Well, that’s not really true isn’t it? I’m not against stealing games from corporate devs, but imagine you decide to get a kick ass printer, those they use in companies. Those printers are usually leased, not bought, and the printer leasing company usually updates and upgrades it every X time. The company pays for the use of the printer, but they don’t own it. The leasing company is very clear in what they are selling you, they are selling you a service. You still need to have a place to store the printer, you still need to pay for the ink used, you still need to have paper, just as a game needs storage space, a gpu and all the periferals.
Imagine if taking a printer from the leasing company makes them lose 0 money in material costs, since this is what happens with digital goods, they still lose money from you being able to use the printer without paying the lease, when you would originally not be able to use it if they didn’t develop it. In that sense, what you stole is their revenue from the lease.
All of this to say that pirating IS stealing, and I still do it proudly. All of this to say, either they let me own it or I’m stealing it.
But if you do care about the quality, then you should just download those movies in higher quality than DVD. Like this you’re just getting 480p/576p with visible compression artifacts at the same file size.
The problem is the DVDs is in a language I couldn’t find reliably to download. I once had access to a private tracker that had these things, but they got shut down, and I was on a long vacation while they migrated.
So I missed the window and I haven’t been able to get in since.
Jellyfin supports external audio tracks (see here). It works pretty well, so you could rip the audio tracks from the DVDs with Handbrake and download higher definition video files
Copyright’s explicit purpose is to encourage new works.
Any form of “unpublishing” is theft from the public. You wanna say a guy can’t make money on a thing? Great, fine, go nuts. But nothing any human being put effort into deserves to be lost forever.
Yes, copyright exists to encourage new works - which the author ignored by creating content violating copyright law. Never mind the public, this dude stole from the copyright holders. He’s a pirate and he got caught.
It’s mind boggling how anyone could possibly consider otherwise. Aside from your own life, there’s nothing more belonging to oneself than their thoughts.
Once you share your thought, they are no longer yours alone, and the thoughts they spark in others are, in some ways, both yours and theirs. Or, if you prefer to hear it another way, “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”
This entire sub is delusional. You believe in things which are untrue. You make things up to justify theft. It’s funny and it’s sad. I really don’t know where you get these irrational theories or how you’d ever justify them in a court.
If you want to live in literal communism, sure, you can establish that any idea anyone expresses belongs to the world. In the world we actually live in, we have laws protecting people’s intellectual property in order for them to generate content and profit from those original ideas. Otherwise, what’s the point of having an idea at all if anyone can make money from it. This further promotes new original ideas that aren’t derivative of existing ones. This is exactly what the OP stated and I agreed with.
Every now and then I see threads like this on lemmy where people are getting downvoted into negatives despite being objectively correct about something (and the wrong info being upvoted). I think there may be a lot of very young, inexperienced, naive, and gullible children here. At least I hope they’re children.
No there is new work that has been done that you are reducing to “piracy”. As if intellectual and creative processes ever could take place in a vacuum. The only contradiction is that copyright laws as a concept do nothing than stifle innovation and progress. If you do not like how anyone can profit from other people’s ideas you should maybe rethink your stance on monetisation schemes in general instead.
True. To throw my opinion into the mix, if the Rings of Power show did actually copy from his work, they should look to partner with Demetrious instead of all this nonsense. I agree he legally can’t profit off the IP of the Tolkien estate as laws stand, but copywrite also lasts far longer than it has any good reason to. It should be the author’s lifetime plus a decade or so. Finally, it is an affront to creativity everywhere to order the destruction of all physical and electronic copies. That should not happen. Ever.
I’m not getting into how long a copyright should last. I don’t have a meaningful opinion on it.
What it seems people are overlooking (or forgiving?) is that the guy published a book about characters (IP) he doesn’t own. Taking something that doesn’t belong to you is theft.
Whether or not Amazon should option his material is irrelevant if he didn’t get permission to use it in the first place. I mean, fan fiction is one thing. Creative license and educational purposes could be argued. But he published a freaking book!
Do you think Zack Snyder should get to put out a Rebel Moon and call it “Rebel Moon: A Star Wars Story” without getting permission or paying for licensing? Is this the reality this sub believes we live in? If you write a novel and I read it and soon start writing better more successful stories based explicitly on your characters without crediting you or sharing in my profit, how would you feel? Should your work be public domain? Is that what you (collective) feel is best for “the public”?
I don’t really have an opinion on what should happen with the work either. I could see some cases where it would be a major loss for the public to have the work erased. This could be catastrophic for classic literature. For something so new and not having any established cultural significance (as much as you wish it did), I’d go with whatever a judge believes is best under the law. You’re welcome to argue the validity of the law, and I may agree with you, but that’s a different conversation.
