What ended piracy for common films was not DRM or videocassette seizures but the offer of cheap tapes and eventually cheap streaming that made it simply "not worth it" to pirate. The same is true of video games where paid players far outweigh pirates.
In other words, if the art film industry wants piracy to stop, it needs to bring all its materials together in a cheap subscription store that people can afford. Criterion[0] is one such product with outstanding content, real human curation, and a lower price than mainstream movie providers.
> Distribution rights for obscure cinema are complex.
That's what I don't understand. The odds that more than 10 people in Mongolia are going to give two shits about say an arthouse drama about an immigrant Latino family in Yellowknife are incredibly low. No matter how well-drawn the characters, or compelling the story, obscure arthouse films are not expected to find a big paying audience. So why not make that film free to watch in any market that you don't expect to be interested in it? How much revenue do you really stand to lose?
I don’t know a single person who pirates music anymore. It’s way too convenient to pay $5-10/month for unlimited access to nearly every record ever created.
And there was a brief period in the 2010s where I could almost say that about movies. But now, most people I know are back to pirating because it doesn’t require an eclectic taste to find that you need 6 different streaming services to meet your needs. The film industry was so close, and dropped that ball.
It's everything I can do to police the subscriptions that my wife and children think we should have. How you people don't have subscription fatigue I'll never know... it's like having debt standing over your head, but even with a thousand year mortgage I would make some progress in paying it off. Subscriptions? It's there forever. Even worse, sometimes the payment goes up.
There is no convenience in subscriptions, just some sort of pathology akin to recreational heroin, where it lulls you into a narcotic coma, death just waiting a few years down the road.
> And there was a brief period in the 2010s where I could almost say that about movies.
There was never any such time. There was a time when Netflix had a catalog of a few thousand movies. My Plex server has 6700, and I'm not even hardcore. I estimate that were I to get every new release, and work backwards through previous years to 1995 or so, I'd need storage for at least 30,000 movies just for English language titles. Television is an order of magnitude larger still, and that's if I stay away from reality tv shows. Organizing these would become a burden... if lumped all into the same library, a person might have trouble paging through all the movies that started with S just to find what they were looking for (already started to become an issue at about 5000). I'll need to start saving up for the two synology expansion bays that my nas supports.
We just cancelled all our streaming services - there's just too many and most of them we don't watch for months at a time.
The deal for us now is, if there's something we want to watch, we will enable that service for a month or two, then cancel it.
So only one at a time, and often none. We haven't noticed any loss of entertainment. We have a plex server with loads of great stuff on it, and satellite TV (Freeview) for general TV watching.
Also avoids the "Hmmm, I can't think of something more interesting or productive to do, let's scroll through $streaming_service and find something that might interest me"
I think most people limit the number of subscription services they have active at any time. You can usually subscribe to a new streaming service in under a minute if you absolutely must watch something you're not currently subscribed to.
> I don’t know a single person who pirates music anymore.
What do you think the biggest category is, by every measure, on YouTube?
There are lots of distribution and payment mechanics changes over the years across creative industries. So it's very hard to generalize. But strictly in terms of piracy, there are more than enough non-monetized audio uploads on YouTube to say, music piracy is alive and well.
YouTube's Content ID systems ensures that the vast majority of uploads pay royalties to the performer. Those royalties may be miniscule, but they are paid.
Sure. I too have heard many “performers” celebrate the effectiveness of content ID. They all talk about how that was the end of piracy. Thats exactly how they put it: “Content ID ended piracy.”
Implementation detail. What matters is the UX: think of a song, search for it, there it is on YouTube. Open the link and it plays. No payment needed, for a long time not even an account. The platform itself was pretty inobtrusive for most of its lifetime; it's gotten quite bad recently, but for most of those who care enough to do something about it, uBlock Origin clears out the UX of all the bullshit.
Pirates couldn't possibly beat that if they tried. But it only exists because of an accident of history: YouTube got big on pirated content early enough and fast enough they could transition to "content id" instead of getting sued to oblivion.
YouTube's UX is a huge reason why I use it for music as much as I do. And not even pirated music but indie releases, etc. The recommendation algorithm isn't all too terrible on some days. But I do prefer more navigable and preservable systems. At least yt-dl still works for the time being.
> It’s way too convenient to pay $5-10/month for unlimited access to nearly every record ever created.
How do you know for certain that the classic 1960's song youre listening to on a streaming service is the exact same song that was played in the 1960's? There's a trust issue that comes with streaming platforms.
Or even the same version the user originally liked! Apple Music (as of last use, about 10 year ago), Google Play Music (RIP), and YouTube Music all do this fun thing where they swap explicit versions of songs out for clean ones or partially clean ones. My favorite example is Kenji by Fort Minor, a song about Japanese internment camps in WWII that features the verse:
> stop it don't look at the gunmen
> you don't want to get the soldiers wondering
> whether you're going to run or not
> because if you run then you might get [EMPTY SPACE]
This is the explicit version available on the app. The word was "shot." The album version says the word. As of today there's no way to get the album version on YouTube Music, the way it was when I first hit "like."
