I've been trying to watch old 80s-90s movies recently. I'm happy to pay $5 or whatever, and they just aren't available anywhere. Rental stores are dead, so I can't go rent them from blockbuster or whatever, and streaming sites have splintered to the point I'm not even sure what is a scam and what is a legitimate business anymore. Trying to even find availability of what films exist on which streaming sites has been an absolute pain. There are theoretical catalogue sites, but they are all randomly out of date to the point that its not very useful.
I'm literally at the point where its looking like pirating the movies is the only way to watch them...
This is precisely the problem, and the whole reason why we still pirate TV/movies. I would have no problem paying $XX to a unified service that has basically everything; I have no interest in paying a dozen different streaming platforms for effectively "cable packages" that often add/remove/shift content around.
The music industry figured this out: I pay Spotify, they have 95% of music content I could ever way, the UX is good enough. I have no reason to pirate music anymore.
> The music industry figured this out: I pay Spotify, they have 95% of music content I could ever way, the UX is good enough. I have no reason to pirate music anymore.
To my knowledge, a radio station or music streaming service doesn't have to negotiate with the record label to play a given song, they just have to pay a small royalty as defined by law. However, that doesn't hold true for movies. Each video streaming service has to negotiate the right to carry a given movie with the film studio that owns it. Those film studios play the streaming services against one another, often allowing the exclusive right to offer certain content for a limited time, after which they then lease the rights to a competing service.
>To my knowledge, a radio station or music streaming service doesn't have to negotiate with the record label to play a given song, they just have to pay a small royalty as defined by law.
The copyright holders can legally prevent their recordings from being streamed by Spotify. Famous examples were Taylor Swift and Neil Young withholding their music from Spotify.
For extra nuance, copyright holders can't stop cover songs from appearing on Spotify. So the Taylor Swift cover songs do have to pay compulsory license fees to her and her record label.
> Those film studios play the streaming services against one another, often allowing the exclusive right to offer certain content for a limited time, after which they then lease the rights to a competing service.
Even worse, a lot of the big studios have their own streaming service (Disney, Paramount, Peacock, Canal+ in France, etc) and have no incentive to have lease the rights to competing services.
That's ultimately what pushed Netflix to focus so much on creating their content, they knew that at some point the original content owners will realise streaming can be lucrative, and just build their own services.
Yep. This kind of exclusivity agreement should probably be illegal across the board; they basically exist to make competition legally impossible. Great for business, sucks for people.
I dont know, that means if a streaming service created a show they would be forced to share it meaning no incentive for them to make their own content I prefer a limited time exclusively of 3-5 years for first party content then compulsory licencing of content. That would incentivise creation of new content as a positive market differentiator but also decincentivise removing old content as it would in effect be a negative differentiator.
Music industry runs on barely paying any artist that cant fill a stadium. Movie industry runs on constantly re-licensing content to min-max their returns from IP. Music industry can happily barely pay musicians via the spotify model, but the Movie industry can't continually re-license their stuff to a higher bidder if it's all on one site.
I broadly agree with your assessment, but I think the important takeaway is that these situations are created artificially, usually by dominant market players for their own benefit. There is nothing natural or neccesary with the way these markets work, and it's certainly not unchangeable.
>but I think the important takeaway is that these situations are created artificially
Are they really though? It's easier than ever for an indie creative to create and distribute their works through the many channels. Problem is, people don't spend as much money as a whole on indie works compared to focus-grouped blockbusters.
Yes, in the sense that at one point IP laws didn't exist and then we made them up. It stands to reason we could make up something better - maybe something that doesn't routinely banish media from public access.
Honestly I dont know that I believe that narrative, music labels have been cheating the talent out of the proceeds of their work since Edison phonograph. Labels claiming to the artist that they dont make any money while they use creative accounting to charge any and every expense to the artist and is a long and storied practice in the industry. Artist are expected still to pay x% of sales revenue for "breakage fees" on digital downloads example. Breakage fees having been introduced to cover the loss to the breaking in transit of early brittle shellac phonograph records. ID dont know about you.but tje think the breakage cost of a mp3 file should be on the scale of negligible to nonexistent.
Movies & tv have higher monetary value to the studios than songs to the record labels.
So the ip owners of video content get more revenue by restricting it as exclusives to their respective platforms rather than licensing it out to everybody and get a smaller fractional payment from an everything-unlimited-catalog video streaming service.
E.g. HBO would rather get 100% of their own $16.99/month subscription -- vs -- licensing entire HBO catalog to Netflix and getting a fraction% of $17.99/month.
How much extra would Netflix conceivably have to charge per month such that the fractional amounts to each movie studio (HBO, Disney, etc) would be enough $$ that the studios wouldn't bother with their own exclusive streaming platforms? $99/month? $149/month? Right now, there isn't a number that Netflix + all studios + subscribers can converge on so instead, we get the current fragmented streaming platforms of video content.
For more evidence of how video content is more valuable than music (in terms of digital streaming platforms), consider that tech giants like Netflix, Amazon, and Apple -- all created their own movie & tv studio business to produce even more exclusives for their streaming platforms. But none of them have started their own record labels to sign musicians to get exclusive songs or albums.
If its so valuable why are HBO and Disney killing already produced content making it unavailable (legally) on or off their platform. Why is the Willow TV show (sequel to the classic movie) removed it was one of their flagship early offering when they were starting their streaming service. Why is HBO killing finished movies like Batgirl and Wiley Coyote v Acme for the tax right off if they are such precious valuable content? Why is classic Looney Toons being broken up and sublicensed to everchanging array of shit tier streaming services. none of these moves makes since with the reason given
Except there are times when exclusivity deals have games launch on other platforms first, and then get to Steam sometime later. Therefore, more like the movie model than the music model.
I only understand the frustration with finding any legal avenue at all to see certain films. I don't really understand why disparate services are a big deal. You don't need to subscribe to multiple things all at once, and it's all done in a few clicks in the convenience of your own home.
I'm concerned and curious about one thing, which is that tech giants have a monopoly on renting. If you want to rent a digital movie that isn't otherwise available from subscription, you might be able to get it from MSFT, Google or Amazon. Meanwhile the telecoms only seem to offer this through cable machines, just new releases at that.
I'm interested in seeing a few Korean films, the kind that aren't on criterion or mubi. Basically no legal way to see them.
Why not have some platform that lets users to actually buy the movie and download/stream it as a file at full quality on their device?
Renting is sucky compared to just buying things, you could watch any movie you want and have unlimited access to it instead of juggling 5 subscriptions and get frustrated with shitty products. And publishers that make actual good movies that people want to watch would be rewarded
Music recording copyrights have a single owner, and can be licensed for streaming by that owner. Older movies have a lot of IP owned by various entities with licensing to allow for theatrical and home release, but all of which have to cooperate to make the movies available for streaming.
I recently joined a local independent video rental store and it's so, so good. My partner looked at me like I was crazy when I told her, but she was a convert after one trip to pick out a movie in person.
Something about browsing in person is just so much more enjoyable than flipping between 9 services. Having a cinephile right there behind the desk that wants to nerd about movies and help pick something out is awesome. It's not a big store, but they've got thousands of movies in their catalog, which is (apparently) way bigger than any of the streaming services.
This doesn't solve your problem, but for the folks that are near the few remaining physical rental stores: consider supporting them, because they're great.
Most of the collection is DVD and/or Blu-ray, but he's got some VHS tapes and video games across a few platforms. When he was giving me the spiel about joining he was explicit that he doesn't have any Laserdisc or Betamax, though.
This is actually a larger problem that has to do with lost licensing negotiations and residuals. For a place to offer up streaming, they have to know they can license the content.
But oftentimes, that production company is closed shop. They've sold the licenses off to someone else, who split it into something else. And then there's the music rights. The whole thing becomes extremely complicated.
There's a whole set of movies that were somewhat popular that you just cannot find streaming. 100 cigarettes and Woody Allen's Crimes and Misdemeanors are good examples.
I'd say if they can't figure out the rights, just put it on YouTube.
The length of time it takes for media to enter the public domain is absolutely absurd. It if didn't take over a century for works to enter the PD, we could say, "Eh, just wait a few years." But instead we hold these works of art captive for no reason, other than a few multi-billion-dollar conglomerates want to keep milking art for money again and again.
If we had a more reasonable period like a decade, it would be a driver for creating new art, and prevent works from being locked away arbitrarily until our great-grandchildren can enjoy them (unless the art was just... lost to time).
> But instead we hold these works of art captive for no reason, other than a few multi-billion-dollar conglomerates want to keep milking art for money again and again.
In many cases, the conglomerates aren't even making money from them. How much do you think the movie company (and all the various middlemen) are making from some obscure movie from the 80s that they don't even make available on DVD or streaming anywhere? They're just griefing the public by withholding it and not even making any money.
I think the reason that the big guys don’t make money out of old films is that if they did they’d be on the hook to pay the cast & crew(‘s retirement plans).
The Roku app is actually really good at determining where everything ever is currently streaming (or purchasable). It's not 100% perfect, but it's generally correct. I go there first for basically everything.
For example, it tells me Wake Up Ron Burgundy (which isn't even a "real" movie) can be purchases on Prime, Fandango, or iTunes.
Actually, iTunes and Prime have mostly everything for rent, what movies were you actually looking for?
Just wanted to watch a relatively recent movie yesterday (Antichrist) and the only place that has it is a streaming service called Mooby. Not signing up for a service to watch one movie. Would have gladly paid 4 bucks to watch it, so had to find it in the usual places instead.
My spouse loves watching old direct to home video movies and I'd say about 75% of them have no accessible copies outside maybe eBay. Most of the remainder are only available via piracy. A vanishingly small percentage are available from streaming platforms.
One that I wanted to watch recently was Disney's 2000 animation short John Henry. It's now part of the American Legends compilation, which is only available for purchase on Amazon, not rent. It's not even on Disney+.
It gets worse when you're looking for a movie only to realize it's different from what you remember. Either a change of substance (different scenes), or a change of form (adjusted color palette). Occasionally the original version is no longer officially available anywhere.
IMDB does something similar (it at least lists Wake Up Ron Burgandy as available for rent on Prime, doesn't mention iTunes or Fandango but I'm not logged in to IMDB so I'm not sure what's enabled/disabled as "preferred services" by default)
Too much. I love Plex but it's increasingly hard to avoid the search integrations and other non-local features. I recently set up access to my library across a few devices and it's disappointing how hostile it now feels to turn off a lot of stuff that should not be enabled by default just to get to my own files.
agreed. at least there are still toggles to disable most of it. especially considering i paid for a lifetime membership. i’ve tried enby and jellyfin though and they just aren’t up to snuff yet for me needs. but i need to put my money where my mouth is and toss jellyfin a donation.
Seems like a fair solution might be limiting damages on pirating movies that aren't widely available. For example, if a movie isn't available for streaming cap damages at $2.99 or whatever the going rental rate is.
I don't see why there should be any damages paid out if something isn't available to stream. How can you claim a loss of sales for a product you aren't even selling? Why why should anyone be rewarded for not providing a product and just sitting on it so nobody else can use it? There certainly isn't any excuse for not being able to bring a product to market fast enough when it previously was already on the market and there are plenty of services to license it for streaming or sale.
