5 major ISPs roll out the "six strikes" policy regarding illegal downloads.

Deathwing_sl said:

I thought media groups were going pretty heavily after newsgroups already. The best indexing site just went under and new content gets removed so quickly that the "super secret" place to upload changes frequently.

Click to expand...

It took me less than 24 hours to replace NZBMatrix with a different, although slightly less capable, indexing site. Sickbeard caught me back up as soon as I had it pointed to the new site so I basically lost a few hours when they closed the site. They just don't get it.

as someone who comes from a time of filling floppies with cracked software / media I got offa dial up BBSs, I for one will enjoy this latest expensive boondoggle that will go nowhere and do nothing, I have seen many just like it come and go.

Deathwing_sl said:

So if we don't like the tv package one provider offers, we cancel them and go with...? A true marketplace should allow people to vote with their dollars and it's becoming hard to do that.

Click to expand...

I would like more choice too, but you're downplaying the available options. There's your cable provider(s), Dish, Direct TV, Internet, Netflix, etc.

Also, your previous post makes it hard for people to ignore the margins some media companies are getting. When I can get a 1 hour standup from Louis CK for $5 or a just as funny 1 hour from HBO for many many more dollars per month for two years, you know there's a ton of margin. Which makes it hard to feel bad for them when you steal their shit.

Click to expand...

First, the margins are irrelevant. The margins certainly don't change the legality of the act and they don't change the morality either when one is just keeping the content for his or herself. Second, the comparison isn't fair and doesn't illuminate the margins. Yes, an hour of comedy is cheaper than two years of (near?) 24/7 content.

To be sure, one can be upset that he or she must purchase two years of HBO (hypothetically) or wait until to DVD's are released to watch what shows he wants. Or one can be upset that he or she must purchase HBO in a package with Showtime etc. However, the proper response is not to illegally download the desired content. That increases the cost for paying customers. It provides a boogie man that legislature seek to fight with awful legislation like SOPA. Even accepting, for the sake of argument, that piracy is a vehicle of change for content distribution, its a pretty damn slow one. Piracy has been around since the beginning of the internet and yet the pirates are still unhappy.

What would it take for pirates to stop pirating? I'm curious to see the answers of some here. If you illegally download content, at what price would you buy, instead of download?

Simas_sl said:

What would it take for pirates to stop pirating? I'm curious to see the answers of some here. If you illegally download content, at what price would you buy, instead of download?

Click to expand...

Netflix (with the on-demand service side) dropped piracy way the fuck down, but the studios got greedy and gutted the available content by increasing the licensing fees 20 fold. They love to shoot themselves in the foot. Can't have it both ways.

Simas_sl said:

What would it take for pirates to stop pirating? I'm curious to see the answers of some here. If you illegally download content, at what price would you buy, instead of download?

Click to expand...

If Amazon or another provider offered 1080p 5.1DD MKVs of television shows, free of DRM, for anything under ~$3 an episode I would be all over it. The current implementation of 'owning' digital TV shows is ridiculous since you can't easily play or transfer the file to a device beyond your computer.

Which is why I just buy the BDs of shows/movies and rip those. Definitely less convenient than a true digital distribution method, but at least I know it works, free of restrictions.

If I legally have an entire band's discography and I want to put the entire thing on my ipod I need to pop in N amount of CD's, rip them, add them, etc. Or I could download them in about 3 minutes, not rip them, and continue.

What is the legality if I own the product already?

I don't really know what price I would pay for television and movie content. First they'd have to come up with a delivery system that didn't suck and could provide same-day/live content seamlessly. At present though the only delivery option I have is On Demand through my cable company and the prices there are not doing it. $7 for an old movie, $60 for a UFC event? No thanks. I'm guessing it would need to be in the $1-4/movie (depending on age and how decent the movie is) and ~$.50/half hour for television shows.

I'll say this much though, I used to pirate games exclusively and since Steam came onto the scene I haven't pirated one. I'll even wait for a sale on a questionable title instead of downloading it from sketchy sources.

Noodleface_sl said:

If I legally have an entire band's discography and I want to put the entire thing on my ipod I need to pop in N amount of CD's, rip them, add them, etc. Or I could download them in about 3 minutes, not rip them, and continue.

What is the legality if I own the product already?

Click to expand...

Technically it's still illegal since breaking any form of copy protection on CDs, DVDs, or BDs violates DMCA but anyone would be hard pressed to file a lawsuit against you if you downloaded those files via a system like Usenet. Torrents are obviously a different story since you upload as well, and there would be a legitimate case against you.

Steam type service with 0 day availability and reasonable prices would stop a lot of pirates. The rest wouldn't stop would have never bought your product anyways so content producers lose no money there.