The YouTube Music song library is distinct from the YouTube video library. YouTube Music allows you to add both to playlists, which I guess is a nice feature, but I typically just stick with the audio version. Music videos often have additional sound effects added over the song and (I assume) the songs have higher quality audio. I don't think Fort Minor adds sound effects, so this would be an effective workaround in my specific case.
eh. Back in 2017, Gorillaz released "Hallelujah Money" via youtube. A week later, the song was altered because it had used a clip from Spongebob at the end of the song. The physical album was released a few months later, and contained the new version without the spongebob clip.
I pirated the song the day it was released, so I still have the artist's original version. Ever since then, I've always wondered how we can trust that streaming platforms with a monopoly on a service, will provide unaltered versions of an artist's work.
They've been changing album covers and songs since at least the 70s. This isn't anything new or recent, except streaming makes it a lot more convenient while also getting artists out of hot legal water like the Gorillaz change. I'm not here to defend streaming services (vampires), but changes are coming from the artist and not the service. Youtube didn't take out the spongebob sample in the Gorillaz song.
Sure, but I think the point is that if you aren't in possession of a copy of the recording, then you will be affected by these changes whether you like it or not. If you are in possession of a copy, that copy will never be so affected.
Agreed, I was just making a comment that the changes can be from the artists and not the services.
I've been streaming music since Yahoo music, but have started to change my ways by buying vinyl or digital through the artists own site or bandcamp. It's less about my music changing and more about supporting the artists instead of the corporations taking a big cut.
This is nothing new. Back in 1992, Beastie Boys wanted to use a Jimi Hendrix sample but couldn’t get it cleared for the album Check Your Head. They later secured the rights and were able to use the Hendrix riff on the single and music video version.
Not only can't you trust them not to alter the works, you can't even trust them to keep the work available in perpetuity. Video is especially bad with this, with shows and movies randomly getting pulled and/or switching streaming platforms.
It's the artist who altered the song, not the streaming service.
I've never heard of a (legal) streaming service that edits the songs submitted to its platform outside of YouTube (which can mute sections of videos that contain copyrighted audio)
TBH, when it comes to the music I'm consuming from streaming services I don't really care. They end up taking the space of an enhanced radio for me, always on and always on-demand. Whatever I want at the moment, for the most part.
For music I really care about culturally, it's absolutely physical and backed up digitally.
But 95% of my listening is definitely streaming services.
I think it depends on the person. I am a huge music fan, and am very particular about my music. There are some remastered versions that I strongly dislike (and some that I prefer). I find it to be near impossible to know what version I am going to get on a streaming service. The original and the remaster may be from different labels, which means when streaming services renegotiate, you may suddenly end up with a different version in your playlist.
For movies, I _probably_ don't care if I get the theatrical cut, extended cut, un-rated version and so on (unless we are talking about the Abyss), so I sort of see your point.
But for me, that is why I curate my own music collection locally and run navidrome to stream.
> It’s way too convenient to pay $5-10/month for unlimited access to nearly every record ever created.
1. It's not unlimited access, it's access over the Internet. Which one doesn't have always and everywhere.
2. It's absolutely not every recording ever created; pretty sure it's not even half.
3. It's convenient, but not too convenient, because access, arrangement, playback GUI etc. is controlled, to a great extent, but the relevant service.
4. For most people in the world, this is not affordable. The median per-capita income in 2023 was ~2920 USD [1]; and you're asking for, say, 7.5 USD/month = 90 USD per year, or nearly 5% of one's income. No can do.
5. Even in richer countries - this stuff adds up! After a year at 90 USD - you don't accumulate any music you can then hear. So, you need to pay that sum for your entire life, let's say ages 15 to 95, e.g. 90 * 80 = 7,200 USD for music. Not cheap.
I was going to comment but you saved me the bother of going into the details - yes, across the board.
Knowing "not a single person who pirates music anymore" is no reflection on music(al) pirates - maybe for some reason the piraters tend to end up in different circles than the kind of people who think spotify has "nearly every record ever created".
On top of what you said in your reply above, I also (partially) blame spotify for the fact that when you ask people what music they like now, a lot of people are quite likely to say "oh, everything!".
> 4. For most people in the world, this is not affordable. The median per-capita income in 2023 was ~2920 USD [1]; and you're asking for, say, 7.5 USD/month = 90 USD per year, or nearly 5% of one's income. No can do.
Most subscription services adjust the service prices to what specific markets can stomach. Spotify in the US costs $11.99/month, but it's $5.86/month (23.99 PLN) in Poland.