Not just 80s-90s but try everything non-vanilla Hollywood stuff. Asian cinema, MENA, Eastern Europe etc. Piracy is just superior because I can actually watch what I want.
>Try to buy Need For Speed Most Wanted (2005). You can't.
I searched the biggest used online (flea)marketplace in my country and I could find the DVD for sale from several people. So I can buy it and play it right now legally if I want to, without resorting to piracy.
What point were you trying to make with this? Because I also can't buy a brand new 1969 Ford Mustang. Nothing is made forever.
Agree. However I'm willing to cut EA some slack here. NFS series (like some other games) has music in it that's been licensed by the devs for a limited time.
Selling the game today would mean either ripping out the music which is what made the game fun, or paying the record labels more money, which will not be offset by the few sales to 30+ year old nostalgics.
But at least EA isn't actively preventing you from playing that old game if you own a licensed copy by requiring always-on DRM.
> However I'm willing to cut EA some slack here. NFS series (like some other games) has music in it that's been licensed by the devs for a limited time.
If that practice gets killed as well, that'd be a bonus.
> Selling the game today would mean either ripping out the music which is what made the game fun, or paying the record labels more money, which will not be offset by the few sales to 30+ year old nostalgics.
Well if the market can't provide, Pirate Bay can. Maybe they should fix "the market".
Where I live, ILLs do not work for video games because the format identification for video games is “Electronic”, and their software is programmed to suppress the request button for these items because it is interpreted as “no physical media”. I emailed the people who run the system, they said it is a known issue, and as far as I can tell that just means they aren’t going to fix it, since it has been this way for at least three years.
I wonder what the material difference is between borrowing a film from the library (is this DVD? Blu-ray? Streaming?) and downloading it from a peer-to-peer network.
I suppose it's an act of support for your public library. But no one with a financial stake in that particular media is impacted in any way by using either method to obtain the film.
Unhelpful but related; back in the day (15 or so years ago), Netflix had a truly excellent back catalogue of old movies. Over a hundred thousand titles. A DVD collection that we just didn't realise was going to vanish as quickly as it arose.
The current offering is just... less. I don't know if I mean in terms of sheer number of titles, but a million episodes of slop is just more slop. Netflix peaked 15 years ago and we didn't even notice.
In fairness to Netflix, in the old days they only had to own a copy of the DVD in order to rent it out.
Now they have to secure rights for every title they want to stream. That’s a lot of work (and cost) for a hundred thousand titles, especially when your competitors own some of the studios that license those titles.
Disney, for example, owns the Disney / Marvel / Fox / Searchlight / Lucasfilm back catalogues and wants to hoard much of it for its own streaming service.
They've ended/sold/traded away many of their licensing agreements. Many things they used to have are gone.
It stinks because some of the things they tossed are mundane, but they add to the depth of the catalog if you're looking for something and improve the experience.
This is why I started getting into physical media. I was subbed to so many services, but I felt like only 15% of the time would any service I want have the movie (and almost never Netflix as they prefer their own content slop).
Same here. I have 4 streaming service subscriptions and it really frustrates me when I can't find classic films that I want to show my kids or just watch myself.
I'm at the point where I just automatically assume any new movie is derivative, uninspired slop. Professional reviewers don't really seem trustworthy these days and user reviews are constantly being gamed based on fandom, political sentiments or just bots boosting or tanking reviews.
I do love movies, particularly ones that are pre-2010 or so. I've actually started going to a local indie theater that curates excellent older stuff so I just check their calendar every once in a while and pick something that sounds interesting to go see a couple times a month. Often times it's foreign stuff or things I've never heard of but those guys have excellent taste and I have yet to see a bad film. For anyone curious, here's my spot: metrograph.com
Look at the amazing spiderman 1, it was better than anything Marvel has released with Spiderman, it got trashed on for a very simple reason in my eyes, Disney wanted the rights for Spiderman and tried to force them to give them it (it worked) via giving it terrible reviews.
Opposite thing happened with Star Wars, another Disney "product", the new trilogy getting "amazing" reviews at the start was ridiculous, they were very bad movies, like terrible, the first one which was the most watchable of the three was just bad acting mixed in with nostalgia bait, didn't push the universe forward at all which the prequels get hate for but they did hugely expand what star wars was, in good ways. Even midichlorians which people gave so much hate to in episode 1, makes sense if you rewatch the OT, Darth Vader suddenly turning good is like "snapping" out of the trance state he was in, because as we know now, the "force" in star wars is not like morality in the real world, while you play a part in you getting taken "over" by a side (light/dark side), once it happens you sort of lose control, sort of like a hard drug in the real world, it takes a lot for someone who has given in to the dark side to go back to normal, which I believe makes for a better science fiction universe, the concept of only giving in enough to receive the power but not enough to become evil was even explored with mace windu with Vapaad, anyways.
Lastly, Black Adam, I watched it and the movie was objectively not beyond terrible for current day standards, it was a watchable popcorn flick and the CGI was very very good compared to Marvel movies which made the movie look cool, the main villain was uninspiring but so are most first movie villains, it's all about the setup. It received beyond terrible reviews in my opinion directed from Disney/Marvel in an attempt to fully kill competition especially during Marvel's weak point post endgame. I would have enjoyed seeing a movie of Superman vs Black Adam but it is what it is.
Lastly any anime movie competing with Disney, just look at the Oscars, how many anime movies get snubbed? I still remember being shocked at how when marnie was there did not win vs inside out... or how look back wasn't even nominated, lol.
I think you're making up a narrative in your head to support your bias against Disney here.
TASM 1 was definitely well received when it was released. It was tarnished by the slop that was TASM 2, which lead to Sony being able to come to a licensing agreement with Marvel Studios, to use Spider-Man in the MCU. I think it's an extreme stretch to think Disney had any nefarious doings in the public opinion of those movies, Sony did that to themselves and has proven time-and-time again they cannot make a good quality movie with their Spider-Man IPs.
The Rise of Skywalker is at 51% on Rotten Tomatoes, that was universally acknowledged to be terrible, even by the "critics". Disney definitely was also not able to silence or drown-out the absolute outrage by the cast and fans of the treatment of Luke in The Last Jedi.
Why would Marvel / Disney spend any effort sabotaging the DCEU when Warner Bros. was good at doing it all themselves? If Marvel was worried about DC stealing their audience, they would have focused more on movies like The Batman, not some c-grade antihero most people have no idea about? The Rock fostered a lot of the ill-will towards that movie himself.
I say all this but I also think it's accurate still to say reviews are trustworthy but I don't think they ever have been. I don't think this is some new phenomenon, just people are more aware of the corruption embedded in the system.
> streaming sites have splintered to the point I'm not even sure what is a scam and what is a legitimate business anymore
They're all scams, of varying levels of scammyness ;P
No but seriously, the pricing is intentional deceptive and a lot of werives won't offer ad free viewing, no matter how much you pay. They'll also weasel around it with "most media won't have ads, but some will". Thanks, how helpful. Paramount plus apparently doesn't consider ads for itself to be ads - so on the ad free plan, you still get ads for Paramount.
But the worst part is that every app is different and some are really, really poor quality. You'd think we would just invent an API for this and then have one viewer, like we had for TV. But then again, maybe nobody wants to reinvent TV.
Also, blocking VPNs: if I'm logged in and you know my real country and I'm paying, you don't need to block VPNs. It doesn't do anything but annoy customers
Pirates always pull this out as justification. Like they are starving people who are forced to steal bread just to survive. Maybe just because a piece of media has been published in the past, we don't all have some God-given right to access it in perpetuity for a nominal fee. Lost media is not a sin.
And good luck trying to find anything marginally erotic, like "Bliss (1997)".
Not only you don't own anything anymore, you can't purchase anything anymore and you can't view content that the overseers deem imoral. At this point pirating is just civil disobedience against the stronghold that corporations have on the American society that ripples across the globalized world.
> No one can argue that you’re stealing a product that’s not being distributed, the law specifically says you need to put in a reasonable amount of effort to commercialize something to claim it damages you for someone to steal it
The law literally does not say that, either for things that are literally subject to be stolen, or, more to the point here, for copyright protection where “steal” is merely a very loose metaphorical term sometimes used to refer to infringement.
It's incorrect. The copyright holder of any work is obviously well within their rights to yank it from shelves (physical or otherwise). That doesn't make piracy legal.
That's because it's bullshit. (IP-trained attorney here, not legal advice.)
IP law is like real property law in the sense that it provides the owner the power to exclude others from using it. As with real property, there is no requirement that the owner be using the subject property in an economically viable way.
Not OP, but yes believe it or not it's impossible to find certain movies anywhere other than pirating them. One example is "Pirates of Silicon Valley", I watched it when I was young and recently wanted to watch it again. I pay for basically all the streaming services, I'm would have been happy to rent it from any service at all. I spent several hours trying to find a way to pay to watch it and never could.
This is an old relatively low budget TV movie, it's not on TV+ (which I subscribe to). Nor can you rent it on iTunes, it doesn't even show up when you search for it. Same for Prime Video, etc.
Apple TV doesn't allow me to stream in my browser, so I happily pirate their content. I pay for all the other "big" streaming services that I can use like a normal person.
I watch a decent amount of movies, I can count on one hand the number of times I couldn’t rent it for <$5 on Prime or YouTube. I’ve never been unable to identify where I could find a particular movie to stream, and it’s certainly less effort than going to a physical storefront.
I think there are plenty of problems with the streaming model, but I think it’s borderline bad faith to try and make the claim that piracy is needed because it’s hard to navigate streaming sites. It’s certainly easier than finding obscure movies was pre-streaming
You have to go pretty deep though for the record. At least, using one of your examples, for Altman if you look at his top 25 films on Letterboxd, 20 of them are available to rent or stream online. And for me at least the other five I can get at the library. There are none that are totally unavailable of those 25.
Yep. I watch a lot of movies and TV shows from the 60s and below, and they are often not available to stream legitimately anywhere, and the only option is the occasional DVD release on Amazon which is hit or miss.
BBC: This Was the Week That Was. TV, aired 1962-1963
NBC: This Was the Week That Was. TV, aired 1963-1965. Someone found acetate audio recordings of two episodes and ripped them to YT. An act of culture, done in spite of rights holders.
Not a movie, but Police Squad is missing from streaming services. It's strange given it spawned 3 movies and now we even have an upcoming sequel to those.
Even when Amazon Prime has it, the rental terms are dogshit. I used to rent VHS and DVDs from the store and got to watch them as many times as I wanted for a week. With Amazon Prime, once I start watching it I only have 48 hours and then I have to rent it again. Friends coming over in 3 days and you think they'll like the movie you just rented? Too bad, have to pay them again.
It's flagrant bullshit that physical media, with real scarcity, had better rental terms than digital.
So why the hell shouldn't I pirate it? I get a better product, it's free, and all the people who made it are dead now anyway so spare me any bullshit moralizing.
You may know this, but these rental terms are typically driven by the studio that published the film, not the TVOD service provider (Amazon in this case).
I know that it doesn't change the customer experience, but it's worth being angry at the right people...
I've recently switched to privacy respecting computing options, so of course lost access to everything I've bought from Apple and Amazon for the last 20 years.
