Summary: A recent UK government inquiry into the challenges faced by the film and high-end television industry has recently received submissions from major Hollywood studios advocating for KYC (know your customer) rules for hosting providers, similar to banking regulations to identify money laundering. If adopted, this would help them to identify people hosting pirated content.
The submissions are united in identifying the same solution to this problem: the UK must implement a ‘Know Your Business Customer’ regime to compel commercial entities (including online intermediaries) to establish the true identity of their business customers as a precondition for selling, and receiving payment for, digital services.
I’ve always wondered what the genuine ‘cost’ of pirating is. Like if someone from a developing country pirates then it doesn’t count because they wouldn’t have bought it any way due to the high price. And if someone from a developed country pirates, but there is no reasonable alternative, then that is void too. I wouldn’t be surprised if that number was really low. Why go through the trouble of pirating if you can pay for it and get a reasonable service?
That’s why it’s a service problem.
As a student (around 5-6 years ago) my friend and I both payed for a netflix account via gift cards because we wanted it and didn’t have paypal or credit cards.
Now I pirate because there are way too many services, for too high of an asking price and fragmented catalog.
Want to see all the seasons of a show? Gotta subscribe to two or more services because one stroke a deal with the publisher while the 2nd got the other part.
Also censoring both in episode and by removing whole episodes, changing parts of something etc etc.
Fuck all the above. :|
I can just call up radarr, search the movie by the parameters I set up beforehand and decide what version I want and done.
I literally don’t know any platform other than Steam that dose anything reasonable with digital content.
I’d argue Bandcamp does Artists set the price, and the files downloaded are .flac or mp3 without any DRM.
They got sold, which resulted in layoffs recently…so no telling how long it lasts. But right now, they’re reasonable in my book.
Here’s my take on it. Things like Radarr, Sonarr, Jackett, etc offer a better service then Disney+, Netflix, Hulu, etc. Devs could charge for the *arrs and a lot of people would pay. Why? Because it’s completely a la carte. Right now if there are say three shows I’m interested in then I could have to pay for three different streaming services. But not only that, I would also have to be concerned with whether or not that show is leaving the platform anytime soon. In the case of Hulu, not only do I have to worry about paying them but I also have to worry about paying them enough that I don’t have to watch ads after paying them.
Likewise with video games, there are games that have DLCs that require previous DLCs to fully unlock what they include. In other words, it is paywalling already paywalled content. I don’t have a problem with the content, I have a problem with the way they present the content.
Not only its cheaper but also the service is starting to get better than if you’d pay for it
Louis Rossman’s recent video on this is good.
And yeah, my Plex server doesn’t fuck me about the way the streaming services do.