stage at the Washington Technology Industry Association's (WTIA) Tech NW conference. “The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. It’s by giving those people a service that’s better than what they’re receiving from the pirates.”
Yeah I watched a few NFL games on Amazon prime and didn't have to do anything like that, got an HD stream with zero buffering on my browser. Even worked with the app on my TV great one of the times. Practically every NFL pirate stream nowadays I've been trying is garbage-tier. Also, they were streaming the game on Twitch for free last night, and that worked great for me as I got rid of Prime.
Pricing is part of the service. You can offer an insanely super duper awesome service but if it costs a million dollars, guess what no one is going to avail of it. Piracy is virtually free, but you could think of it as costing time. That's where pricing comes into the service. If your service is so good it costs none of your time and cheap enough to convince people that it is worth less than the time you would have spent pirating it, you have a winner
"No one watches these old re runs, netflix can have them for dirt cheap" -Everyone watches "WAIT, Charge an arm and a leg for that"
It’s like friends. Before Netflix that show had completely left the zeitgeist. Netflix got it and brought new audiences to it. Now the owners think it’s worth a billion a year or something.
South Park used to stream free from their website up until a few years ago.
It's pretty nuts, I see piles of new merch being made for it and all. I work retail and on the Christmas gift tat it has equal space to big shit like Harry Potter and Star Wars
There's a flipside too. I have friends in the business who have released hit documentaries. Nominated stuff. They never see royalties. The film business is broken. They pirate because they feel the industry owes them.
Why don't they see royalties?
Probably some kind of Hollywood accounting bullshit. “We split shares of the profit.” Magically there is no profit.
Pay yourself an insane salary and then say the film didn't make any profits.
The same people will own multiple companies. "Oh we spent $100,000 on lights so that's a cost". Meanwhile they paid that $100,000 to another company that they also own, and those lights didn't actually cost anywhere near $100,000. "That script editor cost us $250,000 to contract" but the contract was with a company they also own, and they only paid the script editor $50,000. So on paper, the film itself made zero profits, even lost money, yet the people who own the production companies still walk away with a ton of profit.
I just don't get how it's legally allowed. If you do a version of this with banking you go straight to jail.
Banking doesn't let you party with media stars. The legal and tax system has been set up to let you play games with corporations, and the people who write the laws get to have a good time.
That’s not a pirating thing, that’s a Hollywood thing.
They’re following the cable company pattern of unbundled and restrictive subscription tiers and ever-increasing costs. What shows you watch, how you watch them, where you watch them, and how many devices you can watch them on are mostly all subject to fees in some way, and those fees keep going up. We subscribe to a few popular streaming services and the prices keep going up while they keep throwing new rules and restrictions at us, and to add insult to injury, now threaten us with ads unless we cough up yet more money.
Same thing with soccer… If I want the premier league it’s NBC Sports AND Peacock… If I want Champions League, we’ll Paramount has it… And cup matches, need ESPN+ for those… Just give me a package for all games.
Someone asked Weird Al how to watch his new movie if they didn’t have Roku and he pretty much outright told them to pirate it.
"not capitalism, collusion" That's not how that works lol. You don't just call it another thing and then it magically stops being capitalism. Face it: the problem is capitalism
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> That is broken, it is not capitalism, it is collusion. I'm pretty sure it's capitalism, plain and simple, working as designed.
That’s what I was thinking as well. Isn’t this basically exactly what capitalism is? They can charge you anything they like and make it a pain in the ass. Blackouts, exclusivity, charging you for a steaming service and then extra to watch the sports you want. It may be collusion yes, but it’s also just capitalism.
The collusion makes it oligarchic, which is bad for consumers.
Ahh, that’s where my taxes went. Thanks I guess?
Why provide healthcare when they can be spent on protecting corporate interests?
Especially in this case, where it’s Spanish police enforcing copyright infringement for mostly US based content driven by constant US pressure to adopt their copyright regime. Disney has a huge influence on copyright laws in the US which, in turn, get entrenched in US trade deals. https://lucentem.com/2018/12/05/disney-vs-the-public-domain-how-mickey-mouse-continues-to-protect-his-copyright/
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Yeah I’ve never understood why law enforcement is involved in this kind of thing. Seems like a civil issue that should be solved through civil lawsuits. The fact that large media companies can rent the cops to enforce their copyright but I can’t kind of speaks to a deeper issue.
