The pirates are back - Anew study from the European Union’s Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) suggest that online piracy has increased for the first time in years. In fact, piracy rates have bee...
The pirates are back - Anew study from the European Union’s Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) suggest that online piracy has increased for the first time in years. In fact, piracy rates have bee...
The pirates are back - Anew study from the European Union’s Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) suggest that online piracy has increased for the first time in years. In fact, piracy rates have bee...::We analyze a new study where the EUIPO suggests online piracy is on the increase within the European Union.
The EUIPO speculates that financial pressures, like inflation, means that people have less money to spend on entertainment. This can be seen in the way that fewer people are signing up for Netflix or Amazon Prime – and some are even cancelling their subscriptions altogether.
Ah yes, that's the only reason. Not that streaming services are offering less content and functionality for more money, that can't be it.
The article wonders why would anyone pirate, let us give him the reason:
- Ads
- Multiple streaming services costing many times more than food. With nothing to see except for re runs and rehashes of old content.
- Ads
- Rising prices for poor service and shit content.
- Ads
- Geoblocking
- Ads
- Low quality videos even if you are willing to pay just because you don't wish to use their specified player or browser. Why can't I stream it to VLC player without the overhead of a browser.
- Ads
- All the while the CEO and the executive of the companies raking in billions on the money they are saying charging us for the artists.
It’s worth noting that although piracy is up, the rates are still far lower than they were 20, 10 or even five years ago. Whether people continue to access content illegally remains to be seen – hopefully this is just a ‘blip’ and rates of theft begin to fall again as the economy recovers.
I can't be bothered to pull back all the layers of naive optimism in just these two sentences.
Hmmmmm. Let's see here.
People don't like cable, because it's too expensive and inconvenient
People start pirating
People like having 2-3 streaming services that show everything, without ads, for much cheaper even combined than cable. They stop pirating.
People don't like having 20-30 streaming services that show only a little in each service, NOW WITH ADS!?!?! and that become MUCH more expensive than cable ever was.
People start pirating again......
I wonder what happened?!?!
I 100% believe this. The video streamers are getting too greedy and pushing out too much subpar content. When it was affordable and easy to find what you want streaming was great. Now it's expensive and stuff in on 12 different platforms.
Also most of what I watch is older so everyone on the creative and production side has been paid the only ones making money at this point are the studio fat cats.
Wow that wording, trying to make pirating sound like an evil crime lol. I feel no moral negativity pirating. In fact, my conscience is clean and I feel morally obligated to, considering how expensive they are making services.
I think reading between the lines is the real story: when they get greedy, pirating puts them I check and causes pricing to become affordable and people stop pirating. Once people are not pirating, greed increases and pirates have to return to put them in place again.
In conclusion... we need pirates to balance things out, this pirating is a necessity in our modern age..
You are welcome everyone, I am doing my part for myself and I am doing my part for you.
I have subscriptions (and shared subscriptions) to... seven services that I can think of in 20 seconds.
Yet, time and time again, I try to figure out if what I want to watch is covered by one of them (not trivial to figure out), and end up falling back on piracy probably around 50% of the time.
Now that every fucking content owner has its own subscription plan, it makes subscriptions pointless because it's spread so damn thin.
If not, we can expect to see legal channels raising their prices again to cover the losses caused by piracy.
what a shitty take. Well, anyone who has better memory than only one month back can realize that the reason the people turned to piracy was that they raised their prices. There is no loss caused by piracy. They only missed potential gains. And the reason they raised their prices were not because they were loosing money. Was because they needed to "grow infinitely". If the free market evangelists are right, the free market will self regulate and the prices will go down in order to attract back the lost customers lol
I believe it was Gabe Newell who said the best way to avoid piracy is by making legitimate purchasing easier and/or better.
In the early history of streaming services, you could get access to a lot of content in a straightforward way for not much money. People started doing that instead of pirating. The corporations got greedy, they made the services worse and increased the price to the point that piracy is preferable again.
And I don't have the least amount of sympathy. Yarr matey.
I just cancelled my Netflix that I had for like 10 years. Total shit nothing to watch.
Now there’s a million services, everything is plus. Paramount+, Disney+, Nutsack+
Even if I wanted to pay for all that shit, everyone has their own shitty app I have to install and configure and have a login and fuck you.
It’s just easier for me to torrent what I want.
hopefully this is just a ‘blip’ and rates of theft begin to fall again as the economy recovers.
If not, we can expect to see legal channels raising their prices again to cover the losses caused by piracy.
This is a crazy thing to write. Every streaming service already has their prices set at whatever they think will maximize profit. If they raise prices in response to piracy, they'll push even more people away.
If anything, piracy will serve as competition, and it will cause the streaming services to lower prices.
It's not just streaming services that have turned to shit. Society as a whole has been enshittified because shareholders and directors are chasing the dollar.
Reddit started charging out of their butt for API access, and had killed off 95% of third party apps in the process.
