I don’t currently sail the high seas, but clamping down on access and making it harder to enjoy content, increasing prices, blocking account sharing, and adding unskippable ads and promos make me want to pirate, just out of spite!
But wouldn’t that go against freedom of expression and the internet?
It might. If it causes undue burden on ISPs or services like Cloudflare, for example, the law will probably be scrapped by some part of Congress or a judge.
And even if it somehow survives all of that, a VPN with a server in another country will make this bill pointless.
The current administration is seemingly trying to kill the very concept of free speech and expression.
The people who create these services will always be more clever and quick to implement workarounds than politicians. It’s a futile battle.
Want to avoid piracy? Make getting things easier and more convenient.
Back when Netflix was £5-10 depending on tier, had a load of content, and an account could be shared between a few trusted people, I practically gave up pirating. Now it’s £18 per month for 4K (and due to rise), and doesn’t have those other positives going for it, I’ve abandoned it in favour of Radarr+Sonarr+Plex, and am having a better experience.
For video games, I predominantly buy from Steam, because it’s a good service, and so far I have not seen any evidence that Valve are going to fuck me over. They’ve made gaming and all the things ancillary to it a lot more convenient. So I happily pay. If they embrace enshittification, guess what I’ll do?
The only games I do pirate are Nintendo/Sega games that haven’t been sold in decades. Why? Because there’s no feasible other way to buy them and keep them!
I don’t pirate music because Spotify. For all the issues I have with it (and boy do I have a few), it still has almost every song I search for, is fairly priced, and hasn’t clamped down on account sharing in the same way Netflix/Disney/etc have. I’m part of a family where we split the cost. All the music I could possibly want for £2.20 per month? Fine by me! If that goes away, I go away, yarr harr.
Not to mention Valve spearheaded major development for making Linux gaming like 200% better than it used to be, with development of Proton and everything, and giving all those work back to the entire gaming community as open source products entirely for free, bring in momentum for an entire industry.
That’s a company you support.
I’m so fucking glad Valve isn’t beholden to shareholders.
Sounds like their strategy is to force US companies to block access to piracy sites.
I already run my torrent client through a non-US VPN so this can literally be bypassed by adding this to my prowlarr docker compose:
network_mode: service:gluetun
What VPN do you recommend?
I have had pretty good luck with airvpn, but the ultimate is mullvad as I understand it, though relatively speaking it is much more expensive than airvpn.
I don’t really have a recommendation atm, I used to use mullvad but for torrenting I feel like the lack of port forwarding (once they removed that feature) was hurting my ability to seed so I switched to proton. I also recently added Usenet into my mix and since many providers bundle a VPN subscription - and mine in particular supposedly also supports port forwarding (usenetdirect bundles a ghost path VPN subscription), I’m gonna try to get it to work with that so I don’t have to pay for a VPN separately but I haven’t tried it yet.
gluetun works with any openvpn provider. i prefer proton as ive already got a ton of mail services through them… the vpn is basically a freebie.
Thank you, I’ve been using my own docker image that adds in the PIA scripts and creates a Dante SOCKS5 server which works decently but I’d like something a bit more provider agnostic in case I want to change.
They already banned pornhub and pornographers. Fascists are going to fash.
I’m curious how effective those bans have been. Is free porn difficult to access in states that have added verification laws or has it only affected the larger players that get attention while the ones that most people don’t usually think immediately of fly under the radar?
You hit the nail on the head, it’s just the biggest sites
Someone I know told me their usual site is no verification, but sometimes finding content through Google on the big sites triggers an ID verification.
There’s a part of me that has become annoyed that i’m forced to pay for a vpn to now access the entirety of the internet. I don’t blame the vpn provider, though. --Nope, they are not the ones I blame…
Who pays for vpns anymore. Isn’t proton VPN free?
kinda, but you have to pay for access to more than 3 servers. protonvpn has a paid tier (faster speeds, more servers, p2p support) – which people do pay for – putting them in the ‘okay’ category.
also, it’s a general rule that all ‘completely free!’ vpns sell your data, keep and sell logs(thats why they can afford to be free), have really slow speeds due to user overloads etc.
I only use vpns for porn hub lol so I guess I didn’t realize people need vpns for more than that haha
How does proton cover that expense?
By enticing you to pay for their office suite
Wasting their time
This is dumb considering that these types of streaming sites are how I actually discover anime and become a fan enough that i want to purchase merch. I pay for Crunchy Roll, but sometimes I want to check out stuff from other services. If I had to rely sheerly on legal services I wouldn’t watch or discover half of what I did.
Legal services are also pretty inferior. I wanted to watch A certain Scientific Railgun… Season 1 was dubbed, but season 2 on the service wasn’t… I literally had to track it down on some streaming site to get access to what I’m paying for.