Taking something that doesn’t belong to you is theft.
This is the point I wanted to contend and is the main premise I disagree with. In my opinion, nothing was taken, at most borrowed, by the author of the book.
But he published a freaking book!
Yes, is it not great?
Do you think Zack Snyder should get to put out a Rebel Moon and call it “Rebel Moon: A Star Wars Story” without getting permission or paying for licensing?
In my dreams, yes.
Is this the reality this sub believes we live in? If you write a novel and I read it and soon start writing better more successful stories based explicitly on your characters without crediting you or sharing in my profit, how would you feel?
I would be fucking thrilled to be honest. If someone not only cited my research, but actually improved on it I would schedule a meeting to talk with them ASAP.
Should your work be public domain? Is that what you (collective) feel is best for “the public”?
YES. Everything that is published should be publicly available as default. I understand that this would require another method for financing those that actually make new stuff, but that is something that is sorely needed anyway. What usually happens is that the actual creators are left with pennies while legal entities own IP almost indefinitely.
Also, I want to add that had IP laws always been what they are today, much great work from the past (that is now enjoying protection by copyright) could not have existed. I also ask how say the dwarves in Tolkien’s tales could be copyrighted when they are based on stories about dwarves from Norse mythology?
TL;DR there was a special time when all work got copyrighted into oblivion. It has to end so that humanity can create more cool new stuff just as we did back then.
I mean it deserves to be lost forever in that it has no artistic or ideological merit. Mein Kampf deserves to be lost. But we deserve to keep it as a warning so that we do not repeat history. But if humanity could grow to the point that such warnings are never needed again, and if the book could be forgotten due to losing all present and future relevance, that would be a good thing. What a thing deserves is sometimes different to what is necessary or good.
My phone won’t open xpi files and the only solutions I’ve been able to find is either create a html file in the same folder, which I don’t know how to do on android, or download and install an extension which is ALSO only available as an xpi 🤦
Well I use Fennec for Android from F-Droid, which has the option of using custom collections for addons.
I don’t think it’s possible yet on “normal” Firefox other than Nightly.
Looks like it SHOULD work, but when I search for addons, I get quick (far too quick to select any of them m) flashes of gray rectangles where suggestions would normally be and no search results after I execute the search.
I’m beginning to suspect that the Firefox app is broken 😕
I find it funny that they specifically refer to the past year for a large increase in piracy. Remind me when it was that companies started consistently charging even more for the base package of their games…
In retrospect I regret drinking the Nintendo koolaid for so long, but turning what used to be the fairly equitable Virtual Console system into a ROM rental service made me jump ship to the Steam Deck and it’s been smooth sailing since.
This is precisely why I’ve always waited for the GOTY version to release (or whatever other subtitle they slap on the box) but through all of their BS I find I’m less and less willing to part with my money. Certain companies have become a no-fly zone for me and that list is only growing longer.
It’s not even just the Internet. Marketing fucks up every aspect of our civilization. We can’t even handle having a professional election anymore without trashy ads and people acting like children. You can’t even watch legitimate news anymore. …nevermind mind whack kids pranking people on YouTube being used and turning into assholes for YouTube monetization.
Honestly I’m starting to wonder if the reason why we got ourselves into a ad filled hell hole is because we expect soo much to be free and those things have to make money somehow and server space and the electricity they run on aren’t free and the only people willing to spend money are whales and advertisers and from what I’ve been told YouTube was never profitable on it’s own for Google and the only reason they’ve been keeping the site on is because it brings attention to other Google services while also preventing competition so I greatly think we’d all benefit from being open to paying for sites that are like YouTube so YouTube and advertisers have some real competitors I don’t know how a my theoreticall site would profit without ads but it’s still sad that sites like YouTube are expensive and unprofitable making it so Google is the only option solely because they can afford the loses making yt premium even more greedy
IF you want to get down the rabbit hole of expectations. I lose 34% off my pay. Like that. Poof. Taxes. I lose another 50% of what’s left to rent and groceries (not eating out). That doesn’t cover internet or utilities. Then transportation. And that’s just essentially living. My place isn’t all that.
And now you want me to pay for every website I visit. Or every service I use? Or I don’t use them and just go back to “essentially being alive.”
And I’m in the top 20% of income earners according to recent stats, which is insane because I’m not making fuck you money.
