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If they had more content on offer than the big legal streaming services combined, should that not tell us something about the quality of legal offers?
What’s there to learn that isn’t already widely known? Existing (copyright) laws are asinine and all corporations eventually become consumed by greed. That’s America in a nutshell.
Capitalism wherever it is found. Not just the USA.
It’s not even copyright laws, it’s everyone insisting on exclusive contracts. There’s no reason a piece of content couldn’t be on Netflix and Disney+ at the same time. It would be a lot better for consumers if streamers could compete on price and service instead of which content they managed to create/licence.
Music streaming has proven this for years now, all the major brands have massive collections that make its super easy to pay and listen to just about anything.
Early Netflix proved this when everything was readily available for an affordable pricre.
The situation is a lot better with music, but it’s not perfect. There’s still issues with region locking content, and content only existing on one service and not another.
There are also issues paying creators instead of rights holders
Me in the 90s and 00s: yarrrr!
Me in the 10s: it feels good to be legit
Me in the 20s: YARRRRRRRRR!
It felt good to live in a world where being legit was reasonable.
Yep, you choose between Spotify, Tidal, etc based on price and how well the app works, not because one service has the band you like while the other one doesn’t (not that music streaming isn’t its own shitshow for other reasons, of course).
Exactly. I like Netflix’s service, but Disney’s content. Why can’t I just pay for a Disney bundle on Netflix? Likewise with Max, Peacock, etc.
Lawyers are why we can’t have nice things.
Farewell heroes. I may not have heard of you before, but I shall mourn your departure nevertheless.
“Sophisticated scripts to scour pirate sites”.
I think we’ve just found a new tagline for radarr and sonarr.
Did someone leak their Jellyfin credentials?
Honestly pretty funny to call the site “Jetflix” and advertise it as nothing but aviation videos. Nobody would know what you’re up to until they pay you.
How much you wanna bet a aerospace nut subscribed to this because they love Jets, and immediately reported this site to the authorities because he got the avengers movies rather than Airbus maintenance videos or something…
Pretty stupid though to run this site out of the USA. Terrible opsec. They really just seemed to trust that nobody who cares would ever figure out what they were doing. Plenty of similar sites out there that don’t even need to hide what they are because they are well outside of American jurisdiction.
“substantial harm to television program copyright owners,”
Give me a fucking break
Not trying to sound elitist, but…all the content combined still isn’t worth $10. Mind you the last TV show I liked was Better Call Saul, the last Hollywood movie I liked was…let me think…The Irishman, I guess?
Since 2000 the amount of TV shows I truly enjoyed watching and would watch again was maybe 8. The amount of movies maybe 20. So less than one per year.
And because I don’t have to watch stuff when it comes out, but am totally fine with watching things years later, when it’s cheap or free, I’d wager I spend less than $10 per year on TV and movie entertainment.
I think the shows have been better than the movies
Succession was really good, for example
Yes, they have been. But Succession is an example of a show which I thought I would like, and did for one season, but never finished, because the writing was so lazy and repetitive, and what’s worse constantly pretending huge things happened while nothing actually happened.
its a character study, not a bombastic thriller. Same as the shows most folks rave about: Sopranos, Mad Men, Six Feet Under, The Wire, Arrested Development… its fine to not like anything but I’m not sure why you’d take time to write about how you don’t like anything. Do you find posts about, say, an art heist and post about how you haven’t liked any paintings in a couple centuries
Quite a lot happened in the Wire TBF (also I think it’s the strongest of the ones you’ve mentioned, largely for that reason…)
I guess… a lot of the time it was Landsman eating Arby’s at his desk
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what you dont know could fill a book I wouldnt put succession on the same tier as sopranos (very little comes close), all I was saying is its not about crazy plot twists, and more about the way the emotionally crippled kids of logan roy cosplay as human beings. I enjoyed it- jeremy strong and brian cox did a great job imo
Hollywood has been sucking ass lately, but lots of small indie films have been kicking ass. Everything from A24 has been fantastic recently. Lots of good foreign films too
Even A24 has a track record of 1 in 10, getting worse.
Yes, making movies is not an easy feat. But there’s plenty of good stuff coming out. Don’t know what to tell you.