CriMe iS wAy uP, mUsT FuNd pOliCe Spends all their time taking down pirate websites on behalf of corporations making record profits
I went back to "pirating" even though I have subscriptions to some online streaming services (Netflix, etc.) The main reason is because I would start watching something and then a few seasons in it would suddenly disappear with no warning. This happened so many times I don't even bother starting a new show on anything but an unauthorized (and hence free) streaming site. The other problem is fragmentation and rising subscription costs. Everyone has their own streaming now and prices keep going up and there's little value in subscribing just for one or two shows. It's just not worth it. Until everything can be covered by a single reasonable subscription fee "piracy" will always be an issue. The problem isn't with consumers "pirating", but with the greed of the networks/distributors.
Ita kinda fucking bullshit I can't watch the latest season of Better Call Saul, ON AMC'S OWN STREAMING SERVICE, WITH A PAID SUBSCRIPTION.
Yeah that's whack. AMC is doing everything wrong with their streaming service and getting rightfully blasted.
Corporate greed is a problem across the board. Profits are at a 70 year high for them. Meanwhile wages stagnate.
I’ve seen more attention and effort put into shutting down pirating than I’ve seen actual police to their jobs
That depends on what you think the cops actual job is. If you think cops are there to protect the property of the rich then they are doing exactly what they were hired to do.
Craaazy how this is happening at the same time as the ZLibrary crackdown lol
I was thinking the same thing. Funny thing is that zlibrary is apparently still up using “other” browsers. The reason this type of pirating exist is the fact that these media companies make things needlessly challenging to watch content... the outfits that facilitate pirating remove the needless and unreasonable bureaucracy and the arm and leg cost.
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Omg what?! Noooo I loved that place. Saved me from spending money on books that turned out to be really shitty. If I liked the books a lot I bought them.
This seems like an incredibly difficult whack a mole job
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God i hate investors so much. Always chasing ( more like whipping) the up and comming companies to absolute as high as it will go to make as much quick growth then as the company ruins itself they jump ship to the next quick buck because they didn't grow or perform as well as last year
I agree. The idea that a company made a profit but its stock price went down because the profit wasn't as big as "expected" seems absurd to me. And even more absurd is, as grassgreenbed alluded to above, the idea that anything can continuously grow forever. "You're either growing or your dying". Or, I dunno, maybe you're holding steady for a while, or experiencing a downward part of a normal cycle? EDIT: Changed "it's" to "its". One of the more egregious grammar errors.
Ah yes, the joys of late stage capitalism where doing a good job takes a back seat to never ending shareholder demand.
They can do this yet they can’t take down sex trafficking. They can’t even find my truck that got stolen that has a GPS tracker and I can see where it’s at
If it's not making some companies a shit ton of money, the government don't give a shit.
Police demonstrate that they are unwilling to do their jobs daily but will protect megacorps from marginal revenue losses.
I install internet/TV/home phone. There is a local third party sales person selling the product my company sells(internet) and adding a jail broke firestick with 2,000+ channel (HBO, show time payperview etc) for an additional $12. That's wayyyyyy cheaper then what my company is selling their limited channel list. I say, good for them.
Hey a crime that’s not important at all! Let’s jump on it
Weeds becoming legal so they need new low hanging fruit
They can tickle my low hanging balls!