I think the real issue is greed. There’s no need for Disney+ to cost $20 a month. There’s no need for me to pony up another $1.5 a month to get 50GB of storage instead of the 5GB they know you’ll outgrow in a week. There’s zero need to pay $18 a month for a blue checkmark. They tell you it’s because it costs lots and lots of money to operate and the ads just barely cover our costs. Sure.
It’s just greed. It’s all just amoral, unethical, greed. Right on up from the rent/mortgage to all the shit you buy or “consume.”
We saw this surge with COVID, GME, crypto, NFT, absolutely wild, insidious, and morally bankrupt schemes exposing just how much wealth is pooled away from working class (they actually call them ‘dark pools’, where money goes and disappears). Something clicked. And it became a feeding frenzy where everyone is just steadily driving up prices, but not a single company is unprofitable. All the lay offs? None of those tech companies were in trouble. In fact, most made record profits!
I’m not paying them a penny either way, but if you’re going to, wouldn’t you want more features for your money, even if you don’t use them? Or are you suggesting they charge less for a subscription sans music?
I’ve been around since YT red, and while Google Play Music was a better app, I am OK with YT music and primarily watch YT over the other sites and yt music is all I listen to in the house or car. So, while not cheap $22/mo for premium family fits my needs.
I’d be OK if yt allowed me to skip/blocked sponsored ads too. At least on PC sponsor block works well. For my TV its a few more hoops to get that there, which I haven’t done. Not terrible to ffw across them
This answer confuses me. The message on that pop up is "buy YouTube premium, so you won't be stuck in our ad supported model" and now we're ranting that they need to find another model to finance themselves? Isn't YouTube premium exactly that?
What everyone else said but also they still collect and do whatever they want with your data even if you pay them. They purposely made everything more shitty and then charged to put it back to how it was originally. Also, they stayed free as long as they did to kill off the competition and it clearly worked. I just can’t ever justify giving them money. Especially with the double dip on my data.
I’m sure they can take a page from every online service before we entered the 2020s, where you could pay to enter without ads, like Netflix was. But no, the ad company has to inject ads into everything.
You’re right, but premium is too expensive. They make a pittance per ad view, but expect a user to pay $14/m to get rid of them? The math doesn’t math.
Paying to remove ads is part of the ad business model. Upset your customer enough until they give you money to make it stop. Once you pay to remove the ads you have rewarded them for implementing ads which lets them know that implementing ads was a great way at making money.
So YouTube premium is not another model. It is the same model. Another model is paying for a service that never had ads at all such as NebulaTV or CuriosityStream.
Somehow? Paying to remove ads is rewarding ads thus causing more ads in the world. It’s not mysterious at all.
There are plenty of ways to not make it an all or nothing service, but that is at least the most straight forward. You could potentially give some of it away and then have to pay for the rest. Or have some stuff for free and more premium content is paid for. Or perhaps based on bandwidth with video quality / resolution.
Anything that is not ads is going to be an improvement.
All those are fine suggestions, but a “free with ads” option isn’t that bad either; the real problem isn’t the ads themselves. The real problem is how intrusive the ads are, how many of them there are, as well as much information they (and YouTube) collect on you. Plus, in this case, the company in question isn’t exactly a small company who is financially struggling. It’s the classic capitalist problem of “infinite growth”, where your profits have to be constantly increasing.
But there’s nothing inherently wrong about the idea of having ads, just like there’s nothing inherently wrong about youtubers having sponsors.
I don’t mind ads as a concept. The issue is how invasive and numerous they’ve become. Get back to the days when ads were just banners around the actual content or an easily skippable video that plays before what I’m trying to watch and I’ll happily disable my ad blocker for you. Unfortunately hardly anyone does that anymore because they view it as a missed opportunity to make even more money.
I’m not against using ads to support websites but it’s the same basic concept as piracy. If you make the experience of playing by the rules so unbearable that it seems easier to go out of my way to break them then I probably will.
Looks like this one is just the 4.33gb source code/no assets one :( I’ve found this one and a 7gb torrent (I think it has some extra build tools or something), but no trace of the mysterious 1tb dump yet…
4.3 gb for source code only seems like a lot though, doesn’t it? (I am just a data scientist/civil engineer/hydrologolist though, no software developer, so I might be wrong I guess).
It’s probably just the code without any assets (textures, 3d models, etc.). Code really doesn’t take much space. You’d have a hard time actually building it to something playable as is, but this is still useful to modders.