Not just anime. As a DC comics fan over the last few years, a lot of how WB does business looks pretty fucking stupid to me too. I’m willing to bet that if I visit the DC Universe website right now, it’s still going to say something like “not available in your country but keep checking back because we’re working on it!” just like it did 5+ years ago.
And they’ve been handling (HBO) Max with same sort of ‘urgency’. So we’ll get the movies on the big screen but as far as the tie in series go, maybe they’ll make it to Netflix some time after you’ve already been spoilered everywhere you look online, in the DC fan spaces you visit.
One of the funniest things was when James Gunn shared a clip of some school kids in Philippines (I think) doing the choreographed intro sequence dance for Peacemaker along with the theme song. Before Peacemaker was even legally available there.
crunchyroll is the most infuriating they were a piracy streaming company that went legit
kick the ladder down
Oh no!
Anyway.
I’m currently watching The Practice. One of my favorite shows. Over the years it’s been on Netflix, prime, and shit like peacock and tubi. I can’t keep up with all that. Right now it’s in Amazon prime which I have but can’t watch because I have a “business” account and according to Amazon I shouldn’t be watching shows and movies on a “business” account.
Soooo… To the high seas I go. Not that I don’t want to pay for it but because it’s so much easier.
And now I’ll have the show for whenever I want to watch it.
This is why you run servers outside of five eye countries
I have heard that phrase before, but I am unsure what it denotes specifically.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes
Basically countries part of (or allied) with the countries that are part of the UKUSA agreement.
We only pirate TV because it’s easier and cheaper. If you actually had a catch all service (like old Netflix) for a low price, people would stop. Oh wait, we had that but greed got in the way again…
I used to be perfectly happy with Netflix and Google music + YouTube Red, but corporations were too greedy
I now use a mix of free Kodi TV, patched YouTube apps, rip music off tidal, and self host media on a lifetime premium Plex server.
They don’t care. They don’t want to innovate, they want to force you to pay them for nothing in return.
This falls under enshitification, no?
Yes
If you actually had a catch all service
I believe this used to be called cable tv.
But before you reply, yeah, I know cable didn’t get everything. And you had to pay extra for Disney, HBO, etc. And on top of the exorbitant price there were always tons of commercials. That’s all true.
But I do remember a time right around 2005, when everyone was saying “if only there were a-la-carte options, for people who only want sports, or only want movies”. My point being, there’s no winning and the grass is always greener somewhere.
And for what it’s worth, I basically agree with you. I use Plex, I have a few friends who also run Plex servers and we all share content. That’s the best catch all I’ve ever found.
The problem with cable was it was not on demand and contained ads.
I would never, ever pay for cable even in today’s world if it was $10 a month because of the overwhelming amount of ads.
Why just pay one service a small fee for ad free streaming, when you can pay a lot of services a large fee for ad supported streaming?
I miss my $8 a month google music + YouTube red… I wonder if people got to keep the legacy price for YouTube premium
As has often been reiterated: piracy is a service problem. If what you get by paying more is an inferior service, then people don’t want to pay for that service.
100% true, haven’t pirated a single game since I started using Steam and actually having a paycheck since about 10 years ago
Just you wait till you see the arr stack (radarr, sonarr, lidarr, etc.)
I tried Lidarr but I find that it is inconsistent enough that it is just a find-and-grab utility for me.
I much prefer ripping tidal tracks on my phone using a tidal-dl in termix and then just using a ftp to my Pi when I get home
… You know that feeling when you get nerd sniped. 😭
FWIW, Lidarr works the worst out of the arr stack for me too. I don’t know if there’s just not enough well indexed material in my sources or what, but yeah, not great.
If your entire experience with the arr stack has been Lidarr so far, give it another shot! Sonarr and Radarr work absolutely perfectly. It’s just such a nice feeling to open Jellyfin (or I guess Plex) on the TV and go “oh nice new episode is out!”
I don’t really watch TV much in the first place of my own choice. A few things my partner wants to watch but that’s about it. Music I get download with yt-dpl -x, I think that was it anyway as I set an alias for it
If you’re in a private tracker like RED or OPS it works very well, but I agree that public trackers are not well indexed enough
why they gotta make the headline almost sound like they gon’ ban anime, don’t do us dirty man
Effectively kill anime 😀
Piracy ☹️
Corporate legislation, making America Great as always.
Not in this particular case, not yet, you can view it’s status HERE and it’s still at 0 cosponsors.
Hard to discuss this bill since the text isn’t even on there yet. But apparently companies expressing approval have seen it.
Difficulty aside, it’s currently a non-bill as far as anybody should be concerned. There is a lot going on and this isn’t really something until it gets more representatives behind it.
I mean ffs the new admin struck down Net Neutrality already, where are the people concerned by that?
They weren’t worried about it last time and they’re not worried about it now.
My only faith in the system is that they will screw over such a wide number of people that it’ll piss people off enough to care.
Best laws money can buy!
Same with freedom lol.
