Submitted 1 year ago by L4s@lemmy.world [bot] to technology@lemmy.world
https://www.pandasecurity.com/en/mediacenter/online-piracy-back/
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 shift really proves that Gabe Newell was right and that piracy is a service issue.
It was honestly really crazy to me when I was excited to see a game on sale, only to remember how I used to pirate everything. Steam has made it legitimately easier to buy games in so many cases.
I sometimes still do pirate games, especially if it’s from a publisher I don’t respect or the cracked version is known to run better, but I buy almost all of my games now days.
I still Piraten EA games, just because the forced origin injection into their games on steam is so fucking annoying, especially if you’re on Linux.
I know a lot of people idolize him, and that’s probably not healthy, but he just gets it. Provide value and convenience for consumers, and consumers will stick around. Squeeze consumers for money, and we’ll leave with a parrot on our shoulders and a one-finger solute.
That’s what happens when you’re not beholden to shareholders.
He’s a weird case, Steam has always been good for pc gaming and Valve releases nothing but polished games without anything predatory.
He just seems to be interested in maintaining a successful business instead of squeezing more money out of people constantly.
Sadly most companies are focused on short term profit over long term growth, Steam is the best example of the opposite.
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.
I’m sure that economics is part of it. But I think the larger issue is the fact that you need 9 streaming services now just to see the shows you’d want. And then these streaming services are starting to remove the things people paid for. I set up a Plex server and just use that to watch things now.
And that’s only talking about streaming.
Everyone wants to be Netflix now: Microsoft Office? Monthly subscription. Adobe? Monthly subscription. A simple weather app? Monthly subscription. Cloud backup? Monthly subscription.
Corporations don’t want competition, they want monopolies. If the good they are selling is in unlimited supply, like music or shows in digital formats are, they create artificial scarcity through exclusivity deals.
Netflix has +9 million users in the past quarter
That’s not enough growth. It’s never enough. It literally can’t ever be enough.
So they raise prices and pay for astroturfed articles blaming everything but the executives charged with infinite growth forever.
First thing that came to mind. I want to see back to back to back quarters of falling subscribers
As someone that went initially got back into piracy for the “no you just raised your prices for this one service I only use for this one show anyway, I’ll download it instead” reason. I have significantly increased my piracy because it’s honestly a much better user experience. For me to easily set sonarr/radarr to grab what I want and have a beautiful and customizable UI/UX like jellyfin to consume that content, which works on all my devices. Fucking Hulu, Disney, Amazon, peacock, max all suck in comparison from a pure UX perspective
The article wonders why would anyone pirate, let us give him the reason:
I forgot to add
Also wanna add:
As a person who loves watching movies with subtitles, this is why I’m canceling Amazon Prime. The fuckers literally won’t offer me English language subtitles for some flicks because Iive outside the US.
I don’t care if the movie itself is in English, why the hell can’t I watch with subtitles in the same language as the film itself? Holy fuck.
And don’t forget about the ads.
Also everything is just streaming. You can’t actually buy DRM-free movies (important for things like VR headsets, trips without Internet), often you can’t even buy anything at all, it’s all just the library of the streaming service were content comes and goes at random.
You will own nothing and you will like it!
I feel like there’s a common theme here but just can’t put my finger on it…
This comment was brought to you by Google AdSense.
You forgot about stuff that just gets taken down one day.
There are a few what I’ll term magnet shows on each streaming service. They want you to pay for the service for the magnet shows and then stick around and watch other half-baked filler garbage or a seasons of a show they cancelled before giving them any hope of finishing their story arc.
Most streaming networks have abundant garbage content I’d never want to watch, knockoffs of other shows, and global content that’s often of soap opera quality with subtitles.
They also (on purpose) often offer no way to filter to the things you want to see other than search, and on search that’s often misleading or terrible too.
It’s basically a race to the bottom just like Amazon. Junk programs created for pennies pretending to match your results.
The whole thing is a crap fest that’s quickly becoming worse than the cable network structure it replaced.
No, thank you.
If you go through the front page, there is usually only 100 shows the platform is pushing, ad nauseam. Like the algorithm is maybe some shows it thinks youll like, or shows they want to astroturf. I would really like a way to go into the dregs, the shit, the stuff netflix thinks is at the bottom of my metrics. Granted, piracy doesn’t do this either (lol how would that even work? I put everything on that server myself) but I would have considered keeping my subscription if they did.
True I start a new movie or a series but can’t see it past a few minutes.
More than food? That math just doesn’t add up for me.
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?!?!
“The more you tighten your grip big tech, the more users will slip through your fingers”
Not after we demonstrate the power of raising prices princess!
Yeah, it’s reall not even about the prices. It’s just so inconvenient to go between all those apps, and then login forgot your password, rest, 2FA so i have to get up from my couch and grab my phone.
All these paid services could be totally free from a monetary perspective and I still wouldn’t sign back up for them. It’s a worse service than cable TV used to be at this point.
The thing that is killing me is Netflixs attempt to crack down on password sharing.
I share an account with a few family members. If I want to watch a program on Netflix, which my brother pays for, I have to call him up to get the unlock code. He has a newborn and sleeps weird hours.
I end up just pirating it myself.
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.
Yep. Stop making shit deals and 100 different services to subscribe to and people will go back to paying for things. Gaben is the only smart one.
Until this month I paid more than $100 for multiple streaming services. I finally got pissed off when something I wanted to watch was no longer available. Instead I went and torrented it and canceled 90% of the services. It’s time to go back to self streaming everything.
