My entertainment experience is so much better than my friends’ because of piracy. I use torrents, and store my media and it’s made my life so great since I got into this a little over a year ago. I’ve seen shows that none of my friends have seen. Lately I’ve been into police dramas and there’s an incredible series from France called Le Bureau des Légendes, which is phenomenal. There’s one from the UK that I just finished called Line of Duty that was also great. I saw an Estonian period film that is entertaining called Apteeker Melchior – it was freeleech for a short while, so I grabbed it.
My friends who pay for Netflix, Disney+ and all the the other streaming channels watch the all same garbage TV. I can see that too, but I get access to these other amazing films and shows. I’ve not even mentioned the books, audiobooks and music.
The pirate’s life is a great life and it’s the life for me. Arrrr.
So many kids living in poverty that would’ve never been able to afford such content have their days slightly less miserable because of piracy. Its not like the corporations are losing a penny, those kids would never be able to pay for it anyways, not in this world of extreme under-regulated capitalism.
(Also, in a perfect world, there wouldn’t be poverty, and there would be a fair system to reward the actual content creators, not just the corporation that happens to owns the rights to the concept of that particular Movie/TV Show)
Me too! The sad thing is that the whole system is set up to prevent people from being able to really choose what to watch. Even within a liberal framework, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the optimum system would be something like ‘person decides they want to watch a show with x characteristics, they discover options based on user reviews or a Wikipedia deep dive or w/e, then they click play and the appropriate rights holder is compensated’. It’s never just been about compensation though. They can’t have users going straight for the good stuff, otherwise what will they do with all the slop?
It makes me very sad tbh. My Dad watches movies all the time, but it’s always some average-to-poor Netflix original, because that’s what the app surfaces for him.
Piracy was likely the only way myself and a large number of my friends graduated college, so yeah.
It’s been an interesting full loop. The first rise of P2P file sharing was obviously much more convenient than the combination of broadcast TV and slow-to-release and expensive physical media and the legal fight against it proved pretty useless, beyond shutting down the most obvious for-profit services. Then streaming tipped the scale of convenience, where it was simpler and easier to have an affordable Netflix account than it was to dig through sketchy sites to seek out torrents and only find out later that half of them were actually gay porn.
The history is well known, the question, I guess, is what the next loop around the enshittification path will look like. Are we always doomed to run in circles seeking the optimal experience or can we agree on what it is and deliver it in a somewhat stable fashion at some point?
I get the feeling it’s going to be constantly running around in circles. The corporations are constantly looking for ways to enshittify things to improve profits, but too much and people don’t want to deal with it. They’re constantly looking for that balance in a landscape that’s constantly changing, and so constantly experimenting with what they can get away with.
For anyone else interested in Line of Duty…
Whoever made this has never played bingo 😂
It’s a great format. 45 minutes of procedural intrigue, then a load of guys in balaclavas bust in and fuck everything up for the last quarter hour
The score was underrated too IMO.
It used to grip my dad and he could never normally shut up during shows like that, but for like you say not a peep out of him for near enough a solid hour which was odd. He loved that shit ;)