If I never paid for content again they'd still be in my debt.
You wouldn't steal a car would you? No, but I'd repossess one from some delinquent son of a bitch in a suit.
There's no moral argument against ripping DVDs one way or the other.
There's a civil/economic argument: arguably copyright/intellectual property make for stronger societies that produce better stuff for everybody.
But there's nothing immoral about copying or watching something you came across. The author isn't injured by it- nobody is. Except, like I said, perhaps society in general.
> arguably copyright/intellectual property make for stronger societies that produce better stuff for everybody.
They really, really don't. The tradeoff of offering temporary legal privileges in exchange for a future richer public domain resulted in better stuff for everybody. Those legal privileges have become effectively permanent, so the trade is broken.
> There's a civil/economic argument: arguably copyright/intellectual property make for stronger societies that produce better stuff for everybody.
They make rich people richer, we have ample evidence for that. But research ... the majority is funded by governments. But content creation ... the majority of high quality Youtube for example in funded in advance by Patreon and similar solutions.
>There's a civil/economic argument: arguably copyright/intellectual property make for stronger societies that produce better stuff for everybody.
You raise a valid point. When copyright was first envisioned in 1710, the world population was 600M, literacy rates b/w 5-25% (rural/urban).
That argument does not stand today - we don't need protections since the number of producers of better stuff will simply compete in the market of ideas. Pearl clutching of ideas isn't a problem.
In my country it is not illegal to download or share copyright content for non-profit and personal use. It's the IPTVs, torrent and streaming pirate sites with Ads or asking for money the ones that should die (that's why I don't agree with Anna's Archive profiting from sharing copyrighted content).
As I said before: it's 2025, we shouldn't need an ad infested "website" to share, discover and download content in a p2p fashion. Kademilla and similar DHT truly decentralized tech has existed for more than 15 years...
The problem is that new generations want to profit from everything and have stopped "sharing is caring"
The main moral argument for intellectual property rights seems to be "because that's how the world already works and we don't want to disrupt that less it be artists or inventors that get the shaft", and yet we don't have strong cases of intellectual property protecting artists or inventors in the first place. Not as a primary effect of IP, anyway.
True, but that's marketing. Without a DRM-free digital copy, it's still "For as long as we allow you to have". Steam also doesn't allow selling "licenses" or whole accounts. All money paid to streaming and "buy" on most platforms is for temporary, pretend purchase. One exception of media distributors is GoG where offline, DRM-free copies are offered.
> The granted orders would stay in place for a year with the option to extend if necessary. If blocked sites switch to new locations, the court can also amend blocking orders to include new IP addresses and domain names.
What if the "pirate site" uses foreign cloud provider, and regularly changes IP addresses? Will I lose access to all websites hosted by the foreign cloud provider once their whole ASN will be blocked?
> Block BEARD does not mention VPNs, but its broad definition of “service provider” could be interpreted to include them.
This seems easy to circumvent - you can just use foreign VPN provider, who don't advertise themselves for piracy use, for... piracy. IP/DNS blocking proven to be a good censorship tool though.
> The site-blocking proposal seeks to amend U.S. copyright law, enabling rightsholders to request federal courts to designate online locations as a “foreign digital piracy site”. If that succeeds, courts can subsequently order U.S. service providers to block access to these sites.
Of course, because what we need is the govt deciding which sites can be banned. I'm hoping this dies in committee, however for Bay Area folks, Rep Zoe Lofgren is the house sponsor for the companion bill and Adam Schiff is the Senate co sponsor. They can be reached at
If you oppose this bill, take 5 min and let your congressperson know. They might seem to be bought and paid for by lobbyists, but they care deeply about being reelected and even a small number of constituents showing up can be effective. In order of impact personal visit > letter > call > email. The higher effort channels(visit, letter) tend to get treated more seriously. Emails are largely ignored unless they are absolutely deluged.
This bill is different than the domain seizures of the past; it seems to be the start of a framework where the government is using its power to tell ISPs to block access to IP addresses - in this case, those identified as foreign piracy sites. Honestly I don't know what's already happening in this space, though. I haven't heard of many instances where U.S. judges are ordering ISPs to block traffic to sites like in other countries, but maybe I haven't been paying attention.
There's a number of precautions and exceptions in the bill, and they're good ones, but I don't think we've seen anything like this before.
I feel like this bill is the beginning of a type of thinking that could grow past piracy by riding the current isolationist wave in U.S. politics. I think once this passes, it's probably going to be easier to justify ordering ISP blocks of non-U.S. IPs/ASNs on other criteria.
It will also further cement social media as the primary thing that is "Internet," instead of websites or other applications based on network protocols. After all that's probably what most people think of as the Internet - social media, a few apps, and streaming. Big social media will always have an international reach as its owners are very rich, they cooperate with governments, their users are individually accountable, and those users will likely become more so over time. I bet soon, that's all that will be left to the masses - social media and streaming.
Isn't torrenting way down from its heyday? Streaming companies are not perfect, but I always thought they were at least moderately successful such that in 2025, average, casual, non-techies no longer bother to jump through the VPN and private tracker hoops just to download a movie.
Most of the rips are probably the same-ish size. But there are definitely now a lot of incredibly huge rips. A 13-episode season of television that's like 80 gigs. It's an additive load, and while it's not that regular, it could have a massively outsided impact.
It's down from it's heyday for the mainstream, but for the dedicated few, it's better than ever before. Gone are the days of manually searching for a movie on tracker sites, downloading them, organizing your library and watching stuff on your laptop.
There are now open-source, self-hosted applications that automate that entire process, so it's as simple as requesting a movie on your phone and having it show up on your own personal streaming service on your TV a few minutes later.
Do not under any circumstance download Stremio (available in Firestick as well). Also don't try to install the Torrentio extension for Stremio. That would allow you to play pirated content with one click I your TV, similarly to PopcornTime.
It's so nice to have all my legal media backups cataloged and organized and easily viewable. My server isn't powerful enough for 4k HDR though so I need to upgrade it.
I know a guy who knows a guy that says that you don’t even need that, you just browse the movies and press “play” as there is direct torrent streaming now. But I don’t know anything about all this i just use my VCR with the clock flashing 12:00.
Yes, for $30 a year you can instantly stream any torrent with no real setup or install. The most used client is a PWA that calls out to VLC or whatever.
Bluray 4K 100+GB copy of Dune Part 2 at >70Mbps with maybe 5 seconds of buffering at the start. Literally can’t replicate it with legal streaming.
I rip stuff from YouTube for the same reason. Currently watching Taskmaster which has all or most episodes freely available on YouTube, but no way am I interested in using that dumpster fire of a UX.
I think it was down when the answer to streaming was "get netflix, it has most stuff", but now it's "pay for netflix, Disney+, Amazon prime, apple tv, ...".
For a while, streaming was better than any alternative. However over the last several year prices have a
spike while the collections available for streaming have shrunk and splintered. Then a bunch of the streaming sites started adding ads for their paying customers.
At this point streaming servcies have been enshitified enough to make piracy again the better experience.
Can confirm. The only streaming service I use anymore is Disney+, and I only have it because I like to watch the new Star Wars stuff when it releases at good quality. Everything else I care to watch, which isn't much besides older stuff, I'll just torrent now.
Greedy companies really need to heed Gabe Newell's words.
I still subscribe to some of the services, but the experience has deteriorated sufficiently that at this point I rip all videos I care about and then watch them in Plex.
I have no doubt that it will pass. If it is overly broad and can be used to needlessly hurt someone, Republicans love it, and they are the ones with power right now.
Both major parties are corpo-authoritarian, with the main dynamics of elections being to gauge how much the public is willing to accept and to make half the people think they actually wanted the resulting policies. And for this round the people have spoken that they want it good and hard.
That’s a false equivalence. Companies can pay people to agitate for them full-time. Then they can pay the politicians, albeit indirectly. Finally the public have the privilege of using their free time to agitate against the politicians. Which just starts out as unorganized disruptions, “people were mildly inconvenienced on their way to work today”.
Sure, you're up against "the purpose of a system is what it does". I'm sure many mainstream politicians actually earnestly care about individual liberty and reigning in corpos - it helps them sell themselves to the public. But the net effect is that when the dollars come calling, enough set aside those ideals to make the corpo agenda happen.
> And for this round the people have spoken that they want it good and hard.
Actually, the people have said "please stop this, this can't go on" at every election since 1992, with the possible exception of 2012 (unless you admit that 2012 President Obama was running against 2008 Candidate Obama.) They again said it in 2024.
I agree that's what the people have wanted to say and that they believe it is what they have said, but they get taken in by simplistic populist messages that transmute their frustration into support for the next corpo con long into when the results have become apparent. But for 2024 the usual excuses of "he reneged", "stick with the incumbent", or "less bad option" don't even work - it's a clear case of people putting their foot on the gas with a known quantity, but thinking it must be a good thing because those other people are really upset about it.
Wonder if having your own DNS resolver will work around the issue... I mean, the caching from cloudflare/google-dns is nice, but I'm fine if 1/8 of my dns lookups has to make the full cycle through domain resolvers.
I haven't seen the text of the bill, so don't know for sure. If it says "resolvers must block site" then yes, running your own resolver would still work. If it says "domain registries must remove delegation" then it won't, but that could only be enforced for registries that are based in the US. Unless your ISP blocks well-known DNS ports, which none due as far as I've found.
The article says one of the requirements for the complaint needs to be that the site to be blocked must be found to be foreign based, so I guess the assumption is that the current set of laws to take down the site or sue are unavailable.
So is this an opening move with an end goal of “private national internets”? Fracturing the international nature of the ‘net seems like every power worldwide would like and benefit from this.
I am more concerned about "big brother" - the increasing use of the internet by the government to "watch" its citizens. The recent efforts by England's demand that Apple provide the English government with a "back door" into Apple OS. And more and more governments demanding ID under the guise of protecting children. How is that going to work? Are we all going to need a government issued digital identity in order to use the internet?
Most accepted needing a government document to access most aspects of public life just a couple of years ago. The governments saw the public blink and now it knows the sky is the limit.
The fact that some Democrats are introducing bills that mandate creation of infrastructure that can be easily repurposed to censor political viewpoints, during this administration no less, tells you all you need to know about how much disdain they really have for their electorate.
The name of this bill, "Block BEARD" is what really gets me.
It's a simple thing. Just a casual joke that means nothing to most people.
I worry because there are millions of young citizens who are going to have to work harder either for new political parties or to overturn this kind of language and jab.
We can't ever prove it's a higher level system that keeps every next generation in perpetual non-paying advocacy and grassroots political work. That's deeply unsettling.
The Great Firewall of China is a censorship program.
This proposed US legislation puts the power of blocking under the authority of its court system and only in the domain of copyright law. The courts are historically very concerned with upholding 1st Amendment rights to a degree that often (but not always) surpasses analogous rights in many sister liberal democracies. Anything that remotely smells of censorship would come under intense scrutiny.
And in this case, since we are talking about copyright law, the only parties with standing to sue for a block are the IP owners in the first place. So, by definition, this legislation cannot be used for censorship.
