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?!
I checked it again and its STILL at 0 Cosponsors and sitting in the committees inbox if it wasn’t already rejected.
Even if it passed making piracy super extra illegal+ it’s targeting google and cloud flare to block access to sites within 15 days that could still easily be reached outside their boundaries. It’s political theater for mpaa riaa etc industry association lobbyists to show they got something for their bribes.
Stop hiking prices on streaming services and making them awful to use while ending sales of physical media and I won’t pirate content.
Totally on board.
Physical media meant straightforward ownership. I have it and I will have it. The distributor I bought from went out of business? I don’t notice, my copy still works. My distributor turns out not to have had the rights to sell it to me? Well that’s bad but it’s done and I have my copy. I start a series and I know I can finish it before the rights move to some other distributor.
Netflix early streaming days were magic. One service had rights to pretty much everything and was relatively affordable. Now each service has a tiny fraction of old Netflix and each one costs more than twice what Netflix streaming did. Frankly paying 3x the netflix price would have been fine if the trend continued except for pricing, but alas, here we are. Also, there’s no amount of money to pay to some of these services to make them shut up with ads, even with ‘ad-free’ offerings/plans.
Brilliant. Make murder illegal now.
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.
It’s much harder when all your ISPs and the world’s largest DNS resolvers block the IPs or resolving the DNS, which is what this dystopian bill proposes. Make no mistake, this is Orwellian censorship masquerading as piracy protection.
Then we have to build a community DNS 🤷🏻♀️ you can’t really block free internet
It’s hard and complex, but they can. And they aim to.
I mean, why not onion routing and tor?
Tor can be blocked.
We’ve been able to chat with people inside failed/repressive states forever even though their governments very much want to block it. Blocking communication between people who want to talk is incredibly difficult. They can make it hard but I’m not sure they can stop it completely.
North Korea was able to stop it. Granted, they literally just don’t allow any of the tech in the hands of the average person with threat of torture or death. But dystopian is as dystopian does.
I see your point, though, and it’ll likely always be possible to bypass those controls, at least for people with the know-how. But that’s not the average citizen. Let’s do what we can to ensure it doesn’t come to this in the first place.
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.
Wasting their time
Oh. Making something illegal illegal again? That’ll be effective.
If you read the bill, heavily sponsored by the MPA, part of it is about forcing ISPs (and presumably US based VPNs) to block the DNS/URLs of “foreign criminal” sites.
It’s laying the groundwork for a Great American Firewall.
If you use a US-based VPN, you fucked up yourself.
Viva la Mullvad. I was sick of being bullied into buying more to get a deal. It may not be the cheapest, but I love that it’s the same price across the board.
Plus, the only way you’re going to get anything cheaper is by locking into a 1-3 year plan when you may not even need it every month.
I’m locked into ExpressVPN for a year but I was thinking about switching to Mullvad shortly. ExpessVPN isn’t bad but being in the British Virgin Islands does give me a bit of anxiety.
Mullvad has a lot of perks. Like I mentioned, no deals for buying yearly. Get it month by month for the same price. No account connections. You get an ID number and that’s it. That ID is your password and username. Pay with nearly anything. Crypto, card, money services, even mail in physical cash.
There’s a lot to love about it, and it hands down has some of the fastest tunnels I’ve used. Nord was always half my internet speed no matter what I connected to. You don’t even need Google Play if you want to use it on android. It’s open source, so grab it right on F-Droid. Easily supports any OS. If you don’t want a GUI, there’s a CLI alternative, too.
This advertisement was not paid for by Mullvad VPN.
Thanks! Honestly the only reason I paid for yearly was because I’ve had it for like five years now and I got sick of paying $12 every month.
Plus the one benefit I like is I paid extra for a dedicated IP (mostly used for my streamer since it has better luck with my streaming services like Prime UK; though I’m ending Prime at the end of the year)
Yeah, I canceled Prime a few years back and it hasn’t hurt me at all. You really get nothing in return, except maybe Prime Day deals and even then you can find the deals elsewhere. I’ve taken to cutting out the middleman and ordering through the product’s actual website to better support them.
Mullvad has been €5 since 2009. Comes to a little over $6. $12 is just highway robbery. You won’t regret the switch.
Freedomwall
So many long games are being played now, it’s like everything is laying groundwork for something else. Would be nice for laws to just do what they do.
It’ll be super duper illegal
It’s a slippery slope. Soon they will make doing illegal things a crime.
Brb connecting to a Chinese VPN so I can access content outside of the US Firewall.
But not if they’re the ones doing the illegal stuff, apparently.
They could take it a step further and threaten penalties for doing illegal things.
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.
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.
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.
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 $20 a month, and the video hosting is fractured among multiple hosts, all of which overcharge, AND want to serve ads.
Oh hey, right on cue. It’s a skull and bones flag approaching.
I would still pirate. I like to have the files instead of proprietary apps
What if they gave you the files, with an easy download button ( with rate limits on downloads per user to avoid mass abuse )? Then, Netflix is basically providing a debrid service, which many people who pirate already pay more than 5$ for. Your VPN for torrenting is likely more than 5$. It’s already trivially easy to rip a movie off a website ( even with DRM ), so this is not a real content control loss for them.
If they offered a service like GOG for movies I think it would be worth it. I don’t have much time for movies though so I actually will buy several films a year on UHD Blu-ray. I only really pirate films that are either out of print or not available in my country on disc.
Same tbh. I like having a hard data copy of the things I enjoy, and have pride in my offline music library, which has been neatly filed with all the proper metadata tagged on. Now I can boot up Audacious (Linux) or MusicBee (Windows) and pick the genre I’m feeling that day. Or I can go out for a walk with one of the iPods I’ve restored and leave my phone at home.
Word… this is why I used spotify for a long time, when it used to be a good service… pirating wasn’t worth the hassle.
now almost everything is worth the hassle
About 10 years ago, I signed up for a seedbox for torrenting purposes. USD 15/month, which was roughly the same as Netflix at the time. Since then, Netflix has repeatedly raised prices, dropped content, and added ads. On the other hand, I’m still paying $15/month for that seedbox, and they’ve upgraded my storage capacity and bandwidth allotment multiple times.
Just a subscription that had most of the things and wasn’t a straight up abusive experience would be worth a hell of a lot more than $5. Too bad it will never happen.
I gind it kind of ironic that if the streaming services were federated and your subscription applied proportionally to the services where you watched different shows this problem would solve itself
I would still pirate — but most normie pirates wouldn’t.
…but why?
Why would I spend money on proprietary software that tracks me and sells my data when it’s trivially easy for me to set up a FOSS alternative and actually own the video files myself.
I’m not rich, in fact I’m under the poverty line, even 5$ a month adds up for me. I see no reason to pay to be tracked.
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.
“Effectively kill piracy” - Sure guys, this time it’ll work.
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.
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.
I miss my $8 a month google music + YouTube red… I wonder if people got to keep the legacy price for YouTube premium