Simple, trust no one. Get a no-reported-logs VPN, don’t download anything that has a strange file size or extension, look at comments, look at the number of seeders if it’s a torrent. If you can, join something like a private tracker where there’s moderation too. If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck then it’s probably not the movie you were looking for and there might be a Trojan army inside waiting for you to let the duck enter your computer… That metaphor may have fallen apart on me…
I added the word “reported” because I don’t trust VPN providers to not keep logs, but ideally they should report that they don’t keep logs and have an established history of not providing logs. Tor is really not ideal if you’re trying to download anything large and you’re still vulnerable depending on who controls the exit nodes.
Shenanigans are always possible of course so you shouldn’t 100% blindly trust anyone, but all the available evidence seems to point to them being pretty legit IMO.
Slowness and bandwith limitations are still an issue and it’s likely that they will always be. It’s already too slow to torrent large files over Tor and it also takes away the bandwith of other users. Tor also still doesn’t support UDP connections, which may cause data leaks.
you do not have to use exit nodes. you can p2p with other tor users. piracy imo is important due to the censorship that countries can have on legitimate content.
Regarding your last point, I agree, however it is not as important and it does take up resources that could otherwise be used for the people who need it (journalists utilizing tor, victims trying to get away from abusers etc).
Especially given that there are still alternatives to piracy without tor, whereas there are far fewer alternatives for these people.
That said, you’re still right, it’s minimal. Overall though, options for piracy without tor are accessible and should still be used when possible. From my understanding, few circumstances arise where pirating over tor is a better method for you and for others
Basically, use tor for legitimate content to help make tor safer for others using it.
From what are you protecting yourself? Piracy? Then go with a VPN that has been tested in court and didn’t turn over any logs. The second one of these providers turns over their logs in court they are out of business because no one will ever trust them again. That’s all you really need for the seven seas.
Can the NSA see what you’re doing? Who cares. If they can, they aren’t revealing that to help anyone in a civil case.
You conflate VPN providers have an incentive to store no logs with it’s impossible to verify whether VPN providers store logs. It’s like trusting your friend to keep a secret. They promise not to write down what you say, but you can’t be sure. You accept that risk in your threat model, and that’s fine. But newcomers should judge that risk themselves. I feel like “Don’t worry bro, they don’t keep logs.” is an inappropriate response to people that’re about to commit a crime that can land them in jail.
I was trying to give general advice, since it didn’t sound like they had a trusted private tracker already it’s a good idea to have a VPN to mask your IP. I agree, it probably won’t help against malware.
I can’t call DNS blacklists part of defense in depth. DNS blacklists are a poor man’s version of existing and pre-installed anti-malware software.
DNS blacklists block only older known malware, similar to existing anti-malware, but less effective.
DNS blacklists block hijacked, but legit websites that host malware, contrary to existing anti-malware.
DNS blacklists? What is that? I use DoH, get fucked. Contrary to existing anti-malware.
They’re completely bypassable, they boast a high false positive rate due to how threat actors host malware, and they don’t even block newer malware. Just use Windows Defender. It ain’t perfect, but it’s leagues better than any DNS blacklist.
Blocking older known malware still blocks them, so that’s good (and saves bandwidth because the connection never happens, so this is really good).
If the site is hijacked, it needs blocked till it’s unhijacked. So this is good as well.
This is not really a point?
Number one above, stopping the connection before it happens, is really the best benefit, in my opinion. And if they boast a high false positive, you need better lists. You keep saying “they don’t block this or block that.” They are (nothing is) a one stop shop. Simply because they don’t block what you’re cherry picking does not make them bad. Use multiple layers. You say “don’t use a blocklist, use MS Defender instead.” Why not use both the blocklist, MS Defender, and even more stuff? Multiple layers. Defense in depth.
Because Defender already covers what DNS blacklists block and more with less false positives and a proper way to manage exceptions for non-technical people. Older malware is a solved problem for Defender since it’s literally pre-installed everywhere. VPN providers don’t have a way to manage DNS blacklist exceptions, so have fun disabling your VPN to do any research. You also don’t get to choose the blacklists your VPN provider uses. Saying 3. is not a point is like saying malware that’s always able to bypass your anti-malware solution is irrelevant.
I canceled last week. I paid to bundle hulu and Disney so I could lock in the year before the price hike. Hulu would never allow me to log in, I spent 7+ hours with tech support over the last month with them literally having me log in and out over and over without doing anything on their end. Never got logged in.
Several times they tried to sell me that I had to accept the ad tier or the one that included ESPN (which you know full well will get bigger cost spikes) despite promising I wouldn’t have to change plans.
I finally told them to cancel and refund the days. I haven’t pirated in over 4 years, because I finally make enough money and wanted to support content and have easy setup on products as my mom and daughter (outside of household) and my husband and son (in household) depend on me.