It’s almost like making it nearly impossible to watch what we want and, at the same time, octupling our bills, while also increasing the cost of each would, somehow, force people into the desperation of piracy. Huh. Who woulda thunk it.
Let’s not forget random pulling of content so that you can never tell if what you want is actually on any given service at any given time. This was the final straw that led me to rebuilding my own media collection.
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.
Another reason why piracy is needed is to preserve pieces of culture from being erased from history to satisfy some perverse corporate accounting requirements.
Fucking rights
They call “refusing to be exploited” piracy. Generally industries where there are huge monopolies like media, groceries, and other such thing are most sensitive to this because they lack the ability to deal with outside pressures any more.
Yeah it should be interesting. I’m also looking forward to see what new trackers come into relevance as the userbase increases.
Redacted as the only viable music tracker is a real shame. Just like everything else, we need more options not less.
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.
Guess what’s also been increasing? Prices.
Guess what also has refused to go up? Wages
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.
Services get worse so piracy gets more popular.
It’s tot BUY SOME SHIT! ally nothi BUY SOME SHIT! ng to do BUY SOME SHIT! with th BUY SOME SHIT! ere be BUY SOME SHIT! ing way to BUY SOME SHIT! o many a BUY SOME SHIT! ds to ma BUY SOME SHIT! ke stuff wa BUY SOME SHIT! tc BUY SOME SHIT! ha BUY SOME SHIT! bl BUY SOME SHIT! e.
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 behave 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.
Streaming services are becoming increasingly fragmented, prices are increasing admist an inflationary environment, their service sucks.
But hey, online piracy is increasing, what a surprise!
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 praises 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.
It’s like no longer having one cheap and convinient way of seeing content makes people rather pirate things than paying 7 different platforms each one more expensive than the next and all of them trying to mess with you and your wallet in new and unexpected ways.
Nice
Can I get a 🧲 in the comments
Hmm, wonder why. Couldn’t be price increases on everything in existence.
Piracy is a service problem.
What service is $SHOW on? Doesn’t matter, it’s already in your favorite piracy site.
Need a subscription to +5 services to see all the content & shows. Ads being forced into paid services. Unfinished AAA games now cost +$70 USD. All games now have battlepasses and FOMO.
All I need is one VPN subscription.
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…
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.
Often, piracy genuinely gives you a superior experience to the regular paid method. Lots of big service providers have been fucking us over in the past few years as well. So it’s no surprise.
Glory to the piracy community!
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.
KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 year ago
Love how it doesn’t mention the fact that services are getting objectively worse content as they stretch thin, are increasing their prices across the board, and cracking down on password sharing which was previously touted as a benefit.
Boozilla@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Exactly. There’s too many platforms, not enough quality content on any one of them, and weaponized greed. Worse, these streaming services have “inspired” every asshole executive out there to make everything under the sun a subscription model.
GenderNeutralBro@lemmy.sdf.org 1 year ago
The anti-piracy measures drive me to piracy, personally. There’s no technical reason I shouldn’t be able to stream 4K in Firefox, but Netflix won’t let me. I have to jump through hoops just to get 1080p, even. Same with most other services. I pirate shit I’m *already paying for".
vithigar@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
Have done this several times for content on Disney+. I have an ultrawide, HDR1000 display. The movie I’m trying to watch is in 21:9 and available in HDR. Why in God’s name are you delivering it in SDR and in a letterboxed 16:9 which is in turn pillarboxed on my display?!
KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 year ago
Yeah, honestly same. There isn’t much I’m not already paying for, but being able to watch it all in one app (Stremio) is so much nicer.
The push for more money, and no more password sharing, is just making me think more about cutting those services, but that wouldn’t stop me watching.
bpalmerau@aussie.zone 1 year ago
Enshittification. Every human who uses computers on a daily basis needs to understand this word.
jonne@infosec.pub 1 year ago
Yep, the only thing I still pay for is Spotify, and as soon as they start carving up music into different exclusivity contracts I’ll go back to piracy for that as well. I’m willing to pay $10-$20/month for one streaming service, but they want you to spend like $200 on services you don’t even end up watching.
It’s just greed, the way the streaming executives talked during the writers strike showed that. You could easily find an equilibrium that works for content creators and consumers, but the middlemen just want too much.
7u5k3n@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Or vanish.
Google play music merged into YouTube music.
I already had a Plex server so I just rolled.my.own music server.
And then with the emergence of plexamp… I don’t need a streaming music service now.
henfredemars@infosec.pub 1 year ago
This fear is why I’m careful to maintain my old man MP3 and CD collection because I can’t fully trust a business.
cm0002@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I think streaming music will be good for awhile at least, somehow, the fucking music industry got it right with streaming (At least on the consumer side, the artist side has been in trouble for some time now (esp with Spotify)). Most big services have most things and a handful of niche services to handle the gaps for the most part.
Xbox Game Pass otoh for Games is a wildcard, who knows where that shits going to end up lmfao people should get in on it now while it’s still good lol
LazaroFilm@lemmy.world 1 year ago
That plus actively removing older shows
7u5k3n@lemmy.world 1 year ago
No new ones…
Star Trek prodigy
Jessvj93@lemmy.world 1 year ago
People aren’t also willing to spend as much on Oreo’s due to inflation so it’s also probably that if theres a game or movie everyone’s playing, sailing the seven seas is tried and true…and free.
flames5123@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Exactly. That’s when I went back to the seas. My family across 2 states uses Netflix and I already paid for the $20/month high tier. When they told my sister that it wasn’t about to be more expensive, I put my foot down and said I’m gonna setup a plex/overseer box on my on PC. It’s been working mostly alright.
synceDD@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Weird thing to love but you do you