All my favorite movies this year have been on youtube.
Most of them by Joel Haver.
Sire!
Tony Ladruzo?
Huzzah!
You don’t sound elitist, just a little boring.
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You gotta be stupid as shit to run something like this from the US and keep a financial tail of credit card payments to you.
You also gotta be stupid as shit to actually pay 10 bux for this.
It ran functionally uncontested for ten years. And it would hardly have been the first underground streaming service to pivot legit and cash out.
Napster was sold for $85M back in 2002. Justin.tv rebranded as Twitch in 2011. Hell, AWS has it’s share of pirate hosted files.
Yeah but megaupload was legit but was still shutdown despite being massive
They had their servers seized, but were later returned and the service came back as mega.nz, legit and all.
Yeah uh no. that’s not the whole story, Mega is a new company, the difference is it’s encrypted so the theory was they’d have no way to scan for pirated content. Mega was also seized people think, it’s unclear who or what currently opperates it. And Kim Dotcom’s extradition case is ongoing.
Yeah uh no. that’s not the whole story, Mega is a new company, the difference is it’s encrypted so the theory was they’d have no way to scan for pirated content. Mega was also seized people think, it’s unclear who or what currently opperates it. And Kim Dotcom’s extradition case is ongoing.
Wait, is that actually Twitch’s history - Justin.tv?
It is. Until recently it actually still used the domain to serve assets.
Wild. What an obscure piece of internet history to have missed out on as an old Justin.tv user.
Was Justin.tv doing copyright infringing things? I seem to remember it was just a guy streaming his everyday life. He would literally wear a hat with a camera on it and record everything he did all day. It makes sense that it became twitch because they solved a technical problem around mass streaming that empowers twitch today.
I remember watching Pay-tv (Premier League / Bundesliga matches) on Justin TV back in the day, when it was still obscure enough to not attract the copyright holder’s attention. That was definitely infringing.
I see… I only remember the very early days of Justin.tv and kind of lost track of it between then and when it became twitch.
Teoretically speaking, asking for a friend who’s doing research, how would you access such a service? :)
There’s plenty of services like this that people use a firestick to connect too.
My friend uses one but I forget the name of it. You can find them online but people usually buy a package of say 20 connections and then sell them to friends and family. I’ll try and remember what to search for and come back.
Edit: IPTV is a good search term.
Legend
Nah just a regular dude trying to help others when I can.
IPTV is the name of the pirated cable TV streams. Personally, I consider commercialized piracy to be a bit distasteful compared to the free and open source route, and I have the know how to self host my own streaming service.
Although it’s not piracy, another free option to consider for live TV, if you’re within range of TV broadcasters, is a digital TV antenna. I’m looking into that since not only is it free and legal, it’s also the best picture quality, not compressed like IPTV (legit or pirated) or even cable.
I’m in the UK, so loads of live TV over the air.
“The group used “sophisticated computer scripts” and software to scour piracy services”
They used the basic tools that most(?) pirates use today like sonarr and radar??
I don’t mind people pirating…i do mind people pirating and profiting from redistribution.
Yes. Charging money for sharing content like that makes them little better than grifters
Guessing they used Sonarr, Radarr, qBittorrent, maybe an NZB client…
Would you look at that, I’m sophisticated now.
Maybe even Jellyseerr
redistribution = service?
Why would they work for free?
Not gonna pretend like this aint illegal but i don’t cry over some IP owners losing money… EVER, fuck 'em
Oh I don’t care that the IP owner don’t get money.
IDK, I just don’t like the ethics of pirating media for profit, the entire idea is that it should be accessible to everyone, not just those with money. Cover your operational cost? Sure…Making millions in subscriptions? That is an asshole move IMO. If you’re paying, you might as well pay the people who are making the media in the first place instead of some rando that had nothing to do with it.
This doesn’t seem that different from paying for usenet. It’s not like they’re making DVDs of pirated movies and selling them on the street corner; they were basically just aggregating content and the service they were providing was making it easily searchable and accessible, not doing the actual pirating, from the sound of it, unless I’m misunderstanding the situation.