YouTube's copyright strikes create a chilling effect. Google takes the easy way out in tuning their system to minimize false negatives at the cost of lots of false positives. This minimizes their liability under the DMCA and minimizes cost but allows lots of abuse by those claiming to hold copyright.
Not to mention the monetization restrictions on Youtube and Twitch. Those who rely on it play a game of whack a mole where they upload a video, it's get flagged, they edit, try again. It makes talking about new or serious situations like gun violence of Epstein very difficult unless you're willing to forgo any ad revenue.
Copyright law is a censorship program. It may not have been the intent presented when it was made but more and more it is used to suppress the speech of those who can't afford the legal battle. This is amplified by enforcement around it taking a guilty until proven innocent style since platforms that host speech are held liable for not taking immediate action.
When you prevent distribution of information, that is censorship by definition. You can argue that censorship in this case is socially beneficial, but don't muddy the waters as to what it it is.
At the same time, laws like these require creation of infrastructure that is goal-agnostic. Once you have ISPs implement mandatory blocking of websites for copyright reasons, this system can, and eventually will, be used to block other things deemed undesirable for the plebs to access.
Given the current presidential administration especially, any Democrat participating in such a project should be tarred and feathered.
Between this, new requirements to verify age and locking down of mobile devices it feels like digital freedom is really under attack. For all the decades of the west mocking the great firewall of china, it's sad to see them turn about and enact it themselves.
They're intended to be propaganda soundbites. The point is that people use them to refer to the bill because it's much easier than using the full title or describing what the bill actually does, and in doing so, they inadvertently propagate a specific perspective on the nature of the bill. "PATRIOT" act etc are good examples.
Agreed but at the same time, "everything" out of congress is propaganda sound bites, so I'm not going to pick on backronyms in particular. Having a short monicker for a bill remains useful.
It's not like non-backronym bills in congress have names that accurately reflect what they seek to achieve.
In media? The non-US examples I know (my home country and where I live now) either refer to laws/proposals based on sponsor name or topic, or (when passed), the date it was passed.
Cursory googling about the UK suggests it's mostly either naked acts or "law of XYZ", but numbers.
The act names and backronyms are for public consumption.
It's nice to see the US Congress finally trying to address the real issues that have serious impact on the daily lives of the average citizen. Oh wait, this matters to almost no one except big business interests. Never mind.
The motion picture industry’s problem isn’t piracy, it’s just that they keep targeting movies at 0.02% of the population. If they want to sell more movies they ought to target a bigger demographic.
Any time a law has a contrived name to fit some cutesy pre-determined name, it's a bullshit law, and will almost never achieve the goals that the cutesy name brings to mind.
I can envision whitelist-only ISPs that block any traffic to unvetted domains and IPs. Hopefully we still have some time left before total dictatorship
As far as I know, what you describe exists today only in North Korea. Which is to say, this is not very likely. Thing is, a "great firewall" with some packet inspection thrown in to cut off the common VPN protocols deters 90% of the population, and that is generally "good enough" for authoritarians.
Remember: you can do almost anything in America so long as a retirement fund gets to wet its beak.
Murder-for-hire? That's not only a first-degree murder charge, it's RICO. You're looking at the gurney in Terre Haute as a real possibility.
Operating a company that takes money from people on the promise that they'll be able to use it to cover medical expenses, then denying the payout because you already promised that money to shareholders who want to move to Florida to swing on and off the golf course at the retirement community they like, all while letting the person die a miserable death from a treatable illness? Perfectly legal. Encouraged. You have Congress' ear.
Same here.
Reading a book that no one wants to sell without paying for it? Intellectual property theft. Having a LLM model do the same and then charging for access to said model's output? Here's a seat behind the President at the inauguration.
That's just silly. There is no moral comparison between the two. I wouldn't bother to respond, except that it's this sort of attitude that was behind the gleeful response and support of a cold blooded murder.
I can point at myriad examples in which someone's life was ended because expending the monetary resources necessary to extend it was not in the best interests of shareholder returns.
This kind of crap will only grow the MAGA base. Everyone knows our politicians work to serve the corporations and are sick of it. Democrats won’t allow a real candidate that will be anti-corporate. So we end up with Trump who pays lip service to it. For reasons beyond me, people seem to believe him.
Meanwhile Altman & Co. continue to steal data at large scale. Trump himself encourages it by removing any potential for regulation the LLM industry. I guess his followers can’t be bothered to read the actual news and get angry about it.
Most politicians that stand up against this stuff aren’t allowed to succeed. Unless someone does, this pro-corporate downward spiral will continue.
I've been trying to watch old 80s-90s movies recently. I'm happy to pay $5 or whatever, and they just aren't available anywhere. Rental stores are dead, so I can't go rent them from blockbuster or whatever, and streaming sites have splintered to the point I'm not even sure what is a scam and what is a legitimate business anymore. Trying to even find availability of what films exist on which streaming sites has been an absolute pain. There are theoretical catalogue sites, but they are all randomly out of date to the point that its not very useful.
I'm literally at the point where its looking like pirating the movies is the only way to watch them...
This is precisely the problem, and the whole reason why we still pirate TV/movies. I would have no problem paying $XX to a unified service that has basically everything; I have no interest in paying a dozen different streaming platforms for effectively "cable packages" that often add/remove/shift content around.
The music industry figured this out: I pay Spotify, they have 95% of music content I could ever way, the UX is good enough. I have no reason to pirate music anymore.
Why is this so hard for the film industry?
> The music industry figured this out: I pay Spotify, they have 95% of music content I could ever way, the UX is good enough. I have no reason to pirate music anymore.
> Why is this so hard for the film industry?
My theory is that the United States has compulsory licensing for music, but not movies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsory_license#United_Stat...
To my knowledge, a radio station or music streaming service doesn't have to negotiate with the record label to play a given song, they just have to pay a small royalty as defined by law. However, that doesn't hold true for movies. Each video streaming service has to negotiate the right to carry a given movie with the film studio that owns it. Those film studios play the streaming services against one another, often allowing the exclusive right to offer certain content for a limited time, after which they then lease the rights to a competing service.
>To my knowledge, a radio station or music streaming service doesn't have to negotiate with the record label to play a given song, they just have to pay a small royalty as defined by law.
The copyright holders can legally prevent their recordings from being streamed by Spotify. Famous examples were Taylor Swift and Neil Young withholding their music from Spotify.
For extra nuance, copyright holders can't stop cover songs from appearing on Spotify. So the Taylor Swift cover songs do have to pay compulsory license fees to her and her record label.
Swift withheld from Apple Music because they were giving it away for free and not paying her (or anyone); I don't recall it being kept off spotify?
Source for the Apple Music claim?
Here's info about how and why Swift pulled her music from Spotif: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/arts/taylor-swift-yanks-music-s...
Perhaps you'd mixed the two up?
https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-33220189
> Those film studios play the streaming services against one another, often allowing the exclusive right to offer certain content for a limited time, after which they then lease the rights to a competing service.
Even worse, a lot of the big studios have their own streaming service (Disney, Paramount, Peacock, Canal+ in France, etc) and have no incentive to have lease the rights to competing services.
That's ultimately what pushed Netflix to focus so much on creating their content, they knew that at some point the original content owners will realise streaming can be lucrative, and just build their own services.
Yep. This kind of exclusivity agreement should probably be illegal across the board; they basically exist to make competition legally impossible. Great for business, sucks for people.
I dont know, that means if a streaming service created a show they would be forced to share it meaning no incentive for them to make their own content I prefer a limited time exclusively of 3-5 years for first party content then compulsory licencing of content. That would incentivise creation of new content as a positive market differentiator but also decincentivise removing old content as it would in effect be a negative differentiator.
> The music industry figured this out
> Why is this so hard for the film industry
Music industry runs on barely paying any artist that cant fill a stadium. Movie industry runs on constantly re-licensing content to min-max their returns from IP. Music industry can happily barely pay musicians via the spotify model, but the Movie industry can't continually re-license their stuff to a higher bidder if it's all on one site.
I broadly agree with your assessment, but I think the important takeaway is that these situations are created artificially, usually by dominant market players for their own benefit. There is nothing natural or neccesary with the way these markets work, and it's certainly not unchangeable.
>but I think the important takeaway is that these situations are created artificially
Are they really though? It's easier than ever for an indie creative to create and distribute their works through the many channels. Problem is, people don't spend as much money as a whole on indie works compared to focus-grouped blockbusters.
> Are they really though?
Yes, in the sense that at one point IP laws didn't exist and then we made them up. It stands to reason we could make up something better - maybe something that doesn't routinely banish media from public access.
Honestly I dont know that I believe that narrative, music labels have been cheating the talent out of the proceeds of their work since Edison phonograph. Labels claiming to the artist that they dont make any money while they use creative accounting to charge any and every expense to the artist and is a long and storied practice in the industry. Artist are expected still to pay x% of sales revenue for "breakage fees" on digital downloads example. Breakage fees having been introduced to cover the loss to the breaking in transit of early brittle shellac phonograph records. ID dont know about you.but tje think the breakage cost of a mp3 file should be on the scale of negligible to nonexistent.
If you have Indie artists on the music side of the comparison, you should have barely paid tiktokers and YouTubers on the movie side.
>Why is this so hard for the film industry?
It boils down to money.
Movies & tv have higher monetary value to the studios than songs to the record labels.
So the ip owners of video content get more revenue by restricting it as exclusives to their respective platforms rather than licensing it out to everybody and get a smaller fractional payment from an everything-unlimited-catalog video streaming service.
E.g. HBO would rather get 100% of their own $16.99/month subscription -- vs -- licensing entire HBO catalog to Netflix and getting a fraction% of $17.99/month.
How much extra would Netflix conceivably have to charge per month such that the fractional amounts to each movie studio (HBO, Disney, etc) would be enough $$ that the studios wouldn't bother with their own exclusive streaming platforms? $99/month? $149/month? Right now, there isn't a number that Netflix + all studios + subscribers can converge on so instead, we get the current fragmented streaming platforms of video content.
For more evidence of how video content is more valuable than music (in terms of digital streaming platforms), consider that tech giants like Netflix, Amazon, and Apple -- all created their own movie & tv studio business to produce even more exclusives for their streaming platforms. But none of them have started their own record labels to sign musicians to get exclusive songs or albums.
If its so valuable why are HBO and Disney killing already produced content making it unavailable (legally) on or off their platform. Why is the Willow TV show (sequel to the classic movie) removed it was one of their flagship early offering when they were starting their streaming service. Why is HBO killing finished movies like Batgirl and Wiley Coyote v Acme for the tax right off if they are such precious valuable content? Why is classic Looney Toons being broken up and sublicensed to everchanging array of shit tier streaming services. none of these moves makes since with the reason given
Games make way more money than movies but it also seems to be solved for games in the form of steam
Except there are times when exclusivity deals have games launch on other platforms first, and then get to Steam sometime later. Therefore, more like the movie model than the music model.
Only if you consider availability on release more important than availability later. Personally, I don't.
I only understand the frustration with finding any legal avenue at all to see certain films. I don't really understand why disparate services are a big deal. You don't need to subscribe to multiple things all at once, and it's all done in a few clicks in the convenience of your own home.
