Corporations like google and amazon damage the market and the industry more than “piracy” does
That just makes sense though? The legit sites have to pay for, fund, or in some way support the content which does cost money. The piracy sites obviously don’t have that cost so they don’t need as much income.
The piracy sites also pay a lot less in infra, since they rely on the user to store, seed to others, and serve the content to the local users. All that infra is offloaded to the user.
Sorry, what exactly kind of content are we talking about? You know, the one “legit” sites have to pay for but piracy sites don’t.
Fun fact: a lot of the content you see on big sites are advertorials, this means some company writes a fluff piece about how their lastest product can solve all your problems, and then pays the site to publish it. In print, you even have the option to have the ad use the same layout, fonts, colors etc. as the real content.
This means a portion of a site is not filled by content that had to be bought, but actually brings them money.
Do you think that Amazon gets its content (movies on Prime video) for free? Or do you think that piracy sites pay for their content (stolen movies on torrent sites)?
Edit: To answer you more directly, YouTube pays creators a cut of the ad revenue, and Amazon/Netflix pay the movie/show creators through licensing deals.
That’s some ground-level hanging fruits - do you know any piracy websites the size of Amazon or Netflix? Sure as hell I do not.
Piracy websites are usually pretty limited in scope. Places like some shady porn repos, pirated games and movies, etc. Of course there are some giants like thepiratebay but even they are nowhere as large as the ones you mentioned.
All of these, especially the big players, have high costs of maintenance and advertising. Just like their “legit” counterparts in size.
That’s normal, it’s the same infrastructure cost then the licensing costs
I don’t think the facts match the claim, but I completely agree with the sentiment.
For years, the ‘legit’ consumer has had to deal with ad interruptions and bad UI and service disruptions and having media removed from their library. Something that pirates don’t even have to think about. The music revolution that Jobs and Apple created with iTunes, which allowed people to just buy music and just own it and just use it however they want (no DRM) with an ease that made piracy look difficult and seem too risky to bother, never came for TV or movies or books or any other media category.
And now the streaming revolution has all but undone that progress as well. You don’t own anything, a company decides when you have or lose access to something, and even if you pay money for access you are still advertised to and your data is still sold off.
Meanwhile, in a dark and forgotten corner of my PC, I STILL have several thousand MP3s I downloaded from Kazaa back in the day.
I remember iTunes only letting you change computer like 2-3 times max before the drm would make mysic not work any more, but maybe it was no-drm in the beginning.
I had a chinese 1GB shuffle though so IDK if that’s correct.
The chinese shuffle also doubled up as a usb key (very useful back then) and also didn’t need iTunes to function smh.
Yeah IIRC you’re right, though I remember you could contact apple and reset it.
It was called FairPlay DRM and they only really got rid of it around a decade after iTunes launched. I’m not 100% but I think I had to pay to upgrade my already paid-for library to DRM free too
It may have originally had DRM but it doesn’t now.
But then later for like $10 I could take all my pirate music, legitimize it, and download a copy from iTunes if theirs was better quality. That was nice.
Adblock my beloved
Advertising needs to become as socially acceptable as smoking.
It indiscriminately pollutes whatever environment it’s conducted within, and causes secondary harm to non-participants by incentivising hoarding of PII in the cheapest and least secure manner.
Ad revenue is like Crack to corporations. Once they get a taste for it, it’s all downhill from there.
Mostly because it’s the easiest money they’ll ever make and it’s more profitable than subscription models. Gotta see those numbers go up at all costs.
Not at all true
Ads you say?
I’ll have to take your word for it…
Much like the twenty minutes of unskippable ads on commercial DVDs, the media companies and social media will enshittify until the general public turns to piracy.
Essentially, the sooner we all come to terms with piracy being
acceptablenecessary, the sooner they let off on their enshittification efforts.Not the way I use legit sites!
Jokes aside, I agree and I hate it
Besides streaming, i.e. the capability to watch the movies and series when you want and how much you want, and lowering the entry to produce videos for more people, they pretty much reinvented cable. Or did I miss something substantial?
ublock origin. I don’t care if some website dies. Whole internet is turning to shit anyways, just let it all burn
Ublock does such a good job at blocking the old janky torrent sites, especially compared to the increasingly aggressive and intrusive new shit.
You know I was just thinking this the other day, and they are just as intrusive as the ones that piracy sites have
What do you mean as intrusive, none of the piracy sites are trying to work around my adblocker.
What ads, on what pirate sites?
I’m talking of ye old days, when you could stream a show or live TV on a pirate site, and the site would be covered with ads with the fake X buttons that would give you malware if you click them