YouTube is downright unusable without a Premium subscription or uBlock Origin. Every content creator meanwhile risks demonetization if their videos are too kid-friendly or too inappropriate, and now have to fill half their videos with endorsements for shitty mobile games like Raid: Shadow Legends if they want to break even.
Porn sites are now astroturfed by e-girls shilling their $20/month OnlyFans pages.
Online dating apps are now a carbon copy of one another, are owned by an oligopoly of big corporations and charge you the same price of four WoW subscriptions for basic features like unlimited swipes, seeing who liked you, etc.
Even real life sucks now. Enjoy paying 70% of your monthly income to pay off some filthy rich landlord's mortgage while the rich continue to snap up properties, all while the wealthy continue to brainwash sheep into voting against their best interests.
Is a lobotomy needed to become a lobbyist?
1.) Article claims w/o any kind of source/data, that people cannot afford subscriptions 2.) Article warns that the big services have to raise their prices soon, because of losses made by piracy, which according to 1.) is caused by people not having enough money for the subscriptions
The article doesn't mention the shareholders, which get billions of wins by milking the subscribers stupid enough to sign up for the bullshit. ... oh, but the article mentions the poor artists/working people, which loose money because of online piracy. I almost forgot about the recent strikes, because the people actually producing the content don't get shit from the companies/shareholders.
Seriously, I'll cancel my last subscription right now, because I am feed up giving my money to shareholders, companies and lobbies who buy politicians and laws.
The convenience of streaming services disappeared, this is just a natural consequence.
Piracy is a service problem.
What service is $SHOW on? Doesn't matter, it's already in your favorite piracy site.
The cost of rent/mortgages is going up, the cost of power is now higher than ever, and the cost of essentials (such as food and medication) is nearly double.
People are ditching streaming services because they can no longer afford them, and with price increases there it only makes things worse.
Piracy is the natural fallback, especially in a market where ownership has degenerated into rental. At this point, streaming might follow cable as folks lose access and realise the folly of rental over ownership. Piracy offers a superior service with a superior experience, and the rhetoric of "tHinK oF THe cREatIVes" is wearing thin in the public eye.
There are two main problems with digital piracy. First, it robs the creator of their income. It’s not just big companies who suffer – the people working behind the scenes lose out too.
No, robbery is theft under the threat of violence. Theft requires an intent to deprive the owner of their possession. Copyright infringement is not theft.
Businesses do not have a right to peoples' money.
Second, piracy is illegal. Penalties for stealing digital content vary from country to country, but they can be quite harsh. In the UK, digital pirates face up to five years in prison and a £5000 GBP fine (~$6000)
Criminal copyright infringement might attract prison time, but that has a fairly high bar, and is typically focused on profiting from piracy. Most copyright infringement is not a crime, but a civil offense - and it's only because of extensive lobbying by greedy businesses that crimes have been established on the books.
Outside of the US, copyright infringement can only attract actual damages, ie the proveable loss in income. Given that you can't easily prove that someone would've paid for the things they pirate, outside of the US there never really have been big cases of people downloading things being charged and facing significant fines.
What has changed?
The EUIPO speculates that financial pressures, like inflation, means that people have less money to spend on entertainment. This can be seen in the way that fewer people are signing up for Netflix or Amazon Prime – and some are even cancelling their subscriptions altogether.
The EUIPO suggests that rather than stop watching digital content online, these people are now turning to illegal sources to access the TV shows they watch. And that is why piracy rates are on the up.
Of course, it has nothing to do with the quality of these services going down as their prices go up...
2015: Share your Netflix between four people, everyone pays $4 per month, have access to 80% of all online content. The interface is shit but you keep up with it because it is cheap.
2023: You pay $20 for Netflix, pay $15 for Disney, pay $15 for Hulu, pay $10 for Amazon Prime, $15 for Discovery, $15 for Paramount, $15 for Youtube, have access to 50% of all online content. The interface is still shit and you wonder why you pay for that shit.
Joe Average: 🏴☠️😎🏴☠️😎🏴☠️😎🏴☠️😎🏴☠️😎🏴☠️ and the interface is easier than ever.
My 2013 Highest-End Smart-TV barely works with Youtube and no longer with anything else. But Burning Series still works marvellous. Another thing: "Consuming" pirated content is not "illegal" in Germany. It is a violation of private property which the rights owner can sue in a civil court. But as long as you don't use P2P services where you also upload - which would indeed be a fellony - he can not detect what you do and can not take any action against you - so One-Click-Hosters and Warez-Streaming is totally safe. And if the rights owner could find out about you he could at most send you a cease-and-desist-order with a one-time-fee of at max $100 because it is a minor incident. As far as I know there was never a user of Warez-Streaming who paid anything.
The only bad thing: DNS is nowadays filtered at the big Telcos and Providers which means I have to change the DNS inside my Routers to Cloudflare and Google. Which are a lot faster anyway.
