" the game you purchased has been delisted " ’ yahrr mateys ’
Wife and I live in Germany, but still have some streaming services from our home country in Eastern Europe.
We started a Scream movie marathon on the weekend to catch up on the series, before we eatch the newest one in cinema.
We watched the first 2, and half of the 3rd on 28th February Saturday on one of the streaming platforms (SkyShowtime). The next morning (1st of March), the movies were not available anymore.
We finished 3 and watched 4 on Amazon Prime, but within that we had to start a separate subscription for horror movies.
5 was only available in German with no subtitles, so I had to search for another source. Ended up creating a Paramount+ account, downloaded the app, and watched the movie there.
Then back to Amazon Prime, where finished the 6th Scream movie, before heading to the local cinema.
This was the last straw, we decided to go back to sail the seas after a decade of streaming service subscription. Next weekend I will take some rime to figure out the setup we need to make this happen safely, as a lot has changed since I left it behind.
Yarrlist, cast from PC to tv is available. Or get a browser plugin and download it from the site if you don’t want to go full pirate.
In instances where there is no legal way to watch something piracy hurts nobody as the company would not have made money from me anyway. It doesn’t even hurt the artists, the refusal of the distributer to offer content worldwide is the real scandal that everyone in the creative industry should tackle.
The other solution I go for is library media, as well as finding competing streaming services like PBS’s. Just finished Fallout season one off a borrowed DVD.
My local library has 24/7 unattended access. I’ve gone and grabbed blurays in the middle of the night before.
Libraries are amazing.
“The content isn’t available in your region”
You have the content. I want to watch the content. But nooooo, I have to turn my VPN on and pretend I’m somewhere else, and you know I’m not really there because I can’t magically materialize half-way across the world in 1 minute.
So what’s the point? Just let me watch the damn content.I’m sure these region locks make a lot of sense for the suits when it comes to paying royalties and shit but as a consumer it’s just infuriating. Archaic ass bullshit.
Its tied to royalties, which you mentioned, which are usually tied to archaic trade deals. The landscape may change after WW3 is done.
You’re optimistic
I turn full pirate at the first stage already. I despise ads so much.
Okay I gotta disagree partially on the third panel. I’d much rather have the option of purchasing individual movies or shows than having a subscription. Like, imagine we had Steam but instead of games, it was shows and movies? That’d be great. Imagine the sales! PatientWatchers amirite?
Unfortunately it’s rarely possible to actually purchase, and definitely not without any DRM. So the third panel should really say “This show is not available for purchase” or only mention renting or specify that it’s with loads of DRM or whatever.
“purchasing” media you mean.
Unless they let you download the file without DRM, you’re just renting the video with extra steps. We have seen many times that “purchased” videos from digital vendors gets revoked and the “purchase” is gone.
Agreed, isn’t that what I just said? 😅
Yeah, I didn’t get to that point in your comment before I replied…
I too, want to own my digital stuff. My physical shelves can be better used as soda racks and storing food.
Except after you rent/buy the video, you can only watch it as long as you pay for the subscription service you bought it from.
That’s not what buying means or at least not the “buying” I am talking about. I mean I give some amount of money and I receive a download of the purchased material, free of DRM. There is no subscription involved. Like Steam (with no DRM) or GoG, but for movies and shows instead of games.
the fact that Gabe said “piracy is a service problem” fifteen fucking years ago, and none of these fuckwits in content distribution have learned this at all is a source of continuous astonishment to me.
I havent pirated a single game since i installed steam 20 years ago
There was a short period of time where netflix was good enough so i didnt pirate movies or tv shows either
It’s 100% a service problem
The only games I pirate are those that either :
_ are completely abandoned by their publishers and literally unavailable through other means
_ are stuff I already bought long ago and this is the most convenient way to get them to run (I have occasionally bought games again if it was cheap and convenient)
_ have turned to such shitty business models I don’t want to give a cent to the publishers (and I almost don’t even do that one anymore since usually they’ve found a dozen more ways to turn the game to shit anyway).
So yeah. Totally agree with the service problem.
There is a lot of SEGA product that I would buy, if it was DRM-free. Shin Megami Tensei, Sonic Origins, and more. I don’t let DRM and rootkits onto my PC, so I either pirate that stuff or just engage with someone else’s product. Either way, SEGA has lost hundreds of dollars.
Same story here.
Loved Netflix at first. I used to pirate a lot of tb shows and movies and then completely stopped once Netflix became decent.
Then they turned to shit and I’m back to pirating.