While streaming services and the record companies seem to have things mostly sorted out, there's still a very, very large collection of rare music that you won't find anywhere. There were sites like what.cd or waffles and probably a few more that were a treasure trove of archived music, ranging from demos to rare releases to obscure casette tape black metal to concert bootlegs. The biggest collection of hard or otherwise impossible to find material. And it was taken down, because the record companies or artists couldn't stand it.
I hope there's data hoarders out there that have the collection. I hope the work continues out of sight.
> unlimited access to nearly every record ever created.
Not nearly enough. A large swath of music I enjoy is simply not available via streaming at all. And what is there can disappear or be altered at any time.
>I don’t know a single person who pirates music anymore. It’s way too convenient to pay $5-10/month for unlimited access to nearly every record ever created.
Do you know any single person who travels outside of 4G coverage?
Because the $5/$10 mo doesn't do much for you in a National or State Park in the US two hours away from a major city.
You can download music on Spotify / Apple Music / YT Music far more easily than pirating it. And you only have to connect to their servers once every 30 days. You don't even need a 4G connection for that, it's just a few kilobytes exchanged to renew the offline period.
>And you only have to connect to their servers once every 30 days. You don't even need a 4G connection for that, it's just a few kilobytes exchanged to renew the offline period.
So, if I have a playlist in Spotify to listen to on long hikes, I will find out that I can't play it when I get to the hike (unless I use Spotify all the time, or think about this crap in advance).
Thanks, I understand that I can jump through hoops to make it work.
But an MP3 works 100% of the time, every time, without any of that crap, or thinking; I copy the file to a memory file once, and that's it. No passwords, no accounts, no internet, no logging in.
Many bands I listen to have Bandcamp/SoundCloud accounts, which offer DRM-free audio downloads. I use that when it's an option - and it pays the artists orders of magnitude more than Spotify ever will.
If I have a CD from a local show, I will rip that.
Otherwise, I am not going to make my life more inconvenient for the sake of a major artist getting $0.000002 from my Spotify subscription. I'll pirate their work.
While I think it's still an unfriendly move on Sega's part, they're presumably delisting these specific titles in advance of releasing new products/packages for them.
That's what happened a couple years ago – they removed Sonics 1-3 (+ Knuckles) from Steam as individual titles, then released Sonic Origins, which included all of those plus Sonic CD.
The SEGA Classics games came out 14 years ago, so they probably want to release these titles again with an updated emulator and market it as a new collection. This seems especially likely to me, since they're delisting the existing Classics Collection title on consoles.
True to the article's point, The Criterion Channel is only available in the US and Canada. Mubi and BFI Player offer a good selection of independent films at a fair price in my country, but that's part of the problem - there's an annoyingly complex matrix of services and regional restrictions.
Rarely does anyone have to ask "where can I listen to that album?", because essentially all of the music streaming services have the rights to essentially all music. "Where can I watch that film?" is still a very real problem.
This is certainly true for me. As a kid, I used to pirate movies/tv shows on my slow 1Mbps connection. Nowadays, I just want to turn on my TV and start Netflix/HBO/Disney/...
But, with the advent of pretty severe content locking and geolocking on various services, pirating is starting to be very enticing once again. The thing I would miss the most is the recommendation algorithm, which tends to be pretty good on Netflix.
> with the advent of pretty severe content locking and geolocking on various services
It's been the norm for many of us for decades. Even if you want to pay and stay an "honest citizen", you're not found of being worthy by most streaming/distribution platforms. For the longest time I thought geolocking will die out and we will be able to access the same stuff you have, but it's going the opposite way.
As the result, "piracy" never died out here, it's more alive than it's ever been. Take the hint. It's a true pleasure to see dozens of countries from around the world represented in the peer list of my torrent client. At least there is one area where we can work together for the good of all.
(Gabe is one of very few exceptions, and Steam is a very successful platform commercially speaking, once again proving the old quote, by gaben himself IIRC.)
There's also the part where the shows that motivated you to get that particular service subscription might not even be there next year. Unlike the pirated stuff that you download.
Ironically, now it's possible to have the best of both worlds by paying for the subscription to get access to the catalog, then using DRM-stripping downloaders to get local copies of everything you actually care about.
Downloading The Matrix over a 28k dial-up modem (on a shared house/family line) was an exercise in patience! I didn't, but a friend did... and we all waited weeks for it to finish.
Ha, that's a good point. We were broke kids in a rural town without drivers licenses a hundred miles from anywhere that sold physical VHS or DVDs. We didn't have money, and if we did we didn't have the means to get to a store, and if we did it was far far away, and if we could I don't think most of us had DVD players at home. The phone bill, on the other hand - parents pay for that. ;-) IIRC, our dial-up ISP was a "local call", which was free then. I'm pretty sure my friend capitalized on the phone line during night times when the house was asleep.
Agreed. The same with Music - with the rise of services like the iPod and more modern streaming services like Spotify, the effort just wasn't worth it. It turns out that people will happily pay for that content if its in an easy and convenient format.