I started with a VPN and streaming this week. I will be working on jellyfin in the next week. They could have had my money, but they want to fuck around with my time, money, and content. I’m pissed and done.
I built out the whole stack: clients use jellyfin to watch media and ombi to request it (a friend uses overseerr which seems good too). Internally I’m using sonarr/radarr to manage the library, prowlarr to handle requests, sabnzbd and transmission to download stuff. Altogether this almost completely automates media request and acquisition.
It took a bit of figuring out docker, reverse proxy (using nginx proxy manager), DNS… I got it working though. Someone who has already done networking would find this much simpler but it was new to me.
It’s dangerous because I didn’t know when to stop lol. I started up some game servers for friends, wrote a borg backup script to periodically save all my configs (and game saves) to two cloud storage services, then started spooling up more services…
I’ve been kind of rotating services. I am saving <1gb of configs, game saves, and various other small files. I used Backblaze and AWS cold storage for a bit but that seemed totally overkill, so I started trying out regular consumer stuff and it’s all the same really (for this purpose). OneDrive, Google Drive, Dropbox… I figured keeping local backups on a different device, and then sending two out to different cloud storage platforms was enough. I backup once a day and keep two weeks worth of backups remote, and one month local. I also manually send a biweekly backup to a friend, and I store his. That’s when I restart the server, do updates, and if I’m unlucky spend a weekend trying to fix whatever broke lol.
Oooh, need to find me a NAS buddy. I’ve been getting into using syncthing lately, I’ve learned that it can encrypt your files before syncing them so that the remote storage never actually knows what’s in them. Still probably need to trust the other end, though.
That sucks. Tech support can be so annoying sometimes. I’m dealing with it too, although in a very different area. I wish they made it at least easy to give them money.
Good luck with Jellyfin and the other things you’ll be doing.
There’s a FOSS companion app for AirPods on Android and some features are “locked” until you press “Activate” and choose “I’ve spent all of my money on AirPods” as a payment method.
The music industry welcomed the development, stating that a service that helps infringers evade prosecution through anonymization also acts illegally.
But a service that artificially inflates revenues with shady accounting of song plays while simultaneously withholding payments toward creators, that’s totally not criminal.
-Also the music industry
Copyright laws based in the eighteenth century sure are awesome when applying analog scarcity to the digital world! /s
I’m for publishers and other representatives of the old system pulling away from the digital world close to entirely. Their whole business model requires scarcity that used to exist when creators were on the other side of the world and fans were lucky to have them come within 200 miles for a chance to enjoy them, and in the meantime, want to buy a record to experience them at home.
Now, creators can be in our hands, on our desks, and easily in our living rooms. The middlemen that brought those scarce physical objects to us (records, tapes, vhs and audio, books, etc) aren’t needed anymore, because the distribution of the art or idea is instant and on demand and already paid for by the communications package we all subscribe to.
Fans can connect directly with creators, who no longer need millions of fans to give them a huge slice of overall music (or other creative work) revenue. Just a few hundred devoted fans is enough to live comfortably, instead of being a superstar.
I’m dreaming, though…
ETA: the publishers could rethink their role and evolve to help creatives reach their audience, but, currently, they impede that. Creatives do better (per fan) when they know their fans and can connect directly with them.
Aye, I used to sail the high seas, the hull of my ship gnarly with viruses, adware and malware from some infectious crackers or key-generators.
Then I had money, and started buying my software and my movies and all was good for a time. Then my media consume shifted to mobile devices, but I had Amazon Prime Video as the only really available video-streaming service around and all was good for a time. Then I added Netflix, as it arrived on my countries market and all was good for a time. Then I added Crunchyroll, Disney+ and Hulu and everything sucked, streaming the shows I wanted to watch was suddenly so expensive, no single streaming service had everything I wanted to watch, so I needed to subscribe to them all, costing an amount of money I would not spend on buying those shows.
Now I have unsubscribed from all but two again, but the market is so fractured, there is barely anything interesting on the services I still go to.
So my eyes keep wandering to that old tricorn, the hook and peg-leg, gathering dust on the wall. I can hear the waves crashing and feel the tide rising in my bones. The moneybags have decided to press us for more and more, their greed means no single harbor, not even two are enough to supply our demands. So there is plenty of bounty to be found on the high seas again, big fat galleons full of content otherwise unreachable or too expensive.
Doncha hear it boys? Davey Jones is singing again, calling us back to the sea, put on your VPN, defy the torrents and right your compasses with a good magnet. We did not choose this life, they made us turn to it.
I highly recommend configuring qBittorrent to only connect to the VPN interface, so if your VPN is off it will simply not connect to the internet at all.
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