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Hello World!

As we've all known and talked about quite a lot, we previously blocked several piracy-focused communities. These communities, as announced, were:

In our removal announcement, we stated that we will continue to look into this more in detail, and re-allow these communities if and when we deem it safe. It was a solid concern at the time, because we were already receiving takedown requests as well as constant attacks, and didn't want to put our volunteer team at risk. We had zero measures in place, and the tools we had were insufficient to deal with anything at scale.

Well, after back and forth with some very cool people, and starting to have proper measures as well as tooling to protect ourselves, we decided it's time to welcome these communities back again. Long live the IT nerds!

We know it's been a rough ride with everything, and we'd like to thank every one of you who were understanding of us, and stayed with us all the way. Please know that as users, you are what makes this platform what it is, and damned we be if we ever forget it.

With love, and as always, stay safe in the high seas!

Lemmy.world Team

❤️

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[-] b3an@lemmy.world 600 points 1 year ago

This is what I like to see. Not just heels digging in, but explanations as to why, the follow-ups, the investigation of options and follow through. Thanks for the transparency. Piracy has and won’t ever go away. I used to pirate due to lack of money and resources. When I had those I went legit. When legit sources started turning into:

  • monthly subscriptions for everything
  • when legit sources suddenly delete or remove content from their systems (to avoid paying taxes?)
  • when the rates go up for everything (internet access AND streaming services)
  • now ads in your paid services unless you pay more (Amazon)
  • Plex trying to go legit and police where and how people run their private streaming, fucking over license holders who built the financial footing they could stand on in the first place. Cool.

You can’t rely on any shit from these services, except for one shit… enshittification.

I don’t want to sound negative, but as a consumer, it’s been nothing but ads rammed down our throats from everywhere we go and look. They lie, they change rates, they shrinkflate, while their pockets get bigger. Long live piracy.

[-] CosmicTurtle@lemmy.world 158 points 1 year ago

From lemmy.world's perspective, I get it. Our current legal framework makes it damn near impossible from a financial standpoint to take a stand against corporations with pocketbooks the size of some first world countries.

But the rise in piracy is a direct consequence of these corporations' actions against their very users.

Piracy has and always will be a service problem. I don't think lemmy should be used to share torrents for example. But honest discussion about the current state of affairs and alternatives should be allowed.

The admins took a measured approach here and it's one that is refreshing given the regime that many of us came from.

[-] Bebo@literature.cafe 59 points 1 year ago

One of the reasons I explore the high seas is that some shows I want to watch are not legally available to watch in my region at all.

[-] beefcat@lemmy.world 11 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

the problem i have, that nobody has been able to really explain to me, is how the economics of streaming should be made to work.

content is insanely expensive to make. even with all of Netflix’s recent shitty changes, their operating margin is still only about 13%. that isn’t enough cash left over to fund production of every single show they don’t have. and it’s important that they actually be able to fund production, because unlike 10 years ago, most productions no longer rely on first runs on OTA or cable TV to make their money

so it seems to me there are three paths here:

  1. the industry puts everything on a single service and dramatically increases the base price (remember cable? my parents paid twice as much for it in 2005 as i spend today on streaming services)

  2. the industry puts everything on a single service and dramatically scales back production (remember OTA TV?) to fit within the budget afforded by a reasonable subscription price

  3. studios branch off into competing streaming services

i’m not trying to start a fight or defend shitty corporate behavior (no one will ever get me to pay for ads), i just want to know how people think this could work in a way that balances out

[-] takeda@lemmy.world 20 points 1 year ago

Netflix caused movie pracy to nearly case, because was affordable and convenient. People preferred to pay than hunt and download movies.

Once other studios started creating their streaming services, applying exclusivity for shows, jacking prices for their content (encouraging ads) all went to hell. They successfully managed to ruin the experience, and make it as shitty as cable.

The thing about intellectual property is that you create it once and then you can copy it infinitely and generate profit. The studios want to maximize the profit, it isn't (as you are suggesting) how hard was to create content, but it is how much people are ok paying. It always was.

They can do this, because there's monopoly due to crippled antitrust laws in the last 50 years.

Piracy is a natural response to this, but they are using copyright (which was originally meant for different reason).

Antitrust laws as well as laws like copyright, DMCA etc needs to be fixed.