Regarding video specifically, one problem I see with the streaming services is the increasing push of New content. Streaming services like Netflix or Hulu or Paramount+ are really dependent on new subscribers, which means they tend to focus on new and exclusive content to draw in new people, so they prioritize that (to a fault imho).
Many of us still want to rewatch those shows from the 90s we loved. Paramount+ specifically is "The Star Trek Streaming Service", and I know the folks over on reddit have their beef with P+ for seemingly de-prioritizing it instead of milking an extensive library like a cash cow. The past few years I've been digging into older movies - some black and white, silent, foreign, or weird avant-garde stuff. Streaming really drops the ball there, but I can understand how the business model doesn't really favor that.
Video game pirating was mostly killed by viruses. At one point it was too just too risky. Probably good sources still around but it's too much hassle, maybe only if you game a lot and don't have a job to pay for a hobby.
Even for non pirated content, I built a dedicated gaming pc. Kernel level anti cheat is becoming more prolific and it is impossible for me to trust the code quality going into those. Even games are not immune to ad tech revenue and are sending system telemetry to their servers.
> Video game pirating was mostly killed by viruses. At one point it was too just too risky.
It wasn’t, teenagers don’t give a shit, and torrent sites like Piratebay had trusted uploaders (green/pink skull) and comments.
Steam sucked initially but it kept increasing its value add (cloud saves / settings sync, easy voice chat before Discord, Steam Workshop for mods, etc) and simultaneously the sales got better and better.
Why pirate a game when you can wait a couple of months to buy it for 66% off, niceties included.
Is this a joke? I don't see it being any less prevalent than at any time in the past. There are plenty of trustworthy sites and plenty of people know about them. It's all over Reddit for anybody who's interested and it doesn't take a rocket scientist. It's easier now than it's ever been before.
Worth pointing out that video gaming piracy has a number of challenges that make it less appealing.
No connected experience (usually); you have to play in offline modes only, sometimes with more compromised. Game updates are often lagging. Others have mentioned viruses already. Steam sales are frequent so /r/patientgamer types can just wait till the game becomes affordable where-as there's a rarely discounts available & a patchwork of streaming services.
There are many hurdles but one of the biggest I see is that there isn't a common/market leading way for independent films to self-publish their films to an independent streaming service. Something like Steam but for films. I'm sure YouTube, Vimeo, and others may offer the ability to do this... but none of them are winning that market or advertising themselves to potential viewers. And it isn't cost effective for a streamer to go after independent films that are very niche.
MUBI[0] is another streaming service that's focusing on curation and smaller lists of films available. Their service is available in a lot of countries, and each region has its own curation.
I'm a huge fan of this ultra-curated approach, since it lets me find a lot of things that I'd otherwise have to hunt for, and would likely miss out on.
In 2008/2009, I bought a DVD of this movie called "The Fall": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fall_(2006_film) . I'm a sucker for visually-appealing films so I loved it, but I eventually lost the DVD and was never able to find another copy, despite checking every year or two. The wikipedia page says:
> As of September 2023, The Fall had been unavailable on streaming services or rental services, making it notoriously difficult to access with secondhand Blu-ray copies of the film being very expensive.
But apparently that isn't the case anymore! MUBI bought the rights earlier this year, and it looks like I can watch it through Amazon Video if I sign up for a MUBI trial.
EDIT: I maybe should have visited https://mubi.com/ before commenting - clips from The Fall is the very first thing they show.
Last time I checked Criterion was only available in the US because of publishing rights. It could be easily bypassed by using VPN (location is actually only checked at account registration), but I’m wondering: is it really different from pirating if you’re breaking the rules anyway?
Here in Europe MUBI[0] is an alternative to Criterion. I’ve tried it during lockdown but the streaming quality was seriously lacking, and their library was really small. I’m curious if they improved in those areas
The concept behind MUBI is that they provide a small set of curated films which change frequently - sort of like a little independent movie theatre. Criterion is possibly a better offering if you want a large catalogue.
Criterion also rotates through human-curated collections. They do not offer a full library archivally, which was initially a disappointment when I subscribed. It turns out the curated content is great, changes all the time, and really has movies that are worth watching and I don't already know about -- along with lots of favorites.
Quantity is not the important factor in entertainment channel selection. Most people do not pay for a streaming service, if there's only 1 thing they want. Consumers aren't concerned with what they dont want, unless it gets in the way of what they do want.
I was using Criterion subscription extensively for about 2 years. What I loved the most is that I could make a random pick from their main page and be sure it’s going to be a good quality film. I could never say this about Netflix, there I have to struggle to find something that’s at least decent
That isn't enough. A big motivator for these kinds of people is preservation, and a subscription service doesn't solve that problem. Licenses and agreements end, many culturally significant works are completely unavailable today except for pirating. This goes for music, film and video games.
Until we live in a world where the conglomerates taking their huge slice of the revenue from artists and creatives are also stewards of culture, acting in the best interest of culture itself, I couldn't care less about their bottom dollar.
