• Blackmist@feddit.uk
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    12 days ago

    If five people can maintain a service bigger than all those combined, then the big streamers need to buck their fucking ideas up.

    • geekworking@lemmy.world
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      12 days ago

      They had a big library, but not the user base. They were definitely not maintaining anywhere near the infrastructure and bandwidth of major streaming platforms. Netflix claims 260 million users. It’s not hard to get a giant catalog when you dont have to pay for it.

    • OldWoodFrame@lemm.ee
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      12 days ago

      If there was no DEMAND it wouldn’t exist. It exists illegally specifically because it can’t be done legally at the price point. That doesn’t mean anyone needs it, all the content is presumably available elsewhere. It just costs money and people don’t want to pay money.

      I don’t want to pay money either, I’m just not high minded about it.

      • Sam_Bass@lemmy.world
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        12 days ago

        Want is not the issue. You can want anything and everything but unless you are able to pay, the need arises for access to the material for a price you can pay that the “legal” owners either dont comprehend or refuse to in the name of greed.

        • OldWoodFrame@lemm.ee
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          12 days ago

          That doesn’t track at all. I can’t afford a Lamborghini so the need arises for access to stolen Lamborghinis for cheap? It’s absolutely not a need, you can just go without or only access the free media that is available to you. In the car example, I can just buy an old Civic.

          If it’s stealing bread to feed your family that is one thing, because it’s an actual need. If it’s getting stuff because you want the more expensive version instead of the version you can afford, there’s no need there.

          The ethical argument is that there’s no one harmed because you can’t afford it anyway. It’s not that you need it like a starving man’s bread.

          • Jarix@lemmy.world
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            12 days ago

            Just one specific point of contention. A physical object is very different from an object that can infinitely and effortlessly be copied with 0 degradation of that thing.

            I think you are making a good argument and but maybe not the best example.

            I think there is significance in the difference that needs to be accounted for in any discussion of piracy as theft.

            It is currently, and has been for a long time, legal to copy music from the radio or movies and tv shows from a broadcast(but not pay per view, or copys for distrubution) or go to a library and borrow whatever interesting (to you) media they have.

      • Petter1@lemm.ee
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        12 days ago

        Digital media is culture. And culture should not be reserved for rich people, in my opinion.

        • OldWoodFrame@lemm.ee
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          12 days ago

          If you’re saying “you should not restrict ALL culture to rich people” then, we’re not. There is plenty of culture available for free on YouTube, or on broadcast TV channels, or FreeVee. And paying for one paid subscription doesn’t make you rich, $10/mo or whatever is an accessible price for a subset of digital media to a non-rich person. And those libraries are sufficiently large that you would not run out of material to watch even if you only had one service.

          If you’re saying “everyone should be provided literally all digital content for free at all times” that is a pretty extreme position which does sort of break the economics of any content being produced. Digital content would have to be plastered in way more ads or be government subsidized or something to have the money to make more of it. That’s not a political position I’d be on board with.

          If you just want the current system but with you being allowed to download the stuff you want to see on services you don’t pay for…again, there’s an argument for that, but let’s not pretend it’s some high minded one. It’s selfish. You probably have the money to pay for HBO Max for one month to watch the new Game of Thrones and the Barbie movie but you don’t want to pay money and it’s really easy not to.

          • Petter1@lemm.ee
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            12 days ago

            Yea, I understand the problems you describe and I am not a genius who knows how to solve that problem. I want to point out that I consider ads and tracking as privacy invasive.

            In my opinion the solution should be a way where we can ensure loss of media at all cost where the whole humanity has access to all human culture and knowledge in a reasonable timeframe (not the livelong time the copyrights hold today)

            And competition on the market should be about the best way to deliver content, not about on delivering which content.

    • dan@upvote.au
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      12 days ago

      That’s the thing about all the pirate apps (apps like Weyd, Syncler, the now-defunct TVZion, etc). They’re made by people that actually care, not by companies that are only in it for the money. The user experience is usually a lot better. One of those apps plus a Real Debrid subscription and you’re set.

        • Setnof@feddit.de
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          12 days ago

          I’ve heard that you can download stuff from filmfans.org and serienfans.org with jdownloader. Reportedly it’s then possible to host it locally on your own Synology NAS and use Infuse on your Apple TV for a magnificent user experience.