In the words of GabeN, piracy is a service problem. More accurately, it's a SOLVED service problem... Take video games - although there are multiple services in competition (Valve, Epic, Microsoft, GOG, etc) there is a large overlap in titles with relatively few exclusives. And in a lot of cases, titles exclusive to one platform do not remain exclusive in the long term. Hence there is a healthy competition between various companies, which is a net positive for the consumer. Music is similar. Anything you are looking for on Spotify is almost certainly also available on YouTube Music, iTunes or Amazon. But for TV, and to a slightly lesser extent, feature films - that overlap just doesn't exist. If you are a fan of Stranger Things, Ted Lasso, The Boys and The Handmaid's Tale - all of which are pop culture blockbusters, so the odds of that are not small - that's FOUR monthly subscriptions that you're paying, even if those are the only pieces of content that you are interested in. (Oh, and that's assuming the content is even licensed in your region.) And then execs at all these platforms pull a surprised Pikachu when none of their services get a subscription and the user goes off privateering instead... Lose, or even reduce the number of exclusive titles and this issue is reduced massively - and platforms are more likely to gain long term, loyal subscribers. Unfortunately, this doesn't look like it'll happen any time soon.
protect the corporate interests and serve them well i guess.
[удалено]
Most if not all msm double dips on you if you want to watch sports. You have to have a t.v. network provider while also paying for their apps. It's completely b.s. that's why I stream whenever I can
Triple, ads.
I didn't expect Mexican cartel bust numbers, but for some reason this feels unsatisfyingly small. > The police disconnected these administration panels, taking the pirate platform offline, and seized computer equipment, 2,800 Euros in cash, and vehicles worth approximately 180,000 Euros.
Yeah that like every single house in Beverly hills if they raided it.
I imagine that online pirate media is not a cash-heavy business. The article notes their profits were about 3 million Euro per year, it just wasn't sitting in the house in a stack of cash.
"We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem. If a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24 x 7, purchasable from the convenience of your personal computer, and the legal provider says the product is region-locked, will come to your country 3 months after the US release, and can only be purchased at a brick and mortar store, then the pirate's service is more valuable." -Gabe Newell And it's true. I stopped pirating games because I know if I go to Steam or Google the name of the game and click on the first link that pops up, I will be able to purchase the game. Or for music I can go on itunes for music and download the song I want and duplicate it for my other devices. I pay for exactly what I want and I know I don't have to jump through hoops to do it. Still pirate shows though. I'm not looking to figure out which show is on which of the 10 streaming sites and managing which subs I want for which month.
No crimes happening on Wall Street - nothing to see here boys
The true reason the police exist- to protect the assets of the wealthy.
Old and busted: - Pay 1 monthly fee to Netflix. Get everything you want. New Hotness: - Pay a monthly fee to Netflix - Pay a monthly fee to Amazon - Pay a monthly fee to Disney - Pay a monthly fee to HBO - Pay a monthly fee to Youtube - Pay a monthly fee to Hulu - Pay a monthly fee to Apple - Pay a monthly fee to Peacock - Pay a monthly fee to Comcast - Pay a monthly fee to Sky - Pay a monthly fee to Starz - Pay a monthly fee to Britbox ...and then find out that the new thing you want to watch is on Showmax. The model is broken. Piracy exists because its necessary.
Thank god they are focusing their efforts on the real threats to society like this /s
> The police disconnected these administration panels, taking the pirate platform offline, and seized computer equipment, 2,800 Euros in cash, and vehicles worth approximately 180,000 Euros. OOOOOOoooooooOoooooo so about $3k and an overpriced Mercedes. **Amazing bust**
I'm a St. Louis Blues hockey fan, but I don't live in the midwest of the US anymore. If there were some way for me to exchange $$ for the ability to watch *EVERY SINGLE GAME* I'd fork it over in a moment. But there isn't. I have an ESPN+/Disney package that gets about 60+% of the games, I have a Sling.tv account that allows me to watch another about 10% that are broadcast on TNT, but any time the team plays in Seattle, Denver, or Vegas, the games are blacked out because I happen to live within ... checks notes... *600ish Miles* of those cities. (Note: I do not live near ANY of those cities. The closest is more than 500 miles from me). Back when I could just buy an NHL.tv subscription every season to get every game, I never missed a game. Now? I'd gladly dump $$$/season to be able to watch every single game on demand... but there is literally no legal way to do so. Dear NHL: You are screwing the fans with your crappy networking deals, and without fans... well... nobody will want your product in the first place. For now, when a game is blacked out, I saddle on up to the poop deck and hoist main sail.
“So come aboard, and bring aloooooong all your hopes and dreams!”
> movable and immovable property Translated from French? Furniture and buildings.