This used to be true with the original Netflix where they mailed you DVDs. They really had almost everything you could think of, you just had to wait a day or two to get it. I watched so many obscure movies, it was fantastic!
I would even buy it out right but the rare movies I am interested in almost never have any distribution. Which is strange since that surely can’t be the most lucrative way to monetize it
> What ended piracy for common films was not DRM or videocassette seizures but the offer of cheap tapes and eventually cheap streaming that made it simply "not worth it" to pirate.
Piracy has all but ended for movies.
The issue with streaming is that there are movie streaming apps (for TVs, browsers, etc.) that basically offer the Netflix interface.
I know of people with hundreds of TB of movies and series: catalog in the five digits (so more than 10 000 movies and series).
In Europe there's also the totally rampant "IPTV" craze: where even retired boomers (not necessarily the most tech savvy audience) buy/rent an illegal little box with all of Disney+Netflix+HBO etc. plus also all the regular TV channels (of the entire world).
I don't know in which world movies and series piracy disappeared but it's certainly not in the world in which I live in (FWIW I pay Netflix).
I actually don't know if there's ever been an era with more movie piracy than nowadays!?
Sure, but I remember pirating La Maman Et La Putain specifically because it was yet-to-be-released by Criterion in any form - and it was Jean Eustache's masterpiece that made a splash at the Cannes back in 1972, not an obscure film by any measure (even if not mainstream by any measure either).
Piracy still remains a supremely important means of both accessing and archiving content after it stops being a moneymaker, or simply when it pauses being one.
Case in point - plenty of stories about games on being officially published by the content owners... with cracks, after the source code was lost (or wasn't in a shape to be rebuilt), and officially selling the pirated version was the only thing the publisher could figure out how to do[2].
Maybe 40% of the time I pirate, you can’t see anything original or cult otherwise. The other time I do try to find it at the library. If I can find it on a service I torrent the 4K version anyways because streaming quality is varied trash.
If streaming didn’t offer such generalized garbage for everyone then it wouldn’t be this way.
If consumers just made a leap for physical copies again it also wouldn’t be this way.
It’s the drive to consume once and move on that causes this, but what if I never consume it in the appropriate time frame, then I’m just out of the loop as it goes in the vault because services lose money otherwise.
Agreed, but even if I wanted to see something relatively mainstream like Last of the Mohicans (great movie with Daniel Day Lewis), I'd still go to a certain pirate site to find it. It may be on some of the streaming sites, but which one? Will it be on Apple? I don't mind paying, but where will it be, will it be on Amazon?
Oh forget about Netflix as they don't seem to have anything more than a few years old, unless it's some series they are promoting like Seinfeld.
Also, on a certain pirate site of note, I can also look for the best quality one like a Blu-Ray HD rip if it exists, that'll be something like 20GB - but that's fine!
Also: you literally could make a machine where tou insert a dollar and you get a watch link for the whole world.
With physical media you'd have to figure out the whole logistics, produce to demand etc.
The problem we have is that digital rights are such that many distributers will rather let their films rot on old hard drived somewhere than distribute them worldwide. Give me a cheap way to just watch the absolute best variant of a film and I will use it. But the bar to clear in terms of usability and privacy is me downloading a mp4 and putting it into VLC player. This works everhwbere on the world even without internet connection, what doesn't work is your streaming service because you haven't cleared the rights for each region of the world and it sucks.
Also Kanopy if your local library is a subscriber. Basically anything you might see at a film festival, that could be considered "art house", and a remarkably long tail that goes back to pre-Hayes Code Hollywood (for example).
I have had people pirate things I created, and even though it was hypocritical of me, I got frustrated because it cost me so much time and money to make. It felt like people just pirate everything without consideration for whether it is actually expensive to buy, or hard to obtain, or if it was made by a giant, faceless corporation, or me and my friend Charlie after work and on weekends. There is a pipeline that just puts everything out there, no introspection, no questions asked.
It's not conceivable to me that we'd ever run into a situation where a pirate group would say "it'd be wrong of us to rip this and distribute it." It just wouldn't ever happen.
I said it was hypocritical, because I pirate a lot of stuff myself. I think it's great, it lets me be exposed to so much more than I would otherwise. So, I'm not complaining. But, I'm also not rushing out to spend another year making something small and personal just to have it show up on torrent sites a couple days later. Not sure what to do about that. Ultimately, I guess it comes down to people's choices, but people don't think too hard about the ethics of this stuff—I know I don't, 99% of the time.
Yes, there is a group of people for whom pirating stuff is an actual hobby. They still exist today -- I know a couple of them. And I'm glad that I do. I know that if I can't find something I really want, there's a very good chance that one of them has it.
Also, though I'm having trouble finding the source, I do remember Orwell publishing a preface to Animal Farm (?), but only in illegal bootleg copies behind the Iron Curtain. I remember him saying something like 'I'd only ever give a preface to those copies, because I knew those were the people that would give a damn to reading it'.