[-] beefcat@lemmy.world 7 points 1 year ago

this doesn’t really answer my questions, though.

netflix was able to afford that much content back then for two reasons

  1. they were flush with capital from investors, spending more money than they were making to promote growth.

  2. netflix wasn’t running new content, they were essentially licensing “reruns” of content that already had its primary run elsewhere.

basically, everyone got used to a certain lifestyle being subsidized by cheap capital and investors misplaced belief in perpetual growth. nobody has yet to explain to me how this could have been made sustainable.

[-] ciaocibai@lemmy.nz 13 points 1 year ago

The music streaming platforms (admittedly with their own challenges) have to compete based on service offering rather than exclusivity. Imagine if all the streaming platforms competed on quality of service instead of exclusivity.

I’d personally pay a lot more if I could just have one service that had all the content I want, but instead we’re in this situation where the platforms (in my opinion) are lacking innovation and the content is all over the show. Here in NZ I find different seasons on different platforms or plenty of shows that just aren’t licensed for our market. We all know how that problems going to be solved.

[-] beefcat@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

the music streaming platforms basically screw over the artists to make that feasible, with the excuse usually being that artists can make their real money touring and selling merch.

the cost of producing music is also infintesimal compared to that of producing film and television. the whole music industry itself is pretty small in comparison, yet Spotify costs about as much as a streaming TV service.

to scale that model up to film and TV would mean either a much higher base price, or a lot less overall content being made. these are viable paths, but both come with big trade offs.

[-] CAVOK@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago

Not saying that you shouldn't pay people, but the CEO of netflix makes over $50M a year. Actors make how much? I'm sure there are a lot of ways to cut costs and make a more equal society to boot.

[-] beefcat@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

obnoxious executive pay is its own problem, but even zeroing all that out wouldn’t do much for the financials. if you brought that $50m down to $0 and passed that savings on to consumers, each netflix subscriber would save pennies on their monthly bill

[-] CAVOK@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

I'm not saying just the CEO, but the whole structure. Look at the kids from Stranger Things for example. Any of them over 20 yet? If they never work another day in their life they still enjoy a life unattainable to almost everyone. Good for them I suppose, but it's that really how a society should be? And there are a lot of people behind the scenes that we don't see that makes an enormous amount of cash while most don't. There should be a more equal distribution.

[-] jimbo@lemmy.world 8 points 1 year ago

their operating margin is still only about 13%. that isn’t enough cash left over to fund production of every single show they don’t have.

Isn't the money for producing shows included in their operating costs, meaning that their operating margin already accounts for that?

[-] dx1@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

"Content" at a minimum requires a video camera and people to stand in front of it. It's involving hundreds of people in a production that's expensive. People just hurl money at big centralized services, with the same mentality they had with cable TV, and of course they spend ungodly amounts, because they make even more. There's all kinds of models that can work better than this.

[-] brawleryukon@lemmy.world -4 points 1 year ago

i just want to know how people think this could work in a way that balances out

They don't. They just think content is generated in a vacuum and it's their right to consume it in whatever way they see fit.

[-] pete_the_cat@lemmy.world 8 points 1 year ago

More price hikes! More Ads! More tracking!

Plex can go can screw themselves. I've been self hosting for over a decade (and stupidly spent hundreds of dollars on a PlexPass instead of buying a lifetime one early on) and finally decided to move to the cloud. Two weeks later I get an email saying that they're blocking my connection in about 3 weeks and to move to a more expensive hosting company if I want to avoid getting blocked. I'm not the one violating their ToS, but yet I'm getting screwed.

[-] Cozimo@lemmy.world 7 points 1 year ago

Wait, what happened with Plex? I’m in the dark on that one.

[-] PrettyLights@lemmy.world 17 points 1 year ago

There's a bunch of analytics tracking and cloud integration in Plex. They are interested in what users are watching, which is concerning.

https://www.reddit.com/r/PleX/comments/7bim8n/plex_analytics_analyticsplextv/

Switch to Jellyfin or another open source server.

[-] papalonian@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago

This is unrelated to the piracy topic at hand.

Plex has recently started cracking down on public servers suspected of piracy. I haven't heard anything about private servers getting harassed (and I've yet to be bothered about mine), but the servers where people pay $1/month or whatever to access someone else's server have been targeted.

Yep I pirated all music in college when I was poor. Now that I am not poor, I buy it all from Bandcamp.

this post was submitted on 30 Sep 2023
2897 points (98.1% liked)

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