I've started to pirate games again, which I never saw a reason to in 15 years. Simply because 2 hours refund window isn't enough for the crap they sell now. Performance from hell and half assed story after you left the tutorial.
Gamepass kind of stopped me a bit on that, but it's a subscription and only a matter of time till there's competition with exclusives and increased price.
Games also got too expensive, there's more competition than ever and I earn less money than my parents used to, I simply can't pay that much, yet the games start to cost 90€ upwards. So even if I buy a key, it's still 65€ or more, for an often broken game. No thank you.
I get movies and TV shows from the digital high seas because it’s easier, and I openly admit this with my real name on my Lemmy profile.
Currently, I'm subscribed to four streaming platforms: Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Crunchyroll, and Disney+. Despite this, I resort to pirating every piece of content I watch.
The simplicity of searching a title on Radarr or Sonarr and clicking 'add' vastly outshines the cumbersome process on legal platforms.
These sites are all flawed, tend to harbor more spyware than Windows and present a usability nightmare compared to the streamlined interface of Jellyfin.
In terms of ethics, my conscience is clear. If a movie or TV show isn't available on the platforms I subscribe to, it's a clear sign they aren't interested in my money.
I see absolutely no problem with paying for what I watch; financial constraints aren't the issue. The crux of the matter lies in the user experience, which is undeniably superior and hassle-free on the open waves of the digital ocean.
For me it's a price and convenience if we talk about media streaming.
If we talk about games - I am playing on Linux and Alan Wake 2, which I recently pirated, is selling on Epic Games and this store has no Linux support at all. Steam has, but this game is not on Steam. If it were on Steam I'd have probably bought it.
Source form the EUIPO since it is not linked in the article: https://www.euipo.europa.eu/en/publications/online-copyright-infringement-in-eu-2023
Yeah, because it's easier and cheaper to open up the stream.io app and watch whatever I want whenever I want, than to subscribe to multitudes of platforms of which the majority of the content is garbage.
Because if there was even one large streaming service that wasn't going through shitification for profit I wouldn't turn to the high seas.
Just one. Untill then I'll pay creators directly and pirate the rest.
We paid for streaming networks but our rural internet was too shitty to stream, so I'd torrent everything instead. Now we have good internet but all the streaming services are too expensive to sign up for. Just like the old days, the only available solution to see what you want at a fair price is piracy.
Yeah increase prices due to piracy losses, I'm sure that won't cause even more people to pirate
what a trash article, that honestly sounded AI generated. depriving humans of their journalists income.
Also piracy isn't illegal in many countries. for example in Australia it's a civil offence that must be persued in the courts by the company that alleged the offence occurred.
I downloaded new content for the first time in a while, recently. It's on a streaming service that I don't want (I pay for several).
I'd only been downloading things that I couldn't stream (* Cannibal Holocaust*, for example) for a long time. I stopped downloading for a number of years. Guess what? My bittorrent client still works. After a number of years buying everything on blu-ray discs (and ripping to Plex) and renting from streaming services, I'm on my way to where I was. I'll still pay for convenience. I'm done fucking around with complications.
After reading this and some comments, what I've gleaned is that the article is bullshit and piracy truly acts as a competitor in 2 areas - service and content. Many shows are exclusive to a particular platform and therefore the platforms do not need to compete in that area. For the service side of things, I think there has been genuine innovation but it has become stagnant in the last few years and they are referring to old bad practices.
It feels like there is active collusion but perhaps it's just a result of a poorly regulated industry which allows for pseudo-monopolies. My hope would be for regulation mandating that all content must have a second provider, i.e. no more exclusive shows. Give me stranger things on Amazon prime as well. This would force each streaming company to complete for users and still allow the creators to get paid appropriately. I don't know if this would end up making streaming services unviable but it's certainly a lot faster and more consumer friendly.
Would love to hear about the potential downside to this proposal.
Only thing I've been paying for since 2012 has been a VPN. Problem solved.
I’m shocked! Shocked, I tell ya!
really imagine that, services splitting combined prices rising leads to increased piracy. Shocker
we will never be defeated
I feel partially responsible for this, and I’m not complaining
Back? From where? looks around to make sure that in same place
:)
Glad to hear this classic may make a comeback
That's perfect. There was a thread not too long ago discussing how Amazon Prime removed am item from someone's media library and gave them $5 as "compensation". Imagine someone coming into your house and taking something they don't sell anymore and leaving 5 bucks on your kitchen counter for your troubles. So many people in this world want their cake and eat it too, you can't have it both ways. If it was agreed that buying a digital asset conferred some type of ownership, they might have an argument now. They made their bed, now they can piss off and do what they want with it, it's theirs to do with as they please because we can never own a part of it.
I won't speak for anyone else, but I've been "acquiring" stuff I can't legally in part because we're reaching a phase where the streaming services are taking stuff down and I might want some of that stuff.
KILL THE PIRATES