this post was submitted on 02 Dec 2023
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People this doesn't affect are pirates. People who get to enjoy their media without worry are pirates. When pirates are getting the better experience and it's customers who are getting affected what incentive is there to not pirate other than personal morals. Because it sure isn't for a better product.
A lot of people are getting back into pirating because of this. If a show isn't on a streaming service you use, you either pay $2/episode and hope that Amazon doesn't drop it, or you pirate it. I went almost a decade without pirating, and now I just bought a 5tb SSD for my Plex server. I'm tempted to fully convert now that I've already set everything up, too.
I am coming back after I get a server set up.
It’s seems everything I ever want to watch is either not available or spread across numerous services.
Just last week I was recommended to watch Knives Out. I find the second one on Netflix which I use a family account and then the first one wasn’t available and I would need Amazon for that. Why would I keep jumping through these hoops when I can just download what I want when I want and watch it whenever I want.
It bears repeating. Piracy is a service issue first. I've paid for several streaming services for music and video, but they just cannot compete with the convenience and features of self-hosted options. It's not at all unusual for people to pirate stuff they have legitimately paid for just because of the convenience More than once I have bought a an album on the very same day I downloaded a pirate copy, just because it was slightly easier to get it on all my devices that way.
While Gabe's famous line still holds true, I find that repeating it without qualification is increasingly glib, because vendors are making the matter a technology issue instead, thanks to years of investment in DRM techniques. In the long term, either side's ability to enforce its will on the other will come down to availability/control of compute resources, and unit economics.
Keeping corporate at bay is going to require a combination of maintaining the commons, seeing genuine competition in cultural production, improving consumer legal frameworks, and becoming politically conscious of our entitlement to digital rights.
Aye!
Louis agrees with you