Now, I know there is a preface that Orwell published in the West to Animal Farm, but I just can't shake that it was Animal Farm that he did this illegal publishing for.
If anyone know a bit better what I'm talking about or remembers the story better, please let me know here.
It'd be nice if there were a way for me to contribute directly to a film as if I had bought a ticket or something. I watch a lot of film, and I absolutely would pay after watching many of them.
Oftentimes I also find myself at the end of something and thinking "meh, that was okay" and then days, weeks, months later that film has stuck with me for some reason. I don't have the money to buy a Blu-ray or digital copy all the time, but for those that stick with me I have no problem chipping in $10 or so.
>I also am drawn to piracy just so i can get a high enough bitrate to look good on a modern display!
Then there's languages and subtitles, and publishers still don't get that shit right.
FFS, I can't watch a Ukrainian movie in Ukrainian outside Ukraine, because the publisher only released the English version on US streaming services.
And if I want to watch a film with a soundtrack in one language (the original, perhaps) and subtitles in another (out of the ones I speak that it better translates to), sayonara, we're hitting the torrents.
Oh, and go figure, sometimes you just don't have a reliable Internet connection where you want to watch a movie. Unbelievably, but it does happen if you go outside the house.
To add to this, if you're trying to learn a language, not being able to watch video in the original audio language AND with subtitles in that language is also problematic, as people don't have perfect pronunciation.
Heck, Americans watching British or other historically commonwealth shows turn on the subtitles half the time just to deal with the unfamiliar-to-them accents.
Frequently subtitles are available for every language except the original on many services... which seems insane.
>Frequently subtitles are available for every language except the original on many services... which seems insane.
I didn't even bother bringing up accessibility, since it's so laughably broken (if not outright ignored) with all current streaming services. It is, at best, an afterthought.
None get even close to matching the functionality of a plain old DVD.
Or, since we are in 2024 - an MKV file with multiple audio and subtitle tracks, which the pirates care about providing, and the streaming services do not.
_______
PS: if you're trying to learn a language, US companies often refer to subtitles in the language of the audio track as "closed captions" rather then "subtitles"[1], with the target audience being hearing impaired people.
Look for the "CC" button, or "accessibility" options, and you may find what you look for.
YouTube provides automatically generated subtitles for many videos (of varying quality) with the [CC] button in the video controls.
>I suspect there's a cost associated with licensing the Ukrainian version that will not be recouped in markets outside Ukraine.
About a third of Ukrainians are currently outside Ukraine due to war.
Even setting that aside, [citation needed] that providing additional soundtracks comes with an additional cost to the streaming service, and if so, that this additional cost is upfront (and not per stream).
If the publishers are so idiotic as to kill Ukrainian language distribution outside Ukraine with their fees, that just shows that piracy is necessary.
Knowing people in Ukraine, it's less likely to be stupid greed than plain old stupidity (like Daenerys, the officials and executives in Ukraine kind of forgot that Ukrainians outside Ukraine exist). This is a discussion for another time, though.
>More like about 15 percent as of Feb 2024, per the UNHCR.
Please, do some due diligence before making comments like this. You are incorrect.
Your link counts refugees.
It does not count:
- people who left Ukraine and permanently settled abroad
- people who left Ukraine on work visas
- people who ended up under Russian occupation
etc.
Ukrainian population has plummeted by 25% due to the 2022 invasion alone[1].
The war didn't start then, either. Crimea and Donbas were occupied since 2014. 3 million people in occupied territories[2], technically, never left Ukraine.
Another red herring is the phrasing as refugees or asylum seekers.
The latter does not nearly account for everyone. With millions of Ukrainians having family abroad due to war, and, at this point, millions of those settling permanently abroad, millions of Ukrainians are eligible to immigrate to reunite with their families abroad. Working families, mind you, Ukrainians integrate well, and not refugees anymore.
I am a Ukrainian living in the US. I have evacuated my MIL from Kyiv the first week of the 2022 invasion. She ended up living in the US until her death from cancer this year, and she is not counted in your stats.
As all Ukrainians, she had a 90-day right to stay in the EU, visa-free. She didn't cross the Ukraine-Polish border as a refugee. She had an active Canadian visa from a couple of years ago when she visited her daughter there, so she didn't enter Canada as a refugee. From Canada to the US, we used the United 4 Ukraine program when it was instantiated[4], a remarkable achievement of Biden's administration.
You may note that it is distinct from "temporary protection" status, and requires someone in the US to sponsor you. It is a parole status; my MIL didn't enter the US as a refugee or asylum seeker.
Her friend, whom we managed to get onto the same evac train, remained with her daughter in Spain. She was eligible to do that years earlier. Reuniting with a family member doesn't make her a refugee or asylum seeker.
I can go on and on with examples, that's not the point.
