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
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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!
Oh no!
Anyway.
Oh. Making something illegal illegal again? That’ll be effective.
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.
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.
DoH!
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.
Freedomwall
Wouldn’t be the first wall he put up in the name of freedom
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.
This is dumb considering that these types of streaming sites are how I actually discover anime and become a fan enough that i want to purchase merch. I pay for Crunchy Roll, but sometimes I want to check out stuff from other services. If I had to rely sheerly on legal services I wouldn’t watch or discover half of what I did.
Legal services are also pretty inferior. I wanted to watch A certain Scientific Railgun… Season 1 was dubbed, but season 2 on the service wasn’t… I literally had to track it down on some streaming site to get access to what I’m paying for.
crunchyroll is the most infuriating they were a piracy streaming company that went legit
Not just anime. As a DC comics fan over the last few years, a lot of how WB does business looks pretty fucking stupid to me too. I’m willing to bet that if I visit the DC Universe website right now, it’s still going to say something like “not available in your country but keep checking back because we’re working on it!” just like it did 5+ years ago.
And they’ve been handling (HBO) Max with same sort of ‘urgency’. So we’ll get the movies on the big screen but as far as the tie in series go, maybe they’ll make it to Netflix some time after you’ve already been spoilered everywhere you look online, in the DC fan spaces you visit.
One of the funniest things was when James Gunn shared a clip of some school kids in Philippines (I think) doing the choreographed intro sequence dance for Peacemaker along with the theme song. Before Peacemaker was even legally available there.