This doesn’t seem that different from paying for usenet.
i would think it would be a little different from usenet, considering that usenet would be a service that you pay for, and people who use that service would host content on it, so that other users can download that content. Which effectively removes the immediate liability that you would have in this case, where you are explicitly hosting a pirated streaming service, and then charging for it, for the explicit purpose of streaming said pirated content.
Yeah, I suppose I should clarify - that was in response to the objection to paying for pirated content; it’s different from the service provider’s point of view, but from the end user’s point of view, they’re paying for pirated content either way.
yeah, from an end user perspective, it’s the same.
But i was referring mostly to the legal technicalities there, where one would be significantly more spicy than the other.
Nice root instance btw, getting jumpscared by pawb.social is a rather funny timeline to live in.
I don’t have an issue paying ISPs to access pirated content either, that’s the same as paying for Usenet access IMO. You’re paying for network access for a lot of different things, pirated content just happens to be part of it. Paying a streaming service specifically for pirated content is vastly different from paying for general network access, even from an end user perspective.
All fair points.
I think the issue is that IP owners are mega corps, ie people who made the content don’t own it and can’t provide it anyway.
Hey, look! They had a cookbook on tyranny…
Not all heroes wear capes, but some have a sidegig as firefighters
And wear a sexy mustache?
I mean probably?
Excellent!
They solved a problem people had after the fragmentation :)
The group used “sophisticated computer scripts” and software to scour piracy services (including the Pirate Bay and Torrentz) for illegal copies of TV episodes, which they then downloaded and hosted on Jetflicks’ servers, according to federal prosecutors.
They probably used Sonarr and Radarr and called it a day (or similar off-the-shelf tools available on GitHub). It’s not very sophisticated at all. That combined with Jellyfin and a VPN (or Usenet or a country that doesn’t care about piracy) and you have your own up and running. You could also just use free sites with an ad blocker instead of paying $10/mo like the service this article is about charged.
Unrelated to all of this: https://rentry.co/megathread
Jetflicks, which charged $9.99 per month for the streaming service, generated millions of dollars in subscription revenue and caused “substantial harm to television program copyright owners,
The ownership class will tremble before a communist revolution!
Get your communism here! Only $9.99 a month, or just $99.99 for a year!
cringe
caused “substantial harm to television program copyright owners,_
Maybe? People willing to copy and distribute this content will always be around and you will never catch them all. People willing to pay a discount or seek not and find said content will always be around. And there will be those who will watch a show or a movie because it is freely available, who would never pay a dime for it.
They will never end piracy and I’d argue it might actually be bad for business if they did.
Yeah that competition really did demonstrate what an awful service all those media monopolies provided.
As per Das Kapital our industrialists always move to capture regulation and seek to eliminate competition, which are the two aspects that can make capitalism work for the public. Then you have what we have today, late stage capitalism which is about tiers of rent, so everything is both shoddy and expensive.
That’s how Disney and Warner Brothers (Warner Sister too!) end up owning all the franchises. It’s how Sony owns all the music and sues to take down dancing baby videos.
The EU and California have both made in-roads to slowing down the steady takeover of regulatory bodies and the mulching and mass merging of megacorps into monolithic monopolies, but they can’t stop it, and both are seeing the bend into precarity that is symptomatic of late stage capitalism.
That said, true post scarcity communism is realistically a pipe dream well beyond a few great filters we’ve yet to navigate, but we will see small victories, of which piracy – what is essentially crime against ill-gotten gains – offers more than a few.
To be fair, the service they provide isn’t hosting the videos, it’s making them, which I assume costs a bit more
To be fair, the service they provide isn’t hosting the videos, it’s making them, which I assume costs a bit more
Netflix service started as hosting only.
correction… Netflix started by mailing DVDs, even before Redbox was a thing
Ah. Analogue hosting. But they definitely didn’t start producing content.
Yeah, imo it was also a bit more difficult then. But yeah as others said, the licensing was hard too
To be fairer nobody asked them to produce content. They decided to create it because it’s cheaper that licensing the actual good stuff.
eh some of it is good, I personally wouldn’t want to just watched licensed shows from 50 years ago
Hence why copyright was originally in the 10-20 year range.