My point is that the only accurate measure of the population drop is looking at the number of Ukrainians who remain in non-occupied territory of Ukraine to gauge the impact of the war on the population.
You will not find this number. If the government of Ukraine were to publish it, there'd be panic. You will only find estimates. And when you add up the estimates of how many people ended up abroad, you'll see that a third of the population is quite reasonable (a quarter of prewar 44 million is a lower bound estimate).
I mean honestly, it's pretty bad either way — even the 15% estimate you cited would be enough for me to make the point.
I just wanted to emphasize that the situation is worse than most people — and specifically, most Ukrainians — think, because the country really needs to start figuring out how to incentivize people to move to Ukraine (including, but not limited to, getting people to return to Ukraine), and both the government and the people need to be on the same page (as long as people don't care, the gov't won't lift a finger).
Take it as less me arguing with you, and more of ringing the alarm bell everywhere I go until enough people have heard it.
BTW I only chimed in like that because people routinely cite, for example, casualty figures ("Ukraine has 1M+ dead") intended to make the situation look much worse for Ukraine than it actually is (and to apparently suggest that there's a giant conspiracy to keep keep the truth hidden from us).
Turns out they're invariably skimming, looking at a random figure they saw (for example an article claiming 1M total casualties included wounded, and on both sides, meaning mostly Russian), and duly misremembering in a specific way that happens to align with the narratives they like.
So this case it turns out I was wrong (but at least in an interpretive way; I didn't think about how the definition of "refugee" is overly specific and doesn't really count the number of people forced to leave the country).
On that note, if you have your own estimate of the current numbers for military / civilian fatalities, that would be of interest also.
Thanks for doing the good work! I don't see such fearmongering in my bubble (another big issue is how the society is split into layers, and I have no idea what information most people are exposed to).
>On that note, if you have your own estimate of the current numbers for military civilian fatalities, that would be of interest also.
Ukraine doesn't publish these numbers for opsec reasons, so it's a wild guess.
About a million people have been mobilized. There's an immense amount of casualties, but Ukraine has been fighting hard to bring the wounded back, so many wounded return to service after recovery.
2022 has seen a huge number of civilian fatalities, particularly in cities like Mariupol, where the estimates range up to 100,000. Evidence of massacres and mass graves have been found in areas reclaimed from Russia, e.g. Bucha and Izyum.
But the war has enetered a different phase as of fall 2022. The civilian casualties are remarkably low. This is both because Ukraine is pretty good in evacuating civilians from places where the fighting is going on, and because both sides have zero interest in wiping out the civilians. Cynically, people are still a resource for either side.
On the level of people actually involved in combat, it's not an ethnic conflict, so they have no incentive to inflict civilian casualties. Mariupol's high casualty figures are more due to Russia's disregard for human life rather than deliberate goal of inflicting such damage. They weren't treating their own much better (they have since started caring about that more, but given that they're using NK soldiers, it looks like it was a bit too late).
Russia still resorts to occasional terrorism, like the strike on Okhmatdyt children's hospital. But the entire point of terrorism is inflicting minimal damage with minimal resources and causing maximum amount of fear and outrage. Russia's terrorism fails in the latter aspects; so far, it only strengthened the resolve, while costing Russia expensive rockets that are in limited supply.
Other than that, Russia doesn't have the reach to do much damage to Ukrainian civilians. Air defenses keep the bombers away, and drones on either side don't allow artillery to get anywhere close to the cities.
We're back to WW1-esque situation where the fighting is happening 100km away in the trenches, and you're sitting there sipping tea like nothing is going on, while the number of crosses at the cemeteries and people without limbs is growing, and the number of men of fighting age you can spot in the streets is shrinking.
From talking to soldiers, it's also impossible to gauge the losses. Assault units that storm the trenches have high casualty and loss rates. Bad commanders can send units into an area without recon, condemning them all. Hell is hell, and war is worse. But there's simply no data.
It's safe to say that combat casualties and deaths are much higher than reported. It's also safe to say that it's not nearly as high as the fearmongering you cited suggests: Ukraine is struggling with mobilization, and needs those 1M mobilized to hold the line (Zaluzhny's article in the Economist talks about the need to mobilize 500K a year ago - a task which is still ongoing).
So fatalities in the "hundreds of thousands" range would simply mean a frontline collapse. Meanwhile, we see the opposite happening: Ukraine's incursion into Kursk demonstrates that Ukraine has enough manpower for offensive operations, while holding up against Russian advances in the East (more or less).
On the other hand, Russia is advancing in the East; slowly, but advancing. That means that so far, their manpower losses have been sustainable. Whether they're sustainable because Russia has North Korea as a resource or another reason is beside the point - they can find people to do combat tasks somewhere, and that's all that matters.
As far as Ukraine's ability to have capable armed forces, manpower shortage due to fatalities would be very low on the list of issues.