          • dan@upvote.au
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            12 days ago

            Rumor has it that apps that use Real Debrid are way easier to use since you can just go to a TV show and watch it. Even a non technical person can use apps like Weyd. Real Debrid supposedly caches torrents on their server so you can instantly stream them over an encrypted connection.

        • dan@upvote.au
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          12 days ago

          I’ve heard that Google might have information about Real Debrid and apps that support it. I cannot confirm or deny this myself.

        • LeFantome@programming.dev
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          12 days ago

          He is saying that people that get rich selling others people’s stuff without paying for it are not “in it for the money”. What don’t you understand.

        • Semi-Hemi-Lemmygod@lemmy.world
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          12 days ago

          If they’re servicing that many users their UX should be better, but it’s not. Search should work better, but it doesn’t. They should let me make playlists, but they don’t.

          Yes, scale is hard but it shouldn’t be hard to put a clock in the pause screen showing me what time the show will be done. And that’s just a tiny way Plex is better.

  • paris@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    12 days ago

    The group used “sophisticated computer scripts” and software to scour piracy services (including the Pirate Bay and Torrentz) for illegal copies of TV episodes, which they then downloaded and hosted on Jetflicks’ servers, according to federal prosecutors.

    They probably used Sonarr and Radarr and called it a day (or similar off-the-shelf tools available on GitHub). It’s not very sophisticated at all. That combined with Jellyfin and a VPN (or Usenet or a country that doesn’t care about piracy) and you have your own up and running. You could also just use free sites with an ad blocker instead of paying $10/mo like the service this article is about charged.

    Unrelated to all of this: https://rentry.co/megathread

    • Seasoned_Greetings@lemm.ee
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      12 days ago

      Sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

      For the elderly folk who write and enforce the laws that caused this to come to pass, sufficiently advanced technology just means more complex than notepad

  • Dorkyd68@lemmy.world
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    13 days ago

    The only thing I’m pisseed about is the fact that I was unaware of its existence. Fuck the system

    • Scrollone@feddit.it
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      12 days ago

      You can always start creating your own personal media server, using apps such as Plex or Jellyfin, and qBittorrent, SABnzbd, etc.

      • FordBeeblebrox@lemmy.world
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        12 days ago

        I’ve been trying to do just that and it’s slow going with qB, if one was looking to avoid dens of sins where you might find a usenet key, where should I stay away from?

    • BarbecueCowboy@lemmy.world
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      12 days ago

      You might be overestimating how much content that was. Streaming services try to maintain an illusion of neverending content but last I saw except for prime, the amount of content they offer has been trending down.

      Those numbers are fairly accessible for an average person with 3 or 4 large hard drives.

    • anlumo@lemmy.world
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      13 days ago

      They didn’t need the army of lawyers to get license deals, so that’s not a fair comparison.

      • FreudianCafe@lemmy.ml
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        13 days ago

        Its almost like its unecessary shit made up in order to keep profits away from working people artificially

        • WarlordSdocy@lemmy.world
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          13 days ago

          Yeah its almost like if we didn’t keep extending copyright protections a bunch of stuff would be in the public domain and any streaming service could offer it without having to deal with licensing.

        • GBU_28@lemm.ee
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          13 days ago

          It’s true that Hollywood is corrupt and csuite pay is absurd, but those deals are the only mechanism by which ANY money makes it to the writers, actors and staff who deserve it

          • BossDj@lemm.ee
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            13 days ago

            It’s the exclusivity bullshit that gets me.

            It could be: New movie is released! Anyone who pays the price tag gets to stream it!

            But no, we must bidding war gouge.

            On top of that, X Y and Z services exist in America, but not in other countries, so in this other country, everything is on Netflix, while I had to jump between three different services at one point just to watch Stargate

      • GissaMittJobb@lemmy.ml
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        13 days ago

        Their scale was also an insignificant fraction of what Netflix has, making the point even more irrelevant.

        The best figure I could find on Jetflicks user count was 37k, where as Netflix has 269 million users.

        • calcopiritus@lemmy.world
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          13 days ago

          Prices should go down with scale not up though.

          There’s initial investment on the initial servers (and the software), and afterwards it should be a linear increase of server costs per user, with some bumps along the way to interconnect those servers.

          The cost also scales per content. Because that means more caching servers per user and bigger databases, and licenses.

          So this service has less users and more content, it should be way more expensive. The only reason they are cheaper is because they don’t pay those licenses.