I'm concerned and curious about one thing, which is that tech giants have a monopoly on renting. If you want to rent a digital movie that isn't otherwise available from subscription, you might be able to get it from MSFT, Google or Amazon. Meanwhile the telecoms only seem to offer this through cable machines, just new releases at that.
I'm interested in seeing a few Korean films, the kind that aren't on criterion or mubi. Basically no legal way to see them.
Why not have some platform that lets users to actually buy the movie and download/stream it as a file at full quality on their device?
Renting is sucky compared to just buying things, you could watch any movie you want and have unlimited access to it instead of juggling 5 subscriptions and get frustrated with shitty products. And publishers that make actual good movies that people want to watch would be rewarded
Probably owing to the legal/licensing constraints other users brought up.
I don't want to buy movies, 99% of the time. Renting is cheaper, and I don't care to rewatch most things.
Games we used to rent those too, before they got to be 50-100 hours long. For several reasons it's no longer practical.
> Why is this so hard for the film industry?
The logic is pretty simple:
* It has been widely demonstrated that, in the US, many consumers are willing to pay more than $100/month for cable TV, with ads.
* Netflix costs $8/month with ads.
* Why leave that money on the table?
Music recording copyrights have a single owner, and can be licensed for streaming by that owner. Older movies have a lot of IP owned by various entities with licensing to allow for theatrical and home release, but all of which have to cooperate to make the movies available for streaming.
Old media competes with new media.
If you, as the rightsholder can just eliminate that competition without any further effort, it makes logical sense to do so.
Excessivly long copyright is what enables this.
I recently joined a local independent video rental store and it's so, so good. My partner looked at me like I was crazy when I told her, but she was a convert after one trip to pick out a movie in person.
Something about browsing in person is just so much more enjoyable than flipping between 9 services. Having a cinephile right there behind the desk that wants to nerd about movies and help pick something out is awesome. It's not a big store, but they've got thousands of movies in their catalog, which is (apparently) way bigger than any of the streaming services.
This doesn't solve your problem, but for the folks that are near the few remaining physical rental stores: consider supporting them, because they're great.
Edit: Actually, on the "your problem" part...maybe give the store a call? Looks like he'll mail discs too: https://myvideowave.weebly.com/services.html
Out of curiosity, what formats do they rent?
Most of the collection is DVD and/or Blu-ray, but he's got some VHS tapes and video games across a few platforms. When he was giving me the spiel about joining he was explicit that he doesn't have any Laserdisc or Betamax, though.
I really love that enough movie nerds came in there and asked about Laserdisc and Betamax that it became part of the spiel.
This is actually a larger problem that has to do with lost licensing negotiations and residuals. For a place to offer up streaming, they have to know they can license the content.
But oftentimes, that production company is closed shop. They've sold the licenses off to someone else, who split it into something else. And then there's the music rights. The whole thing becomes extremely complicated.
There's a whole set of movies that were somewhat popular that you just cannot find streaming. 100 cigarettes and Woody Allen's Crimes and Misdemeanors are good examples.
I'd say if they can't figure out the rights, just put it on YouTube.
The length of time it takes for media to enter the public domain is absolutely absurd. It if didn't take over a century for works to enter the PD, we could say, "Eh, just wait a few years." But instead we hold these works of art captive for no reason, other than a few multi-billion-dollar conglomerates want to keep milking art for money again and again.
If we had a more reasonable period like a decade, it would be a driver for creating new art, and prevent works from being locked away arbitrarily until our great-grandchildren can enjoy them (unless the art was just... lost to time).
> But instead we hold these works of art captive for no reason, other than a few multi-billion-dollar conglomerates want to keep milking art for money again and again.
In many cases, the conglomerates aren't even making money from them. How much do you think the movie company (and all the various middlemen) are making from some obscure movie from the 80s that they don't even make available on DVD or streaming anywhere? They're just griefing the public by withholding it and not even making any money.
I think the reason that the big guys don’t make money out of old films is that if they did they’d be on the hook to pay the cast & crew(‘s retirement plans).
The Roku app is actually really good at determining where everything ever is currently streaming (or purchasable). It's not 100% perfect, but it's generally correct. I go there first for basically everything.
For example, it tells me Wake Up Ron Burgundy (which isn't even a "real" movie) can be purchases on Prime, Fandango, or iTunes.
Actually, iTunes and Prime have mostly everything for rent, what movies were you actually looking for?
Just wanted to watch a relatively recent movie yesterday (Antichrist) and the only place that has it is a streaming service called Mooby. Not signing up for a service to watch one movie. Would have gladly paid 4 bucks to watch it, so had to find it in the usual places instead.
My spouse loves watching old direct to home video movies and I'd say about 75% of them have no accessible copies outside maybe eBay. Most of the remainder are only available via piracy. A vanishingly small percentage are available from streaming platforms.
One that I wanted to watch recently was Disney's 2000 animation short John Henry. It's now part of the American Legends compilation, which is only available for purchase on Amazon, not rent. It's not even on Disney+.
It gets worse when you're looking for a movie only to realize it's different from what you remember. Either a change of substance (different scenes), or a change of form (adjusted color palette). Occasionally the original version is no longer officially available anywhere.
IMDB does something similar (it at least lists Wake Up Ron Burgandy as available for rent on Prime, doesn't mention iTunes or Fandango but I'm not logged in to IMDB so I'm not sure what's enabled/disabled as "preferred services" by default)
Plex does this as well.
Too much. I love Plex but it's increasingly hard to avoid the search integrations and other non-local features. I recently set up access to my library across a few devices and it's disappointing how hostile it now feels to turn off a lot of stuff that should not be enabled by default just to get to my own files.
agreed. at least there are still toggles to disable most of it. especially considering i paid for a lifetime membership. i’ve tried enby and jellyfin though and they just aren’t up to snuff yet for me needs. but i need to put my money where my mouth is and toss jellyfin a donation.
An archival incentive is the reason I am pro 25 year copyright. This current situation is causing our cultural heritage to rot.
Seems like a fair solution might be limiting damages on pirating movies that aren't widely available. For example, if a movie isn't available for streaming cap damages at $2.99 or whatever the going rental rate is.
I don't see why there should be any damages paid out if something isn't available to stream. How can you claim a loss of sales for a product you aren't even selling? Why why should anyone be rewarded for not providing a product and just sitting on it so nobody else can use it? There certainly isn't any excuse for not being able to bring a product to market fast enough when it previously was already on the market and there are plenty of services to license it for streaming or sale.
Not just 80s-90s but try everything non-vanilla Hollywood stuff. Asian cinema, MENA, Eastern Europe etc. Piracy is just superior because I can actually watch what I want.
Video games too. Try to buy Need For Speed Most Wanted (2005). You can't.
Oh boy. That one. And Battle for Middle Earth 2.
Nobody wants my money, so to the bay we go.
I Still have my OG copy of BFME2. The joke is that I don't have a disk drive, or an OS to support it.
>Try to buy Need For Speed Most Wanted (2005). You can't.
I searched the biggest used online (flea)marketplace in my country and I could find the DVD for sale from several people. So I can buy it and play it right now legally if I want to, without resorting to piracy.
What point were you trying to make with this? Because I also can't buy a brand new 1969 Ford Mustang. Nothing is made forever.
The point could be made that if it's not available from the publisher for sale then piracy is not illegal.
Agree. However I'm willing to cut EA some slack here. NFS series (like some other games) has music in it that's been licensed by the devs for a limited time.
Selling the game today would mean either ripping out the music which is what made the game fun, or paying the record labels more money, which will not be offset by the few sales to 30+ year old nostalgics.
But at least EA isn't actively preventing you from playing that old game if you own a licensed copy by requiring always-on DRM.
BTW: today is the last day to sign the Stop killing games EU initiative : https://www.stopkillinggames.com/eci
> However I'm willing to cut EA some slack here. NFS series (like some other games) has music in it that's been licensed by the devs for a limited time.
If that practice gets killed as well, that'd be a bonus.
> Selling the game today would mean either ripping out the music which is what made the game fun, or paying the record labels more money, which will not be offset by the few sales to 30+ year old nostalgics.
Well if the market can't provide, Pirate Bay can. Maybe they should fix "the market".
How's your local library system?
I live in a small country town. It's decent for its size, but it's very small.
In contrast, Archive.org is an absolutely fantastic library, and we're happy to support them.
Way better than my public library -- especially for hard-to-find media.
Ask about interlibrary loans; our rural library can get almost anything, given time.
Where I live, ILLs do not work for video games because the format identification for video games is “Electronic”, and their software is programmed to suppress the request button for these items because it is interpreted as “no physical media”. I emailed the people who run the system, they said it is a known issue, and as far as I can tell that just means they aren’t going to fix it, since it has been this way for at least three years.
I wonder what the material difference is between borrowing a film from the library (is this DVD? Blu-ray? Streaming?) and downloading it from a peer-to-peer network.
I suppose it's an act of support for your public library. But no one with a financial stake in that particular media is impacted in any way by using either method to obtain the film.
Came here to recommend this. A viable option, at least until Republicans completely defund public libraries.
Unhelpful but related; back in the day (15 or so years ago), Netflix had a truly excellent back catalogue of old movies. Over a hundred thousand titles. A DVD collection that we just didn't realise was going to vanish as quickly as it arose.
The current offering is just... less. I don't know if I mean in terms of sheer number of titles, but a million episodes of slop is just more slop. Netflix peaked 15 years ago and we didn't even notice.
In fairness to Netflix, in the old days they only had to own a copy of the DVD in order to rent it out.
Now they have to secure rights for every title they want to stream. That’s a lot of work (and cost) for a hundred thousand titles, especially when your competitors own some of the studios that license those titles.
Disney, for example, owns the Disney / Marvel / Fox / Searchlight / Lucasfilm back catalogues and wants to hoard much of it for its own streaming service.
They've ended/sold/traded away many of their licensing agreements. Many things they used to have are gone.
It stinks because some of the things they tossed are mundane, but they add to the depth of the catalog if you're looking for something and improve the experience.
This is why I started getting into physical media. I was subbed to so many services, but I felt like only 15% of the time would any service I want have the movie (and almost never Netflix as they prefer their own content slop).
> I can't go rent them from blockbuster
I can. :) But for those not so lucky, second hand stores have tons of DVDs usually for peanuts. Also your library might lend them out.
I'm still in the process of ripping our collection, but we can watch stuff on TV with Jellyfin.
But to your point, Louis Rossman suggests that when piracy provides the best experience, providers might want to rethink their strategy...
Same here. I have 4 streaming service subscriptions and it really frustrates me when I can't find classic films that I want to show my kids or just watch myself.
I find justwatch.com useful
Useful but +95% of the films I watch are not available in my country :shrug:
> Rental stores are dead, so I can't go rent them from blockbuster or whatever
Try the library, I've found lots of things not on streaming in mine's DVD collection.
my son gets all the old movies from the local library
I'm at the point where I just automatically assume any new movie is derivative, uninspired slop. Professional reviewers don't really seem trustworthy these days and user reviews are constantly being gamed based on fandom, political sentiments or just bots boosting or tanking reviews.