But not only that, I’m actually PAYING to pirate content because its a service that just combines all content from Netflix, Disney, apple, etc into one singular app that you can stream from any android device with the app.
It can have pretty shit quality sometimes, but at least I can watch it.
I will pay for shit if it’s easy access.
Fuck Netflix, Amazon, apple, Disney, etc. greedy fucks.
The funny thing is, i actually have legit access to some paid streaming services. But because i refuse to download their app or connect my tv to the internet, i’m limited to 720p in the browser…
So i just pirate the shit anyway
What do you use?
The last game I pirated was Driver: San Francisco a couple years ago, because you couldn’t (still can’t?) buy it anywhere except for like, second-hand physical media, and I am not going through that hassle. I can’t even remember the game I last pirated before that (Probably Sims 4, because fuck EA and fuck that laundry list of DLC – but I can’t be sure).
Music, movies, and TV shows, though? Oh yeah, baby, that’s a weekly activity now. Netflix I dumped many years ago when the fracturing of content to twenty different streaming services happened, and Spotify I dumped just this last year for a few different reasons (the CEO donating to AI weapons programs, introducing a fuckass AI DJ, ICE ads, getting fed up with songs I either can’t find or can find but aren’t available in my region, or could listen to and enjoyed and then having them suddenly become unavailable, etc…)
I’m sure, someday, Steam will enshittify. Probably shortly after Gabe dies – and it will be a dark day for me and millions of gamers worldwide. But for now, I’m more than happy to let Gabe empty my wallet with sales and convenience, because the gettin’s been good for a couple decades and will likely remain so for another couple. I can’t say the same for music, movies and TV; I don’t know if I’ll ever end up paying for them again unless the distributors involved sort their shit out.
At least, Steam has some pretty good followers should they enshittify. Gog, humblebundle and epic are all poised to take over should steam shit the bed.
They aren’t quite there yet, but at least you don’t need a subscription for any of them and can just add them to a unifying launcher like heroic etc.
I think a bronze lining to WW3 or a 2nd American Civil War, is that DRM-free and telemetry-free media would become very popular. Troops need their entertainment without comms, and civvies might have constant internet shortages. Thus, the markets would have to adapt to that reality.
epic
Lol at including the pre-enshittified store
I get stuff on Gog sometimes. They do some things right (no need for a client, no DRM stance, good compatibility support, chasing down lost rights for old games).
But unfortunately they can never get more than scraps from the big publishers because those will never agree to release their newer games without DRM.
And let’s be clear, I wouldn’t want them to go back on this, but that will make it hard for them to compete.
Interestingly, at the beginning everything on Humble was offering DRM-free options too. And then after a while they gave us some bullshit about their policy not being “DRM-free” but “DRM-agnostic”, which means, publisher can choose whether to use no DRM, or DRMs. Such a strong policy, thank you Humble.
Humble Bundle already enshittified, and Epic was evil to begin with.
There was also a brief period when spotify was good enough.
In the grand scheme of things, they don’t really care about piracy.
Yes, they could greatly reduce piracy by making their service affordable, available, and convenient … but they would lose more profits from doing that than they currently do from piracy. They know enshittifying their service will result in increased piracy … but they also know that it will result in extracting increased money from the people who do pay. And, overall, their profits are still higher despite the higher piracy levels.
(Heck, in some ways piracy has been shown to be overall beneficial. To some degree, it’s free advertising, helping media spread through word of mouth. And maybe while they missed out on a media sale or subscription, they still end up making money from that pirate with a merchandise sale or something.)
I tried to buy digital copies of an album the other day and couldn’t because it was only on streaming services and DRM’d to all shit, so I just pirated it instead.
Ended up with some high quality flac too…
Some artists sell their music DRM free themselves, generally via their Merch Store.
Failing that, Qobuz has a store alongside their streaming subscription and I believe it’s DRM free.Have you tried Soulseek? I finally got it recently, it’s kinda amazing. Like old school limewire or whatever but with fewer (no?) viruses. :3
Yeah soulseek is amazing. You should check out nicotine+ if you’re using Linux. It’s a very nice frontend client using the same network.
I am using Linux, I’ll check it out!
No I’ve mostly just used jackett and qbt’s default searchers. I used to use tixati in the past and that was great, with share searching and text chat communities
Do yourself a huge favor and download Nicotine+ (which is a client for Soulseek, you can also use the official SoulseekQt I guess but it’s old and not as feature-rich). That and Spek to make sure you don’t get any fake bitrate files from people.