          • GissaMittJobb@lemmy.ml
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            13 days ago

            The cost of storage in this case is more or less irrelevant - traffic is what matters here. You’re also not getting any mentionable bulk discount on the servers for that matter.

            The key is that you can engineer things in completely different way when you have trivial amounts of traffic hitting your systems - you can do things that will not scale in any way, shape or form.

          • zbyte64@awful.systems
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            13 days ago

            Certain types of content. But YouTube’s own existence started because people made content without licensing rights.

            • evidences@lemmy.world
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              13 days ago

              Technically YouTube exists because three horny nerds wanted a dating site with video integration. It only turned into a video sharing site when they realized they couldn’t find the clip of the Janet Jackson wardrobe malfunction and they decided they wanted to build that platform instead.

          • uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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            12 days ago

            Nope. People will still make content. It’ll be on far less of a budget, but that didn’t stop the Film School generation of independent films in the 1970s (before which you had to sell your life and soul and beating heart to a studio). In between all the schlock were the occasional arty films we consider classics today.

            And then there’s government subsidization of art projects, as per the National Endowment of the Arts.

            I think the MCU movies, the DC movies, the many studio iterations of Spiderman have shown us what capitalism eventually churns out. Sony actually chose this path content as product the same resort to formula that plagued the music industry in the 1980s (and drove the Hip Hop Independent movement of the next half-century).

            We just need to empower artists. Make sure they don’t have to moonlight as restaurant wait staff in order to eat and pay rent while they create, and make sure they have access to half-decent (not necessarily high end) hardware with which to do their thing. And yes, as Sturgeon observes, most of it will be schlock, but through sheer quantity of content we’ll get more gems than Hollywood is putting out.

            • Couldbealeotard@lemmy.world
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              11 days ago

              If you take away the ability to own and control your intellectual property, then you won’t be empowered.

              Licensing art allows creators to earn a living off of their hard work.

              • uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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                10 days ago

                Not in the US or the EU. If you make music in the States, then RCA or Sony owns your content, not you, and when they decide they’ve paid you enough (which is much less than they’re getting) then they still own your stuff. Also, if you make an amazing film or TV series ( examples: Inception, Firefly ) and the moguls don’t like it, they’ll make sure it tanks or at least doesn’t get aftermarket support, which is why Inception doesn’t have any video games tie-ins, despite being a perfect setting for video games.

                Artists are empowered in their ability to produce art. If they have to worry about hunger and shelter, then they make less art, and art narrowly constrained to the whims of their masters. Artists are not empowered by the art they’ve already made, as that has to be sold to a patron or a marketing institution.

                No, we’d get more and better art by feeding and housing everyone (so no one has to earn a living ) and then making all works public domain in the first place.

                Intellectual property is a construct, and it’s corruption even before it was embedded in the Constitution of the United States has only assured that old art does not get archived.

                I think yes, an artist needs to eat, which is why most artists (by far) have to wait tables and drive taxicabs and during all that time on the clock, not make art. The artists not making art far outnumber the artists that get to make art. And a small, minority subset of those are the ones who profit from art or even make a living from their art, a circumstance that is perpetually precarious.

                But I also think the public needs a body of culture, and as the Game of Thrones era showed us, culture and profit run at odds. The more expensive art is, the more it’s confined to the wealthy, and the less it actually influences culture. Hence we should just feed, clothe and home artists along with everyone else, whether or not they produce good or bad art. And we’ll get culture out of it.

                You can argue that a world of guaranteed meals and homes is not the world we live in, but then I can argue that piracy (and other renegade action) absolutely is part of the world we live in and will continue to thrive so long as global IP racketeering continues. Thieves and beggars, never shall we die.

                • Couldbealeotard@lemmy.world
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                  10 days ago

                  Sorry, I’m not going to read all that, but it seems like you’re upset about the shitty deals made by record labels and other large corporations, not intellectual property rights.

    • AshMan85@lemmy.world
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      13 days ago

      The only reason all companies prices go up these days is for CEO pay packages

      • werefreeatlast@lemmy.world
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        13 days ago

        Like Boeing’s CEO making 300 million… imagine 300 people who worked their ass off could make million. Or 1500 hard workers could be making 200k. But nah, let’s just drag these huge bags of money into this one asshole’s account. Oh there were a couple of crashes right? 👍 Our thoughts and prayers 🙏. But not our money wagons.