I do love movies, particularly ones that are pre-2010 or so. I've actually started going to a local indie theater that curates excellent older stuff so I just check their calendar every once in a while and pick something that sounds interesting to go see a couple times a month. Often times it's foreign stuff or things I've never heard of but those guys have excellent taste and I have yet to see a bad film. For anyone curious, here's my spot: metrograph.com
Because they aren't trustworthy:
1)Disney-adjacent properties.
Look at the amazing spiderman 1, it was better than anything Marvel has released with Spiderman, it got trashed on for a very simple reason in my eyes, Disney wanted the rights for Spiderman and tried to force them to give them it (it worked) via giving it terrible reviews.
Opposite thing happened with Star Wars, another Disney "product", the new trilogy getting "amazing" reviews at the start was ridiculous, they were very bad movies, like terrible, the first one which was the most watchable of the three was just bad acting mixed in with nostalgia bait, didn't push the universe forward at all which the prequels get hate for but they did hugely expand what star wars was, in good ways. Even midichlorians which people gave so much hate to in episode 1, makes sense if you rewatch the OT, Darth Vader suddenly turning good is like "snapping" out of the trance state he was in, because as we know now, the "force" in star wars is not like morality in the real world, while you play a part in you getting taken "over" by a side (light/dark side), once it happens you sort of lose control, sort of like a hard drug in the real world, it takes a lot for someone who has given in to the dark side to go back to normal, which I believe makes for a better science fiction universe, the concept of only giving in enough to receive the power but not enough to become evil was even explored with mace windu with Vapaad, anyways.
Lastly, Black Adam, I watched it and the movie was objectively not beyond terrible for current day standards, it was a watchable popcorn flick and the CGI was very very good compared to Marvel movies which made the movie look cool, the main villain was uninspiring but so are most first movie villains, it's all about the setup. It received beyond terrible reviews in my opinion directed from Disney/Marvel in an attempt to fully kill competition especially during Marvel's weak point post endgame. I would have enjoyed seeing a movie of Superman vs Black Adam but it is what it is.
Lastly any anime movie competing with Disney, just look at the Oscars, how many anime movies get snubbed? I still remember being shocked at how when marnie was there did not win vs inside out... or how look back wasn't even nominated, lol.
I think you're making up a narrative in your head to support your bias against Disney here.
TASM 1 was definitely well received when it was released. It was tarnished by the slop that was TASM 2, which lead to Sony being able to come to a licensing agreement with Marvel Studios, to use Spider-Man in the MCU. I think it's an extreme stretch to think Disney had any nefarious doings in the public opinion of those movies, Sony did that to themselves and has proven time-and-time again they cannot make a good quality movie with their Spider-Man IPs.
The Rise of Skywalker is at 51% on Rotten Tomatoes, that was universally acknowledged to be terrible, even by the "critics". Disney definitely was also not able to silence or drown-out the absolute outrage by the cast and fans of the treatment of Luke in The Last Jedi.
Why would Marvel / Disney spend any effort sabotaging the DCEU when Warner Bros. was good at doing it all themselves? If Marvel was worried about DC stealing their audience, they would have focused more on movies like The Batman, not some c-grade antihero most people have no idea about? The Rock fostered a lot of the ill-will towards that movie himself.
I say all this but I also think it's accurate still to say reviews are trustworthy but I don't think they ever have been. I don't think this is some new phenomenon, just people are more aware of the corruption embedded in the system.
> streaming sites have splintered to the point I'm not even sure what is a scam and what is a legitimate business anymore
They're all scams, of varying levels of scammyness ;P
No but seriously, the pricing is intentional deceptive and a lot of werives won't offer ad free viewing, no matter how much you pay. They'll also weasel around it with "most media won't have ads, but some will". Thanks, how helpful. Paramount plus apparently doesn't consider ads for itself to be ads - so on the ad free plan, you still get ads for Paramount.
But the worst part is that every app is different and some are really, really poor quality. You'd think we would just invent an API for this and then have one viewer, like we had for TV. But then again, maybe nobody wants to reinvent TV.
Also, blocking VPNs: if I'm logged in and you know my real country and I'm paying, you don't need to block VPNs. It doesn't do anything but annoy customers
Pirates always pull this out as justification. Like they are starving people who are forced to steal bread just to survive. Maybe just because a piece of media has been published in the past, we don't all have some God-given right to access it in perpetuity for a nominal fee. Lost media is not a sin.
And good luck trying to find anything marginally erotic, like "Bliss (1997)".
Not only you don't own anything anymore, you can't purchase anything anymore and you can't view content that the overseers deem imoral. At this point pirating is just civil disobedience against the stronghold that corporations have on the American society that ripples across the globalized world.
try local second hand sites and physical copies, although the quality will most likely not be as good if its only been released on DVD
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> No one can argue that you’re stealing a product that’s not being distributed, the law specifically says you need to put in a reasonable amount of effort to commercialize something to claim it damages you for someone to steal it
The law literally does not say that, either for things that are literally subject to be stolen, or, more to the point here, for copyright protection where “steal” is merely a very loose metaphorical term sometimes used to refer to infringement.
Citation for that? I've never heard such an interpretation before.
It's incorrect. The copyright holder of any work is obviously well within their rights to yank it from shelves (physical or otherwise). That doesn't make piracy legal.
That's because it's bullshit. (IP-trained attorney here, not legal advice.)
IP law is like real property law in the sense that it provides the owner the power to exclude others from using it. As with real property, there is no requirement that the owner be using the subject property in an economically viable way.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orphan_work
You can’t find them to rent on iTunes and similar platforms?
There's plenty of stuff that isn't listed there
Not OP, but yes believe it or not it's impossible to find certain movies anywhere other than pirating them. One example is "Pirates of Silicon Valley", I watched it when I was young and recently wanted to watch it again. I pay for basically all the streaming services, I'm would have been happy to rent it from any service at all. I spent several hours trying to find a way to pay to watch it and never could.
I'm pretty sure i just watched that via apple+.
But your point generally valid regardless.
This is an old relatively low budget TV movie, it's not on TV+ (which I subscribe to). Nor can you rent it on iTunes, it doesn't even show up when you search for it. Same for Prime Video, etc.
https://tv.apple.com/mx/movie/pirates-of-silicon-valley/umc....
??
That link says "Content Unavailable" for me, possibly region locked? I changed the "mx" in your link to "us" but same error.
Ah, that's too bad for you.
its a great movie!!
Apple TV doesn't allow me to stream in my browser, so I happily pirate their content. I pay for all the other "big" streaming services that I can use like a normal person.
Who wants to rent? I have money, give me a file for money.
DRM is laughable anyway, if you give me the data I have the file if I really want it.
Let me, the consumer, legally purchase a high res copy of media I can own. Why is this so hard?
In most cases, in the world of TVOD (transactional video on demand), an item that is rentable is purchasable, but the reverse is not always true.
That is, the window for purchasing is much longer than the window for renting.
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I'm guessing they can. They just don't want to.
No, they explained they don't want to scrub through each and every rent-seeker app to find which one has it.
I watch a decent amount of movies, I can count on one hand the number of times I couldn’t rent it for <$5 on Prime or YouTube. I’ve never been unable to identify where I could find a particular movie to stream, and it’s certainly less effort than going to a physical storefront.
I think there are plenty of problems with the streaming model, but I think it’s borderline bad faith to try and make the claim that piracy is needed because it’s hard to navigate streaming sites. It’s certainly easier than finding obscure movies was pre-streaming
>I watch a decent amount of movies, I can count on one hand the number of times I couldn’t rent it for <$5 on Prime or YouTube.
delve deep into most directors filmography from the 60s/70s/80s and you'll find plenty missing. Ken Russell, Robert Altman, etc
You have to go pretty deep though for the record. At least, using one of your examples, for Altman if you look at his top 25 films on Letterboxd, 20 of them are available to rent or stream online. And for me at least the other five I can get at the library. There are none that are totally unavailable of those 25.
Yep. I watch a lot of movies and TV shows from the 60s and below, and they are often not available to stream legitimately anywhere, and the only option is the occasional DVD release on Amazon which is hit or miss.
It happens to me often enough. Might be a matter of taste in movies?
I’m sure it’s related. I’m curious for any examples
I regularly run into shows and movies no one will carry.
A recent example is Hot l Baltimore. It's an early Norman Lear production and stared James Cromwell and Charlotte Rae.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_l_Baltimore
I planned to add Turn On (1969), Tim Conway. It was canceled while the 1st episode was airing.
But since the last time I looked for it, some ethical soul uploaded it to wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turn-On
BBC: This Was the Week That Was. TV, aired 1962-1963
NBC: This Was the Week That Was. TV, aired 1963-1965. Someone found acetate audio recordings of two episodes and ripped them to YT. An act of culture, done in spite of rights holders.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PtVRJ2qdYw4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pprBfg6OSRM
Not a movie, but Police Squad is missing from streaming services. It's strange given it spawned 3 movies and now we even have an upcoming sequel to those.
Even when Amazon Prime has it, the rental terms are dogshit. I used to rent VHS and DVDs from the store and got to watch them as many times as I wanted for a week. With Amazon Prime, once I start watching it I only have 48 hours and then I have to rent it again. Friends coming over in 3 days and you think they'll like the movie you just rented? Too bad, have to pay them again.
It's flagrant bullshit that physical media, with real scarcity, had better rental terms than digital.
So why the hell shouldn't I pirate it? I get a better product, it's free, and all the people who made it are dead now anyway so spare me any bullshit moralizing.
You may know this, but these rental terms are typically driven by the studio that published the film, not the TVOD service provider (Amazon in this case).
I know that it doesn't change the customer experience, but it's worth being angry at the right people...
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I've recently switched to privacy respecting computing options, so of course lost access to everything I've bought from Apple and Amazon for the last 20 years.
If I never paid for content again they'd still be in my debt.
You wouldn't steal a car would you? No, but I'd repossess one from some delinquent son of a bitch in a suit.
I see no strong moral argument against ripping DVDs (from the library or similar) of content you paid for on Apple or Amazon.
There's no moral argument against ripping DVDs one way or the other.
There's a civil/economic argument: arguably copyright/intellectual property make for stronger societies that produce better stuff for everybody.
But there's nothing immoral about copying or watching something you came across. The author isn't injured by it- nobody is. Except, like I said, perhaps society in general.
> arguably copyright/intellectual property make for stronger societies that produce better stuff for everybody.
They really, really don't. The tradeoff of offering temporary legal privileges in exchange for a future richer public domain resulted in better stuff for everybody. Those legal privileges have become effectively permanent, so the trade is broken.
> There's a civil/economic argument: arguably copyright/intellectual property make for stronger societies that produce better stuff for everybody.
They make rich people richer, we have ample evidence for that. But research ... the majority is funded by governments. But content creation ... the majority of high quality Youtube for example in funded in advance by Patreon and similar solutions.
>There's a civil/economic argument: arguably copyright/intellectual property make for stronger societies that produce better stuff for everybody.
You raise a valid point. When copyright was first envisioned in 1710, the world population was 600M, literacy rates b/w 5-25% (rural/urban).
That argument does not stand today - we don't need protections since the number of producers of better stuff will simply compete in the market of ideas. Pearl clutching of ideas isn't a problem.
citation?