I would stop all pirating if they offered the same material via the internet that you have at a movie theater and I would pay ticket price and maybe upwards of a few dollars higher. My cousin loves that I download these movies and make him a copy so he can watch because a trip to the theaters for him is always over $100 because he has four god damn kids, I promise you he would gladly pay 15 bucks to watch the new Iron Man at home or any other new release and so would I.

what happened to all the work that was being done on the next gen encrypted torrent system? I know they were working on it for while, all peers being blind to each other and the requested packets / destinations were invisible to all parties?

The big joke of all of this is the US isn't where the real loss of revenue from piracy is. Also for all the studios claims they are losing massive amounts of money, films make more now than they ever did. they are crying about theoretical money they pretend they would get. Studios keep trying to triple dip, and get paid again when you want to use the content in another format. As Zodiac said, there are people who wont pay for the content affordable or not.

These "policies" don't really apply to you once you start talking about VPNs and encrypted traffic. This is more about people who download a dozen movies off a public tracker and don't even know they have a torrent client that starts with windows uploading everything they have ever downloaded.

Deathwing_sl said:

Simas:

Some of those choices are incomplete. Here, I don't watch much tv. Find me a complete package that consists of these TV shows:

Jeopardy
The Daily Show
The Colbert Report
Chelsea Lately
Chopped


I'm not arguing the legality of the act. I know it's illegal. On the morality part, not really arguing that either. But you have to stand in awe that it's still supposedly cheaper to keep prices the same and spend money to use blatant scare tactics than it is to reevaluate content distribution to get more subscribers.

Click to expand...

An internet connection and not much else will get you most of that. Jeopardy is on ABC so you can watch it free on broadcast television. Full epsiodes of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report are available online free of charge. The Chelsea Lately website looks to contain extensive clips, but no full episodes. The Chopped website seems to host he least content. Alternatively, a basic cable package should cover that. I imagine basic packages with the satellite tv would as well. I didn't check Hulu or Netflix.

An internet connection is not perfect. It won't get you everything you want on that list. But it's close. Basic cable will get you much more than you listed, much of which you may not want. I'm not a huge fan of that. I wish there was ala carte cable but the cable companies are, I suspect rightly, convinced that it would lose them money. Still, there are various options available.

I'm not saying the distribution system is ideal, only that it's not as bad as some make it out to be. It's certainly not so bad as to justify illegally downloading content.

I suspect pirates illegally download content because it's easy to do so and because it's reasonable to believe that there will be little to no consequences for doing so. All of rest is rationalization.

I am old now, I don't crave having content on day zero, waiting 4 months to have it pop up on my netflix queue isn't a problem. a lot of TV has figured out that they should make their shows available on demand via web at the same time as the broadcast.

Northerner_sl said:

I don't really know what price I would pay for television and movie content. First they'd have to come up with a delivery system that didn't suck and could provide same-day/live content seamlessly. At present though the only delivery option I have is On Demand through my cable company and the prices there are not doing it. $7 for an old movie, $60 for a UFC event? No thanks. I'm guessing it would need to be in the $1-4/movie (depending on age and how decent the movie is) and ~$.50/half hour for television shows.

I'll say this much though, I used to pirate games exclusively and since Steam came onto the scene I haven't pirated one. I'll even wait for a sale on a questionable title instead of downloading it from sketchy sources.

Click to expand...

I never pirated games much, at least not past the floppy days. The only stuff I pirate these days are television series out of sheer convenience. I have a full cable subscription that has the shows I download on it, I'd just rather watch it on my HTPC or tablet or laptop than fuck around PVR'ing it. Why should I have to pay $40 a season or whatever when I'm already paying $60-80 a month for cable?

Oh and the occasional back catalog of a musical artist. Again mostly for the convenience of downloading one Pink Floyd or Rush archive as opposed to 20+ individual albums. Otherwise I purchase the vast majority of my music from iTunes since it's at least DRM free. Made the mistake of buying a ski movie from iTunes that I now cannot fucking watch because iTunes/Quicktime continually loses audio sync and the DRM won't let me watch it with another player. How do I convert that shit to a useful format by the way?

Oh and since I'm Canadian, we have next to no online content delivery systems that are open to us, like Hulu. Even Netflix here is a fucking joke compared to in the US, with a far smaller selection. Can't use Pandora, could never get a Zune pass with Microsoft, and so on. We just get straight fucked in the ass when it comes to content, which of course drives piracy.

Eomer_sl said:

Made the mistake of buying a ski movie from iTunes that I now cannot fucking watch because iTunes/Quicktime continually loses audio sync and the DRM won't let me watch it with another player.How do I convert that shit to a useful format by the way?

Click to expand...

Download a good version off torrents.

Yeah, that's an option, but those versions are never quite as good for quality as the original. I should have just fucking bought a Blu-Ray of it instead.

I don't pirate much, Netflix and Spotify take care of 90% of my music and tv needs, but when I want to grab something like GoT or Breaking Bad, I have always just got it off TPB. I guess that's a bad idea now. What is the safe way for me to get the occasional HBO/AMC/SHO series? Please forgive my internet ignorance.