We have literal Nazis stealing all our private information right this second…but THIS is the bill that gets to the floor?
Fiddling while Rome burns.
I don’t think you understand. Rome burning is the distraction. Shit like this is the real goal. The U.S. will be lucky if it hasn’t collapsed to neo-feudalism in the next four years.
Alarmism doesn’t help just like energy drinks don’t help. You get a short period of strong agitation followed by a longer period of mild apathy.
Nothing happens abruptly.
Also it’s called oligopolized capitalism, or maybe state capitalism, I forgot what Nazi Germany’s economy system was called, but that’d be the right classification.
However, the ideology is not that of Nazi Germany, not even similar. It’s still a democracy, however shitty it would seem. Maybe, yes, a 4 years long sample of those Confederate States of America some people wanted, but not even the full bouquet of taste.
In any case, things like this bill could have been seen from 20 years ago. A lot of people just thought it’s not important. Just like it always happens.
We are sitting discussing things without doing anything, a reminder. You know something to hurt them - you do that. You don’t - why bother?
EDIT: Admittedly I’m in Russia, so have less incentives to be scared about this and more about one friend.
is anime a form of Piracy?! One Piece I guess?!
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?
Both. But we already knew the point wasn’t to ban free press, but ID people online like the Koreas.
Stop hiking prices on streaming services and making them awful to use while ending sales of physical media and I won’t pirate content.
Do they not know the concept of piracy? That’s like Walmart and Target backing a new bill to stop shoplifting.
They could just make a better service. Between the password sharing, and everything being scattered everywhere, what did they expect? I’m going to pay for half a dozen services and still not get to watch what I want? Or I may be able to watch it and pay for the privilege to see ubskippable ads? You can only beat us with so many sticks before we stop feeling it. Come back with a carrot.
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!
I started using pirated software in 1990, back when my first PC was gifted to me. All software I had was copied because I could not afford jack shit on my own. It is thanks to pirated (and open source) software that I have the career I have, and can afford to spend thousands of dollars on legitimate software, music, movies, books, etc.
Provide product people want and prices they can afford, and they’ll buy them rather than pirate them. Don’t persecute consumers of pirated products and most of them will eventually purchase legally.
It’s like Gabe said (paraphrased): “Piracy is a service problem, not a pricing problem.”
Make it easy to buy stuff and people will. But the more barriers you put up, the more people will pirate. Granted, there are persons like you (and I counted among those at one point) who cannot afford things from time-to-time, but we’re a minority. Every game I’ve ever pirated from those days I have made sure to purchase once I was able to.
Make it available for easy purchase and people will buy it.
I still usually pirate when buying requires jumping through too many hoops. Being in a sanctioned country, ahem, adds some just impractical to go through.
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?
You can’t legislate piracy away…
But they can make up excuses for their arsenal for whenever they want to ban a site they don’t like from common eyes.
“It was banned because it was pornography”
“It was banned because it was displaying pirated content”
“It was banned because it harmed the public good”
They want control over what the common people can see, hear, say, and think.
Yeah, but for every dictator there’s countless intelligent revolutionaries. Especially when it comes to the internet.
They’re really shooting themselves in the foot trying to deny us/force overcharge the very thing they use to make us complacent in the first place: media.
If they were smart they’d ignore this bill. It would just bring attention to their attempt to essentially seize the internet and for what? For us just to get around it again anyway?
Not to mention if they enforce US VPNs to conform it’ll just result in more currency leaving the country. No wonder this fucking floundering economy is all our fault.
Governing is like holding a marble to the table with your thumb. The more you press down, the more likely that marble is to shoot out and break your shit.
It’s good to know I’m not the only one who thinks this way. That marble analogy is on point. The US is built on mutually beneficial structures. When one cabal of structures starts targeting others, the functionality of the whole country flounders and rebellion is legitimized.
Anyone offhandedly know how this would affect Usenet
Usenet is perfectly controllable for this kind of thing.
Also it’s not intended for sharing binaries, that’s bad behavior.
I can see something new, distributed (no servers), but with Usenet’s feel and paradigm, being the pinnacle of piracy. But there is no such thing.
It is impossible to ban piracy. The whole concept is that it’s not legal to begin with.
I bet Lars Ulrich is so proud that he killed music piracy back when he killed napster.
Except wait…no he didn’t he killed A service. Meaning singular. The concept of piracy moved on. We got limewire and torrents.
The ONLY thing that has slowed (if not stopped) music piracy is making the content readily and easily available in a convienent consumption method at a reasonable price.
Shocking, I know.
The invention of iTunes CHARGING money for music in a (at the time) new more convienent method of music consumption at a reasonable price did leaps and bounds more to destroy piracy than Napsters downfall ever could.
Now if only video services would learn this lession. Because it’s the same lession. I don’t know how they missed the memo on this.
Put your video in one centralized place. Make it hassle free to watch. Charge a reasonable price. Piracy dies overnight.
And just to prove it, show of hands. Who here would go through the effort and risk of pirating, if Netflix had everything you wanted to watch, for $5 a month? Who here would say no, and still pirate? Reply below and tell me if you would still pirate with those conditions?
But instead, netflix is pushing $20 a month, and the video hosting is fractured among multiple hosts, all of which overcharge, AND want to serve ads.
Oh hey, right on cue. It’s a skull and bones flag approaching.
Video services involve bigger files, subtitles availability, streaming load less evenly spread over hours.
But I personally think there are ways involving chunk encryption (one key for many users for the same chunk, but not the same key for everyone ; obviously in the end it’s decrypted and decoded at user’s machine, so opportunity for piracy is not avoidable) and something like bittorrent to make commercial video streaming both convenient for users and not such a technical challenge for distributors.