In my country it is not illegal to download or share copyright content for non-profit and personal use. It's the IPTVs, torrent and streaming pirate sites with Ads or asking for money the ones that should die (that's why I don't agree with Anna's Archive profiting from sharing copyrighted content).
As I said before: it's 2025, we shouldn't need an ad infested "website" to share, discover and download content in a p2p fashion. Kademilla and similar DHT truly decentralized tech has existed for more than 15 years...
The problem is that new generations want to profit from everything and have stopped "sharing is caring"
The main moral argument for intellectual property rights seems to be "because that's how the world already works and we don't want to disrupt that less it be artists or inventors that get the shaft", and yet we don't have strong cases of intellectual property protecting artists or inventors in the first place. Not as a primary effect of IP, anyway.
There are ways to get your content out of DRM walled gardens, e.g. Streamfab.
It's easier to just make a list and torrent.
"If buying isn't owning, then piracy isn't stealing."
I've argued that if 'buy' is DRM encrusted shit (hardware or software), then the sale should be considered fraudulent conversion to a rental.
And since its a rental, and the company still retains control, that's a lot of capex they failed to declare with the IRS. And yeah, tax fraud.
This should be pushed into the public consciousness as far as possible
You only rented licenses if you didn't receive physical copies or DRM-free downloads.
The button said "Buy" and it was next to one that said "Rent". I bought it.
If they choose to make retrieving my purchase from the warehouse difficult, then I will take it by force with a torrent.
True, but that's marketing. Without a DRM-free digital copy, it's still "For as long as we allow you to have". Steam also doesn't allow selling "licenses" or whole accounts. All money paid to streaming and "buy" on most platforms is for temporary, pretend purchase. One exception of media distributors is GoG where offline, DRM-free copies are offered.
> The granted orders would stay in place for a year with the option to extend if necessary. If blocked sites switch to new locations, the court can also amend blocking orders to include new IP addresses and domain names.
What if the "pirate site" uses foreign cloud provider, and regularly changes IP addresses? Will I lose access to all websites hosted by the foreign cloud provider once their whole ASN will be blocked?
> Block BEARD does not mention VPNs, but its broad definition of “service provider” could be interpreted to include them.
This seems easy to circumvent - you can just use foreign VPN provider, who don't advertise themselves for piracy use, for... piracy. IP/DNS blocking proven to be a good censorship tool though.
No one would steal a car. More importantly, everyone would clone a car. Of course we should support this fully.
Oppose this bill.
Oppose the bill based on freedom, as in speech. This comes above all else.
Arguing over what is or isn't piracy is a non-sequitor when it comes to government censorship of the Internet.
I'd argue freedom of access to knowledge is atleast as important, if not more, than speech. Down with copyright - restriction on this freedom.
> The site-blocking proposal seeks to amend U.S. copyright law, enabling rightsholders to request federal courts to designate online locations as a “foreign digital piracy site”. If that succeeds, courts can subsequently order U.S. service providers to block access to these sites.
Of course, because what we need is the govt deciding which sites can be banned. I'm hoping this dies in committee, however for Bay Area folks, Rep Zoe Lofgren is the house sponsor for the companion bill and Adam Schiff is the Senate co sponsor. They can be reached at
https://lofgren.house.gov/contact/offices and https://www.schiff.senate.gov/contact/
If you oppose this bill, take 5 min and let your congressperson know. They might seem to be bought and paid for by lobbyists, but they care deeply about being reelected and even a small number of constituents showing up can be effective. In order of impact personal visit > letter > call > email. The higher effort channels(visit, letter) tend to get treated more seriously. Emails are largely ignored unless they are absolutely deluged.
This bill is different than the domain seizures of the past; it seems to be the start of a framework where the government is using its power to tell ISPs to block access to IP addresses - in this case, those identified as foreign piracy sites. Honestly I don't know what's already happening in this space, though. I haven't heard of many instances where U.S. judges are ordering ISPs to block traffic to sites like in other countries, but maybe I haven't been paying attention.
There's a number of precautions and exceptions in the bill, and they're good ones, but I don't think we've seen anything like this before.
I feel like this bill is the beginning of a type of thinking that could grow past piracy by riding the current isolationist wave in U.S. politics. I think once this passes, it's probably going to be easier to justify ordering ISP blocks of non-U.S. IPs/ASNs on other criteria.
It will also further cement social media as the primary thing that is "Internet," instead of websites or other applications based on network protocols. After all that's probably what most people think of as the Internet - social media, a few apps, and streaming. Big social media will always have an international reach as its owners are very rich, they cooperate with governments, their users are individually accountable, and those users will likely become more so over time. I bet soon, that's all that will be left to the masses - social media and streaming.
Governments saw how much they got away with during the pandemic, most of it to thunderous applause. This has emboldened them to grasp even more power.
Isn't torrenting way down from its heyday? Streaming companies are not perfect, but I always thought they were at least moderately successful such that in 2025, average, casual, non-techies no longer bother to jump through the VPN and private tracker hoops just to download a movie.
In my circles the modern alternative seems to be using Yandex to search for "$show stream".
I don't know about BitTorrent but Usenet is way up:
https://www.newsdemon.com/usenet-newsgroup-feed-size
Daily volume could just be more bluray high quality downloads with people with better internet. And not neccesarily larger number of people right?
I would be pretty surprised if the quality of rips since 2017 would account for a 20x increase in traffic.
Most of the rips are probably the same-ish size. But there are definitely now a lot of incredibly huge rips. A 13-episode season of television that's like 80 gigs. It's an additive load, and while it's not that regular, it could have a massively outsided impact.
It's down from it's heyday for the mainstream, but for the dedicated few, it's better than ever before. Gone are the days of manually searching for a movie on tracker sites, downloading them, organizing your library and watching stuff on your laptop.
There are now open-source, self-hosted applications that automate that entire process, so it's as simple as requesting a movie on your phone and having it show up on your own personal streaming service on your TV a few minutes later.
What are the names of these immoral piracy applications, so that I can know to avoid them if I happen to stumble upon one?
Do not under any circumstance download Stremio (available in Firestick as well). Also don't try to install the Torrentio extension for Stremio. That would allow you to play pirated content with one click I your TV, similarly to PopcornTime.
Plex/Jellyfin for streaming, the *arr suite for cataloging/downloading [0]
[0] https://wiki.servarr.com/
It's so nice to have all my legal media backups cataloged and organized and easily viewable. My server isn't powerful enough for 4k HDR though so I need to upgrade it.
:D I'm glad you're protected from these terrible services now
I know a guy who knows a guy that says that you don’t even need that, you just browse the movies and press “play” as there is direct torrent streaming now. But I don’t know anything about all this i just use my VCR with the clock flashing 12:00.
Yes, for $30 a year you can instantly stream any torrent with no real setup or install. The most used client is a PWA that calls out to VLC or whatever.
Bluray 4K 100+GB copy of Dune Part 2 at >70Mbps with maybe 5 seconds of buffering at the start. Literally can’t replicate it with legal streaming.
I torrent content I’m legally allowed to watch because the UX is far better with Plex than with the plethora of crappy apps.
I rip stuff from YouTube for the same reason. Currently watching Taskmaster which has all or most episodes freely available on YouTube, but no way am I interested in using that dumpster fire of a UX.
I think it was down when the answer to streaming was "get netflix, it has most stuff", but now it's "pay for netflix, Disney+, Amazon prime, apple tv, ...".
For a while, streaming was better than any alternative. However over the last several year prices have a spike while the collections available for streaming have shrunk and splintered. Then a bunch of the streaming sites started adding ads for their paying customers.
At this point streaming servcies have been enshitified enough to make piracy again the better experience.
Can confirm. The only streaming service I use anymore is Disney+, and I only have it because I like to watch the new Star Wars stuff when it releases at good quality. Everything else I care to watch, which isn't much besides older stuff, I'll just torrent now.
Greedy companies really need to heed Gabe Newell's words.
Even Disney+ is crappier than Netflix in the streaming heyday - there are Disney Junior shows that Disney+ didn’t have (maybe still doesn’t).
Buying DVDs and ripping to Jellyfin is much easier.
Why do the ripping myself when the torrents are mostly all rips other people already did?
I still subscribe to some of the services, but the experience has deteriorated sufficiently that at this point I rip all videos I care about and then watch them in Plex.
dunno about public sites, but the private ones are healthier than ever
> Block BEARD does not mention VPNs, but its broad definition of “service provider” could be interpreted to include them.
The prospect of all VPN providers being required to block pirate sites, or being unable to operate in the US, is very scary indeed
Piracy, eh? So copied without approval.
Like archive.is or other news aggregator and paywall-bypass sites.
Or, just needs 1 falsely filed DMCA to ban. And whoops, made a mistake, and no process to unban.
By sneaking in with 'piracy', they're setting the stage to block any content they don't like.
Intellectual property has been a cover story for censorship for hundreds of years. Nothing new here.
> courts can subsequently order U.S. service providers to block access to these sites.
So looks like this will be at the ISP level, so should be able to be circumvented easily with VPNs.
The scary part is it's likely to lead to a lockdown on VPNs in the future.
Amazing. These kind of bills / laws are being passed left and right "recently".
> These kind of bills / laws are being passed
It hasn’t been passed!
I have no doubt that it will pass. If it is overly broad and can be used to needlessly hurt someone, Republicans love it, and they are the ones with power right now.
Many of them have, but you are right, should have used a different term.
Both major parties are corpo-authoritarian, with the main dynamics of elections being to gauge how much the public is willing to accept and to make half the people think they actually wanted the resulting policies. And for this round the people have spoken that they want it good and hard.
I don’t think they care about the policy. They just see a one sided debate: companies will to pay and an indifferent public.
That’s a false equivalence. Companies can pay people to agitate for them full-time. Then they can pay the politicians, albeit indirectly. Finally the public have the privilege of using their free time to agitate against the politicians. Which just starts out as unorganized disruptions, “people were mildly inconvenienced on their way to work today”.
That versus cash.
Sure, you're up against "the purpose of a system is what it does". I'm sure many mainstream politicians actually earnestly care about individual liberty and reigning in corpos - it helps them sell themselves to the public. But the net effect is that when the dollars come calling, enough set aside those ideals to make the corpo agenda happen.
Without making some compromises and taking the money they would be replaced by someone who would.
They (well, all of us whatever we do, but some more then others) operate in an imperfect system.
> And for this round the people have spoken that they want it good and hard.
Actually, the people have said "please stop this, this can't go on" at every election since 1992, with the possible exception of 2012 (unless you admit that 2012 President Obama was running against 2008 Candidate Obama.) They again said it in 2024.
I agree that's what the people have wanted to say and that they believe it is what they have said, but they get taken in by simplistic populist messages that transmute their frustration into support for the next corpo con long into when the results have become apparent. But for 2024 the usual excuses of "he reneged", "stick with the incumbent", or "less bad option" don't even work - it's a clear case of people putting their foot on the gas with a known quantity, but thinking it must be a good thing because those other people are really upset about it.
I have a feeling the public is going to be willing to accept a lot of things.
>corpo-authoritarian
"corporate fascist"
Wonder if having your own DNS resolver will work around the issue... I mean, the caching from cloudflare/google-dns is nice, but I'm fine if 1/8 of my dns lookups has to make the full cycle through domain resolvers.