      • tetris11@lemmy.ml
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        13 days ago

        Does Netflix make shows? Or does it slam its name onto filmmakers it pays to make content? If so, one of those things simply requires throwing cash at people, which I think is a skill that most people can learn.

          • tetris11@lemmy.ml
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            12 days ago

            They had to operate under the radar to avoid the law, so you know the answer to your question

            • iopq@lemmy.world
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              12 days ago

              So Netflix actually pays for shows to get made, so when everyone pays for Netflix, it lets everyone enjoy them. Pirate sites only extract value from the hard work of the producers, without paying them.

              • tetris11@lemmy.ml
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                8 days ago

                producers don’t make the content, they speak to the right people in their exclusive circles to finance it, put their name on it, and then pay the directors and actors a tiny fraction of what it earned

                • iopq@lemmy.world
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                  8 days ago

                  Okay, now tell me how pirate sites contribute to creation of said content

  • Fedizen@lemmy.world
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    13 days ago

    They’re here doing everyone a service. Why are there resources to prosecute this but not like elon musk’s insider trading?

  • Lad@reddthat.com
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    13 days ago

    Five men convicted by the court of the high seas for being absolute chads

  • Snapz@lemmy.world
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    12 days ago

    Nobody gives a shit, you’re not doing enough to punish trump for his obvious, literally filmed and recorded crimes.

    This is the equivalent of the cops celebrating after beating peaceful college protesters while pissing their pants and freezing while the uvalde kids were slaughtered and psychologically tortured.

    You’re focusing on the non victory and ignoring the failures. Cowards.

    • AHemlocksLie@lemmy.zip
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      13 days ago

      You’re focusing on the non victory and ignoring the failures. Cowards.

      That’s not true, they successfully did their job of protecting capital and the owner class. Same reason they don’t go after Trump. He’s in the owner class, so their job is to serve and protect him.

    • Adalast@lemmy.world
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      13 days ago

      When cops only legal responsibility is to enforce the law, and the laws are written to protect corporate interests, of course they will stand outside the school and arrest protesters. SCOTUS has ruled that way so many times that “to serve and protect” is literally gaslighting.

      • AlbinoPython@lemmy.world
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        13 days ago

        Nobody gives a shit, you’re not doing enough to punish trump for his obvious, literally filmed and recorded crimes.

        This is the equivalent of the cops celebrating after bearing peaceful college protesters while pissing their pants and freezing while the uvalde kids were slaughtered and psychologically tortured.

        You’re focusing on the non victory and ignoring the failures. Cowards.

          • Lad@reddthat.com
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            13 days ago

            Tout le monde s’en fout, vous ne faites pas assez pour punir Trump pour ses crimes évidents, littéralement filmés et enregistrés.

            C’est l’équivalent des flics qui se réjouissent d’avoir abattu des manifestants pacifiques à l’université tout en se pissant dessus et en se gelant pendant que les enfants d’uvalde se faisaient massacrer et torturer psychologiquement.

            Vous vous concentrez sur la non-victoire et ignorez les échecs. Lâches.

  • kakes@sh.itjust.works
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    13 days ago

    Love how they make this sound like some incredible feat. When you aren’t bound to license agreements, turns out it’s actually very easy to have a “massive” content library. Literally the only hurdle is storage space.

  • Todd Bonzalez@lemm.ee
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    13 days ago

    Honestly pretty funny to call the site “Jetflix” and advertise it as nothing but aviation videos. Nobody would know what you’re up to until they pay you.

    How much you wanna bet a aerospace nut subscribed to this because they love Jets, and immediately reported this site to the authorities because he got the avengers movies rather than Airbus maintenance videos or something…

    Pretty stupid though to run this site out of the USA. Terrible opsec. They really just seemed to trust that nobody who cares would ever figure out what they were doing. Plenty of similar sites out there that don’t even need to hide what they are because they are well outside of American jurisdiction.

  • sunbeam60@lemmy.one
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    13 days ago

    “Sophisticated scripts to scour pirate sites”.

    I think we’ve just found a new tagline for radarr and sonarr.

  • el_abuelo@lemmy.ml
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    13 days ago

    This is despicable. What specific service was this? So I know how to avoid it if it should resurface.

    • ILikeBoobies@lemmy.ca
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      13 days ago

      Not only does it say that in the first paragraph, it says it here

      Five men were convicted for their part in operating Jetflicks, one of the largest illegal streaming services in the U.S., officials said.