The #1 issue would be losing experienced veterans, and not being able to train mobilized people effectively. The situation is improving, but is still dire. The numbers alone won't tell the story.
Losses alone don't demoralize the civilians (or would-be recruits) either. The fear of being thrown into combat with an AK and three clips, with training amounting to "point in the direction of enemy" does it. The fear of having a commander without any regard for human life or common sense does it.
I'd say that the fate of Ukraine hinges on whether Ukraine will be able to solve these problems and alleviate fears (the fears will be there in any case). Ukraine has enough resources, both manpower and economic/military, to fight this war (including foreign help - but both Russia and Ukraine rely on it, the world has gone global a while ago).
It's the ability to utilize the resources that is lackluster. Not an F level, but B- to C-. Enough to get by (so far). Occasional glimpses of brilliance (like the Kursk incursion, most recently). All riddled with careless mistakes that are systemic enough that resolving them is a very hard task.
If you are looking through the web's back alleys to find obscure films, just be aware that sometimes you can buy them directly from the filmmaker. I discovered this while looking for a copy of Sleep Has Her House by Scott Barley (https://scottbarley.com/sleep-has-her-house).
Also, if you have even a passing interest in cinema, subscribing to Criterion is worth every penny, it is an absolute joy.
I've been wanting to watch the William Friedkin movie To Live And Die in LA starring Willem Defoe and William Peterson from 1985 but it hasn't been on any steamers for rent or to buy. It's so frustrating that such big mainstream movies can be unavailable.
Convenience and accessibility is a huge factor, moreso than price IMO. When you're paying a company for access for their streaming service and you still can't find the particular show you want (that they produce) then why not pirate it.
I live in the US half the year, and elsewhere for the other half. Movie rights go in and out of availability even when staying in one place, but when you cross borders, you find your access changing pretty frequently. So for movies, I have a VPN which works much of the time.
There are still plenty of good/interesting films whose rights issues prevent streaming. There is also a significant collection of films that are just not commercially successful, and which may never be digitized commercially. I go for physical media for those when possible.
With music, a fair amount of what I listen to isn't available over streaming services. I buy physical media when I can and digitize it to keep with me.
I haven't pirated in a long, long time. I remember having to hunt down The Star Wars Holiday Special for a friend back in the day. It ended up being easier to buy a home-made dvd from a shady place. I'm sure there's more out there now, and it's easier now, but search time is at a premium.
Movie piracy (and other domains as well) is one of those, in my opinion, exceptions to the idea that “Well, if everybody pirated (or xyz’d) then where would we be?” Or something similar.
Ignoring the law for a moment, which I liken to pedestrian traffic lights in nyc, but with a wider range of consequences, the reason I usually find pirating material unobjectionable is everybody doesn’t do it (in general) and those who are of the sort to do it ought to do it, as there is “room” for their behavior.
Well what about creators? It’s an important question, but I answer that the circumstances of the consumer along with that of the creator and their product should be evaluated on a case by case basis as regards deciding whether or not to pirate.
Also it often has happened to me that piracy of some product was not the final word. That is there are a good deal of things that I went out and bought afterward anyway. Various reasons having been cause.
There is an option for some movies that are not too rare, but are arthouse enough to not get on the regular streaming services, called Movie On Demand (MOD), where movies are provided on DVD-R. I'm struggling to google a direct service, but I recently got a dvd for an obscure movie from the 80s from a reseller on ebay.
It makes total sense. A similar thing is happening with music. So much music (and movies) that is important to me is becoming unavailable that I've been resorting to buying used CDs and DVDs (which are getting increasingly expensive as others do the same) while I still can so they don't become unavailable to me entirely.
Highly reccommend Mubi. Unfortunately, their unique business model (only have 30 films available to stream at any one time) means they lack an archival aspect, but the films they do carry are highly curated and always worth the time.
Is it a matter of not caring, or is it simply the easier and better solution?
Even if something is available on a streaming service, you have to deal with low bitrates, missing subtitles and audio tracks, wrong editions, and even ads.
I mean it's clearly not caring about the author of the works. With a Disney movie you're not making a difference in the creators pockets, but an author of a book or a comic do feel the effects of pirating.
Honestly I get it. When you want content _in it's original format_ and want to guarantee that you'll be able to enjoy it in the future, you can't rely on streaming services.
(So many albums from 20+ years ago are only available as remasters on streaming services, and many eBooks these days are DRMed out the wazoo, as I recently learned from setting up Calibre. Speaking of Calibre, Amazon is, soon, going to shut off downloading books. This means that it will be next to impossible to get books THAT YOU PAID FOR off of the platform unless you have a physical Kindle. This does not include Kindle Unlimited books, which, at this time, are still un-decryptable.)
In other words, if the art film industry wants piracy to stop, it needs to bring all its materials together in a cheap subscription store that people can afford. Criterion[0] is one such product with outstanding content, real human curation, and a lower price than mainstream movie providers.
[0] https://www.criterionchannel.com/