I haven't seen the text of the bill, so don't know for sure. If it says "resolvers must block site" then yes, running your own resolver would still work. If it says "domain registries must remove delegation" then it won't, but that could only be enforced for registries that are based in the US. Unless your ISP blocks well-known DNS ports, which none due as far as I've found.
The article says one of the requirements for the complaint needs to be that the site to be blocked must be found to be foreign based, so I guess the assumption is that the current set of laws to take down the site or sue are unavailable.
So is this an opening move with an end goal of “private national internets”? Fracturing the international nature of the ‘net seems like every power worldwide would like and benefit from this.
If that is need the end goal, which would make sense, disgusting.
Won't they just instruct isps to block the ip addresses of the sites and bully cloudflare into dropping them so they can't hide behind their proxies?
It'll be a cat and mouse game, and tor could easily mitigate blocking efforts.
But this seems like a 1A violation to me.
So how much are they getting bribed to do this?
Only the powerless are bribed, the powerful are "lobbied".
It's just different, otherwise it wouldn't be a different word... right?
It obvious that the purpose of this is really just to censor and lock down the Internet more. I saddens me to watch us go down this path.
I am more concerned about "big brother" - the increasing use of the internet by the government to "watch" its citizens. The recent efforts by England's demand that Apple provide the English government with a "back door" into Apple OS. And more and more governments demanding ID under the guise of protecting children. How is that going to work? Are we all going to need a government issued digital identity in order to use the internet?
Most accepted needing a government document to access most aspects of public life just a couple of years ago. The governments saw the public blink and now it knows the sky is the limit.
Yes. And I believe you mean the 'Great/ British' [.gov].
Once the market moves on, only the people that love the media will be the best caretakers of it and that often ends up looking like piracy.
They don't rob media sales; they secure media legacies. They're hoarders, not consumers.
Process of drafting a bill in the US:
- Actually drafting the bill: 10 minutes
- Coming up with the perfect stupid acronym pun name: 6 months.
As far as I know, this is a uniquely American thing.
Well given that the acronym is the only part of the legislation anyone will read, it makes sense it should get the lion's share of the effort.
Ah, I'm so glad we can be bipartisan when it comes to making things worse.
Can we get a list of senators who support this and their party affiliation?
Thom Tillis - R Chris Coons - D Marsha Blackburn - R Adam Schiff - D
Schiff is (D)
Worth noting that this was introduced by Zoe Lofgren (D) the 77 year old that represents a big chunk of Silicon Valley. Disappointing.
The fact that some Democrats are introducing bills that mandate creation of infrastructure that can be easily repurposed to censor political viewpoints, during this administration no less, tells you all you need to know about how much disdain they really have for their electorate.
The name of this bill, "Block BEARD" is what really gets me.
It's a simple thing. Just a casual joke that means nothing to most people.
I worry because there are millions of young citizens who are going to have to work harder either for new political parties or to overturn this kind of language and jab.
We can't ever prove it's a higher level system that keeps every next generation in perpetual non-paying advocacy and grassroots political work. That's deeply unsettling.
Same rep that grandstanded with an "Aaron's law" that wouldn't have actually changed the laws used to persecute aaronsw.
He is! Thank you.
ah great I was worried for a second for our struggling monopolies this should help them back on their feet
Our own great firewall
The Great Firewall of China is a censorship program.
This proposed US legislation puts the power of blocking under the authority of its court system and only in the domain of copyright law. The courts are historically very concerned with upholding 1st Amendment rights to a degree that often (but not always) surpasses analogous rights in many sister liberal democracies. Anything that remotely smells of censorship would come under intense scrutiny.
And in this case, since we are talking about copyright law, the only parties with standing to sue for a block are the IP owners in the first place. So, by definition, this legislation cannot be used for censorship.
This is a censorship program.
Every time a system that allows for internet content to be blocked is created, it's extended, misused and abused shortly thereafter.
"The tools already exist, why don't we use them to fight terrorists/pirates/cybercriminals/gays/undesirables too".
The slope isn't just slippery - it's made of Teflon and coated with baby oil.
>Every time a system that allows for internet content to be blocked is created, it's extended, misused and abused shortly thereafter.
Does that included movie leak?
like this: https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2025/07/28/legal-acti...
I'm pretty sure the movie isn't intended to be put on the internet or be part of internet content.
What the fuck does that have to do with anything at all?
The discussion isn't about random movie leaks. It's about creating systems that allow for internet censorship.
YouTube's copyright strikes create a chilling effect. Google takes the easy way out in tuning their system to minimize false negatives at the cost of lots of false positives. This minimizes their liability under the DMCA and minimizes cost but allows lots of abuse by those claiming to hold copyright.
Not to mention the monetization restrictions on Youtube and Twitch. Those who rely on it play a game of whack a mole where they upload a video, it's get flagged, they edit, try again. It makes talking about new or serious situations like gun violence of Epstein very difficult unless you're willing to forgo any ad revenue.
Copyright law is a censorship program. It may not have been the intent presented when it was made but more and more it is used to suppress the speech of those who can't afford the legal battle. This is amplified by enforcement around it taking a guilty until proven innocent style since platforms that host speech are held liable for not taking immediate action.
When you prevent distribution of information, that is censorship by definition. You can argue that censorship in this case is socially beneficial, but don't muddy the waters as to what it it is.
At the same time, laws like these require creation of infrastructure that is goal-agnostic. Once you have ISPs implement mandatory blocking of websites for copyright reasons, this system can, and eventually will, be used to block other things deemed undesirable for the plebs to access.
Given the current presidential administration especially, any Democrat participating in such a project should be tarred and feathered.
Yet it will be. Laws mean nothing to these people.
So how long before its used to block sites that say mean things about Trump?
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the end of red dead redemption 2 is about the internet, isn't it?
Between this, new requirements to verify age and locking down of mobile devices it feels like digital freedom is really under attack. For all the decades of the west mocking the great firewall of china, it's sad to see them turn about and enact it themselves.
> "Block Bad Electronic Art and Recording Distributors Act of 2025” (Block BEARD)
I really wish destitutely uncreative people would stop pretending to be clever.
> pretending to be clever
> Electronic Art
I actually think it's pretty clever that the lawyers who wrote the bill managed to (almost) put their employer's name in it.
Agreed, these backronym bill names are obnoxious at best.
I used to think so, but now I think they're just intended to make it easy to refer to the bill in a context people can recall quickly.
They're intended to be propaganda soundbites. The point is that people use them to refer to the bill because it's much easier than using the full title or describing what the bill actually does, and in doing so, they inadvertently propagate a specific perspective on the nature of the bill. "PATRIOT" act etc are good examples.
Agreed but at the same time, "everything" out of congress is propaganda sound bites, so I'm not going to pick on backronyms in particular. Having a short monicker for a bill remains useful.
It's not like non-backronym bills in congress have names that accurately reflect what they seek to achieve.
Other countries do just fine with numbered bills.
In media? The non-US examples I know (my home country and where I live now) either refer to laws/proposals based on sponsor name or topic, or (when passed), the date it was passed.
Cursory googling about the UK suggests it's mostly either naked acts or "law of XYZ", but numbers.
The act names and backronyms are for public consumption.
> they inadvertently propagate a specific perspective
I think it's often, maybe always, quite advertent. :)
The ones that really stick in my craw are the 1984-esque ones like the PATRIOT act.
CAN-SPAM was arguably well named but it unfortunately did not can spam. To me it always read like "oh so we CAN spam people".
Which is an entirely accurate interpretation.
I wonder if with all of these attacks on international Internet freedoms we'll eventually have a resurgence of usage of technology like Tor, etc.
landlines and snail mail. Not that those things can't be tracked/tapped either, but it is more work. Pay cash for stuff.
It's nice to see the US Congress finally trying to address the real issues that have serious impact on the daily lives of the average citizen. Oh wait, this matters to almost no one except big business interests. Never mind.
Wow they haven't even finished the porn blocking stuff and they're already starting with the web-wide corporate censorship.
Is it really possible to effectively mass-block a website? Lib-z seems to keep popping back up like the head of Medusa.
Every one of those jackoffs probably has a VCR at home flashing "12:00."
The motion picture industry’s problem isn’t piracy, it’s just that they keep targeting movies at 0.02% of the population. If they want to sell more movies they ought to target a bigger demographic.
Gotta say that's a pretty great name at least!
Any time a law has a contrived name to fit some cutesy pre-determined name, it's a bullshit law, and will almost never achieve the goals that the cutesy name brings to mind.
Without piracy no llm
Meanwhile, VPN use is skyrocketing as is use of Tor and the dark web.
Ban vpn use. It's on the cards.
Good luck enforcing that. VPN protocols have already been honed in the process of evading Chinese, Russian, and Iranian blocks. V2Ray, Trojan etc.
I can envision whitelist-only ISPs that block any traffic to unvetted domains and IPs. Hopefully we still have some time left before total dictatorship
As far as I know, what you describe exists today only in North Korea. Which is to say, this is not very likely. Thing is, a "great firewall" with some packet inspection thrown in to cut off the common VPN protocols deters 90% of the population, and that is generally "good enough" for authoritarians.
Oh so all these AI companies get to steal whatever they want but in order to stop the 99% from stealing we need to lock down the internet?
Remember: you can do almost anything in America so long as a retirement fund gets to wet its beak.
Murder-for-hire? That's not only a first-degree murder charge, it's RICO. You're looking at the gurney in Terre Haute as a real possibility.
Operating a company that takes money from people on the promise that they'll be able to use it to cover medical expenses, then denying the payout because you already promised that money to shareholders who want to move to Florida to swing on and off the golf course at the retirement community they like, all while letting the person die a miserable death from a treatable illness? Perfectly legal. Encouraged. You have Congress' ear.
Same here.
Reading a book that no one wants to sell without paying for it? Intellectual property theft. Having a LLM model do the same and then charging for access to said model's output? Here's a seat behind the President at the inauguration.
That's just silly. There is no moral comparison between the two. I wouldn't bother to respond, except that it's this sort of attitude that was behind the gleeful response and support of a cold blooded murder.
Yes, there is. The corporation is worse even because they do it on a mass scale.
The response to that UHC ceo is entirely his and the corporation’s fault. Actions have consequences.
"That's just silly."
... how?
I can point at myriad examples in which someone's life was ended because expending the monetary resources necessary to extend it was not in the best interests of shareholder returns.
That’s necessary because US&A needs to beat China!
This kind of crap will only grow the MAGA base. Everyone knows our politicians work to serve the corporations and are sick of it. Democrats won’t allow a real candidate that will be anti-corporate. So we end up with Trump who pays lip service to it. For reasons beyond me, people seem to believe him.
Meanwhile Altman & Co. continue to steal data at large scale. Trump himself encourages it by removing any potential for regulation the LLM industry. I guess his followers can’t be bothered to read the actual news and get angry about it.
Most politicians that stand up against this stuff aren’t allowed to succeed. Unless someone does, this pro-corporate downward spiral will continue.
So sick of this corporatocracy.
lol bring it senators
TL;DR, "Let's block every single piracy site". Sounds foolproof to me
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When have these blocks ever succeeded?
Good luck! I've stolen everything I want to steal already!