The only two real downsides to Soulseek, imo, are the fact that a lot of the chatrooms are basically unmoderated IRC (So many nazis to ignore. So many.), and the problem of fake bitrates. The huge upside is you can find pretty much any and everything on there if you wait for the right people to be online to share it. I’ve found quite a few rare albums and such that I couldn’t get from my usual gettin’ places.
The unmoderated chatrooms can be a bit crazy, but you are able to mute users which is nice. Also, it kinda reminds me of the olden days of the internet…I’m a millennial so it’s kinda nostalgic lol.
Tixati sounds just like Soulseek! I’ll look it up. Also yes, QBT’s search is amazing.
The difference between 20 years ago and now is companies have been slowly setting up all the dominoes to make piracy nearly impossible in the near future. I don’t think people are aware of how screwed we really are.
For as long as video is distributed (digital or physical) there will be someone that will pirate it. Kids used to sell bootleg movies on VHS, later on VCD’s, and finally DVD’s, where I lived.
There is no possible way that digital piracy can be stopped. This slippery slope, leading all the way to only being able to access whitelisted websites, is not based in reality. The fascists will try anything they can to control speech at that level, but the people are crafty. We’ll find ways around everything they try to throw at us. Attempting to lock the internet down to that extent will unite all sorts of very smart people.
What? It’s easier than ever!
Make it impossible how? I’ve been hearing similar claims for about three decades but have yet to see anything definitive happen.
With the proliferation of age checks, we’re only a couple steps away from “age checks aren’t sufficient to protect our children. We need ISP level whitelisting of sites that obey the law.”
And then if VPNs manage to get around that with any reliability? Well, be ready for the hardware you need to take advantage of it to double every couple of years while the component supply is strangled to death.
Also, moves now to give OPERATING SYSTEM level “age verification” to any site that asks, which will ABSOLUTELY not be done to identify individuals. No sir. Not at all.
The past 30 years have been DRM. The next 30 are gonna be “You can’t access the tools you need to even think about it anymore.”
Is that a thing an ISP can do? Sure DNS query’s to the ISPs DNS can be (and already are) filtered. But an IP level whitelist of every website in existence is a huge endeavor (with dynamic DNS), needing to check every IP in existence for compliance
of course technofascist bloatligarchs want, above all else, a) to control/surveil everyone that isn’t themselves; and b) to exploit them to the maximum extent possible for profit
the graph of progress they’ve made in those areas since the WWW was invented is all line go up. the internet we grew up with is dying. being killed actually, step by step. it was fun while it lasted
“protect the children” LOL what a fucking joke. more like “how can we make it so these future consumers just can’t live without instatwittokbookcord?”
We’ll be trading them drives then, yarrrr.
Piracy was a thing before the internet and it will be the thing after the internet.
Impossible how?! There are easy free streaming sites out there, granted do not enter without Adblock on full. Shit, there’s a site that aggregates the free streaming sites and keeps an active list. And then the ever more concise solutions that programmatically download in the background, many of them end in ‘arr’, all from torrents and newsgroups.
Never underestimate motivated humans.
What’s a good source for a noob to learn how to pirate?
The following advice does not apply to piracy, it’s just general torrenting advice for downloading legally available content.
- Install qbittorrent.
- Use a VPN (windscribe has a free tier) whenever qbittorrent is running, even in the background, even when you aren’t downloading. Make sure qbittorrent doesn’t run on startup, it’s in settings. This makes sure nobody can see that your IP is torrenting perfectly legal content, for privacy.
- Find a torrent. If you go to the pirate bay (top result on duckduckgo), be sure not to choose any copyright protected content, as torrenting that would be illegal in most places.
- Search for your legally torrentable movie/show and press the magnet (or copy the magnet link) next to the torrent with the most seeders (SE)
- paste the link into qbittorrent, optionally select “download first and last pieces first” and “download sequentially”, if you want to watch while downloading.
- Always check the file extension of any files before opening - mp4 etc is safe, don’t run any .exe files. There is malware out there, especially in torrented games.
- Be nice and keep seeding torrents after downloading
- Enjoy your legally acquired content!
There’s a piracy comm on lemmy at lemmy.dbzer0.com.
(If any mods don’t want advice for legal torrenting here, apologies and feel free to delete my comment)
Make sure qbittorrent doesn’t run on startup, it’s in settings
In Advanced settings there’s the ability to bind to a network. Bind to the vpn and qbittorrent won’t work at all without the VPN engaged.
be sure not to choose any copyright protected content, as torrenting that would be illegal in most places.
🤣🤣🤣
So is false advertising and fraud but the major streaming services don’t seem to care.