Movie star isn’t supposed to be a dream job that makes you fabulously rich, but a decent living.
Interestingly, musical artists who work off the web will do exactly that: Tour and make hundreds of thousands instead of millions (in the aughts and 2010s, so pre-inflation), rather than rolling the dice with the record labels.
Movie star isn’t supposed to be a dream job that makes you fabulously rich, but a decent living.
I mean, supposed to according to who?
Capitalist ideologues, for one. I remember in Macroeconomics class that wealth desparity will destroy your economy and then your civilization if you let it get out of hand.
So when (for example) we have eight guys that own more than the poorer half of the world population, that’s a bad sign for every economy on the planet, and is going to cause way more problems than merely discontent and social unrest.
The service they provide (from a perspective external to obligatory capitalism) is less about making them, but providing a framework by which people engaged in artistic expression and development get paid and permitted to survive.
As the COVID-19 Lockdown furloughs demonstrated to us, art manifests so long as people are fed and need something to do. Healthy humans can’t couch-potato for two weeks without fidgeting and whittling wood into bears. And the great resignation that followed showed that enough people were able to make it lucrative (that is, work out marketing and fulfillment enough to make it profitable enough to quit their prior job) that it lowered worker supply that we were able to contest the shit treatment, low pay and toxic work environments that were normal before the epidemic.
It gets worse in other industries like big pharma in which the state provides vast grants for R&D of drugs and treatments, but the company keeps all the proceeds. Contrast the space program, which is why memory foam (the material) is in the public domain, as is a fuckton of electronics and computer technologies.
The service they provide (from a perspective external to obligatory capitalism) is less about making them, but providing a framework by which people engaged in artistic expression and development get paid and permitted to survive.
If it is art that other people value then that framework already existed(and there are many others who created similar tools for it) so I don’t see it as particularly valuable.
Contrast the space program, which is why memory foam (the material) is in the public domain, as is a fuckton of electronics and computer technologies.
There is a compelling argument that tens of billions of dollars being used productively to research anything would have at least some useful results. Memory foam, cordless drills, etc could have been developed much more cheaply than the Apollo program, GPS is extremely valuable, but Apollo wasn’t a necessary precursor to geostationary orbit.
If it is art that other people value then that framework already existed
From Wikipedia on Vincent Van Gogh: Van Gogh’s work began to attract critical artistic attention in the last year of his life. After his death, Van Gogh’s art and life story captured public imagination as an emblem of misunderstood genius
The art we get from pre-made frameworks emerged because people figured out they like art, and then someone capitalized on that. Or in cases of monarchs and governments, they created a fund to allow artists to do their thing instead of waiting tables.
There is a compelling argument that tens of billions of dollars being used productively to research anything would have at least some useful results.
For every $1 spent on the moonshots, we got $14. Feel free to look for other investments, but big science really has proven itself.
From Wikipedia on Vincent Van Gogh: Van Gogh’s work began to attract critical artistic attention in the last year of his life. After his death, Van Gogh’s art and life story captured public imagination as an emblem of misunderstood genius
I don’t really understand how this follows from what I said.
For every $1 spent on the moonshots, we got $14. Feel free to look for other investments, but big science really has proven itself.
Do you have a source for that? (And what that claim actually means), afterall, plenty of “essential” inventions in the modern day(including the base of modern rocketry) came from weapons development- does that make war a good investment? (Of course its not 1-to-1 because war is destructive, but my point is putting a lot of effort and smart people into almost anything will lead to a lot of innovation)
I don’t really understand how [The bit on Van Gogh – that he was only posthumously appreciated in the art sector] follows from what I said.
My following paragraph is about that. Art often happens before the framework made to create it. In fact, when we have set up studio, they’re already doing knock-offs, trying to repeat prior successes.
For every $1 spent on the moonshots, we got $14
Do you have a source for that?
This came up during a TED talk on the benefits of investing in big science. On an unrelated research effort, I found the National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958 which Eisenhower signed during his freak out over Sputnik, and the big grant to Fairchild Superconductor which kicked off the electronics boom in Silicon Valley (~San Jose, California), so the $14 value is certainly plausible.