I don’t torrent, it’s just not as nice as a streaming site like the frontend of solarmovies etc… (I like fmovies and s.to) Also at least in Germany uploading (aka seeding) is punished way more and opens you up to being discovered, where as only streaming, finding you is harder (they need access to the streaming site servers) plus its not punished as hard (and I think in practice not investigated)
Up to you but how is it not as nice though? It’s usually faster so you don’t have to deal with buffering, plus you can keep the content forever and watch it without internet access and after the site gets taken down.
Can’t escape this comic.
Do you not like it?
Regardless of anyone’s opinion of the content of the strips, the author is synonymous with reddit drama.
Oh no! By posting a contentious opinion in this thread, you have introduced DRAMA. And no, you don’t get to point fingers; it’s still DRAMA that you’re at fault for!
See how easy that is?
Keep that reddit drama on reddit, just enjoy the conics
Stay away from Reddit, problem solved. That’s gonna be my take. 😅
She’s from my province. People like you are the problem, not her. People started to openly harass her and attempt to doxx her and she got defencive about it.
That’s not cool to dox her. But sorry, when you say “people like you”, what do you mean? What did u/null say or do?
Spreading the misogynistic lie that she’s the cause of all the drama, when it all started because men were upset at a popular female artist making popular comics on reddit that they personally didn’t like and tried to ruin her life.
Yeah, if I’m a major contributor to a suubreddit about making comics, and I have users actively harassing me, attempting to doxx me, and threatening me, I’d be trying to get them banned too.
I agree.
I just don’t see where null is saying she is the cause of the drama.
the author is synonymous with reddit drama
It might be half insinuated if one reads into it but it’s at least not literally what they said.
But in your defense, they could have been more clear about what happened to avoid confusion!
Saying someone is synonymous with drama is a direct implication that person is the cause of the drama, otherwise why would they be synonymous with something that other people do to them?
Thank god we have Pizzacake to state the blindingly obvious.
Seriously though, every comic I see from her is just the most middle of the road position imaginable.
Sometimes the obvious needs to be stated, because too often people are just that fucking oblivious.
Piracy is not a “middle of the road” position. In our niche of the web, here, in the haven of the nerds reddit wasn’t nerdy enough for, piracy is a non-issue.
For a large amount of the population, it is still a criminal offense and in their minds treated as stealing (in parts ofc thanks to corporate propaganda), not as a logical answer to a consumer(and small creator)-hostile Intellectual Property Rights legal system.
For her audience, which is mostly Redditors, it’s a middle of the road position.
I’ve never understood the blind rage you and others have for this artist. Yeah, some of her comics can be cringe or a little too on the nose, but like… there’s so many other things to be angry about in the world.
And yes I’m aware of her threatening to sue a subreddit, but IMHO that was a very “Oh no… anyways” type of situation.
she made the same mistake as amy schumer:
she’s a woman who makes jokes these men don’t find funny. and because of this she must be a horrible person
any other justification for their hatred (like the legal threat) is just noise, imo. they hated her before she did this.
I’ve never understood the blind rage you and others have for this artist.
Eh, OP’s post seems more ‘mild annoyance’ than ‘blind rage’, but okay.
Every comic I see from her is either “men bad”, or a joke that’s been made before by other comics.
She’s just not funny. And me saying that seems to make people very angry.
If you think her comics are “men bad” then you’re the kind of bad man she’s making comics about.
My masculinity, on the other hand, isn’t challenged in the slightest.
I cant find it within myself to hate the safe paycheck artists of the world. Particularly her, considering she briefly transitioned to porn.
Fair enough, but why people keep posting her content is beyond me.
Be the change you want to see in the world and go post some better content, then.
Still funny. I don’t really get all the hate for her.
Taste is subjective. It’s not hate.
The artist’s subreddit drama that’s of absolutely zero importance here didn’t come up over night.
Her vote manipulation (par for the course on Reddit), getting people banned for expressing the slightest of critique (par for the course on Reddit), instantly playing the victim in her own comics after les redditeurs got mad (par for the course on Reddit) was pretty good popcorn. If you’re completely ignorant of that, of course you “don’t get it”.
It’s a joke that’s been done before, and better, by other artists.
Everything’s been done before.
Mysogyn is the driving force of some human beings.
This artist’s “subreddit drama” was all about vote manipulation, playing victim, and having people banned for criticizing her low effort crap. She clumsily spun it a bit into mysog
Nothing curious, though: marketing. Not upsetting any minority (including obviously crazy but loud ones) is more important than providing the quality product.












