File sharing sites Openload and Streamango shut down by Anti-Piracy Alliance ACE

[mr moose]

9 hours ago, jagdtigger said:

Many of us are feel like we are entitled to the resolution and full catalog whn we pay lets say for a FHD netflix sub. Reality? Limited catalog and if you dont use mspy stuff or have a rooted phone you are screwed....  Ppl pirate because legal sources are clunky, expensive, and restricted to borderline unusable levels.  Plus there are country's where there is a tax on empty media so ppl think "if im paying for it anyway why not?".  Until companies stop treating their customer base like worthless numbers on a paper nothing will change.

 

you are not entitled to a full catalogue if the company doesn't sell you one.  Leadeater explained very well why they don't do that, however why is still a moot point,  just because a company doesn't cater to your specific needs still doesn't entitle you to the product for free.

[SpaceGhostC2C]

1 hour ago, leadeater said:

That is only because people wish to use a single or narrow definition of the word theft in these discussions and ignore the full meaning of it.

The use the correct definition of theft, both legally and conceptually.

Quote

It's still theft, the law being broken is copyright law.

Theft isn't a synonym of "breaking the law". Legally, copyright infringement isn't more "theft" than tax evasion, murder, or driving without a license...

Precisely because the law being broken is copyright law we know it's not theft, but copyright infringement.

 

Quote

Theft and criminal law covers many things which are intangible, like copyrighted work is, and in fact many laws do not use the terminology theft in them, it's all just a semantics game. Outside of a legal setting theft or steal fit just as well as anything else does.

Oh, no it doesn't, conceptually it is even more different than legally (in that sense that I can make anything legally "theft", as long as I pass a law defining it as such), but infringing a legal monopoly (CP), or applying someone else's idea to your own benefit (IP) is deeply and substantially different from theft. You really need to define "theft" as broad as "trespassing someone else's rights in any way" to make it fit, but at that point anything goes...

 

Really, there's no point dragging this further, as I said in my first post: there even isn't a debate to be had.

[DeScruff]

On 11/1/2019 at 7:19 AM, Trik'Stari said:

Worth noting: You'll get a better experience pirating anything Funimation has on their streaming site than actually using their streaming site. I cancelled my subscription to them because it's complete garbage. Poorly optimized, takes forever to load, has annoying Funimation adverts (Because paying to watch on your walled garden means I need to see adverts about the walled garden) and annoyingly always reverted me to Japanese version of shows whenever I came back to the site.

 

Just complete garbage. Maybe if they spent some money on having a decent streaming service, people would be less likely to pirate. I have 1gbps fiber and their streaming site was still slow and horrible.

Reminds me how for the longest time I could NOT use Crunchyroll, cause they wouldn't get off their ass, and stop using Adobe Flash - something Pirate sites were off of for years by that point.

One thing I will never understand is how pirate sites: AKA sites that are only funded by ad revenue, tend to be less clunky then legal sites that generate actual cash. - And its not just the video player - I can understand that DRM makes things clunky, Im taking about the site it's self, things like comments sections, or discovering what shows a service has - Or hell a way to find out what shows are going to be or have been taken off a service.

Crunchyroll's comment section is a buggy mess. Ether comments wont get displayed, or they will multiple times over. There is no reason to "Reply" to someone, because there is no inbox to check replies. - (Something Floatplane needs to add, but at least Floatplane is a newish website thats still under development, unlike Crunchyroll that has had these issues for 6+ years, and not a single fix)
But you goto a pirate website that doesn't use Disqus... It somehow just works.

[Andreas Lilja]

3 hours ago, TetraSky said:

Quite frankly, not a big loss. I don't know where their servers were located, but with the dreadful speeds and buffering every few seconds, streaming from Openload was never really an option to me.

Real Debrid brah.

[jagdtigger]

2 hours ago, mr moose said:

doesn't entitle you to the product for free

And if they wouldnt get a dime out of it anyway its pretty moot to argue about it. Want money? Better get your butt up and make it available, otherwise they can zip it.

Edited November 2, 2019 by jagdtigger

[mr moose]

18 minutes ago, jagdtigger said:

And if they wouldnt get a dime out of it anyway its pretty moot to argue about it. Want money? Better get your butt up and make it available, otherwise they can zip it.

That still doesn't make it legal, moral or anything else.  You are now literally arguing you are entitled to their content for free because you refuse to pay for it.

[Murasaki]

never heard of these..

[justpoet]

13 hours ago, leadeater said:

That's a huge assumption the majority of pirating happening is because of availability, the biggest link has always been financial situation. Both exist but one is far greater cause than the other. I'd probably also rate too high asking price above availability, sometimes what the asking price is is just insane and especially when it comes to Anime where they cut it up in to volumes of only a few episodes and want to charge you double what a movie costs to buy.

So…ages and ages ago…I used to know a circle of folks that were one of the largest music collection "servers" in the world (it spread across about 300 computers at at least 20 major companies in 4 countries).  This was back in the days of Napster, HotLine community servers, and 56k modems being FAST.

 

There were some interesting interviews done with news organizations and reporters doing investigative journalism back then.  I'd love to quote and link to one that was done out of Canada (one of the "in" folks relatives I believe), but I couldn't find it.  Of the 3000+ people that were there and responded, the majority purchased more than 4x the music (CDs) they had prior to pirating music.  Most people there "pirated" as a way to sample and try out bands they'd never heard of or had been suggested to them beyond just a single song…and eventually found more they didn't know but liked to buy.  A large chunk of the folks also did it because they wanted to collect content, not because they were actively listening to it all.  Only about 5% of the people there said they might buy or even listen to the content if it wasn't free…so it isn't like these were generally "lost sales".

 

Me, I've been out of any kind of piracy circles for decades now.  But, I pretty much stopped buying music after I stopped the free exploring of it via full album or Napster downloads too.  I own close to 1000 CDs (which I still play in the 5 disc changer in the living room)…I think I bought about 10 of them in the last 15 years.  Almost all of the ones I own I downloaded to sample and then bought because I liked.  While I'm certainly not everybody that was (or currently is) "a pirate"…at least back then I was definitely part of the majority…trying to support the artists we found and liked.

 

Also, when you hear "we lost $X to piracy"…it's a load of BS.  They're counting all of the copies they think people have grabbed someplace, and saying every person would've bought it at full price.

 

I'm not condoning piracy.  It is wrong, illegal, and not paying a content creator for their work (unless you buy it in a different form/platform).  It is also VERY wrong to be making money as a platform mainly because of the piracy happening on your platform (such as openload in general was).  But at the same time, it is important to realize that the MAJORITY of individual people don't pirate just because of price, nor make anything from it.

[jagdtigger]

19 minutes ago, mr moose said:

That still doesn't make it legal, moral or anything else.  You are now literally arguing you are entitled to their content for free because you refuse to pay for it.

Well they do put a tax on empty media(in my country at least) called royalties regardless of use-case, so i would argue that it is legal..... And pardon me for not paying for something when i dont even have the option to buy it. As i said, either satisfy the demand or zip it and bear the losses caused by your own incompetence. Legal or not and whether they(you) like it or not, piracy can be viewed as competition that moved on with times instead of clinging to the old ways. In the business world you either adapt to the changes in the customer preferences and to the changes in the environment, or you will fall behind. And eventually bail out because of bankruptcy........

The only thing that prevents this is their (sadly) legal monopoly.

[mr moose]

3 minutes ago, jagdtigger said:

Well they do put a tax on empty media(in my country at least) called royalties regardless of use-case, so i would argue that it is legal..... And pardon me for not paying for something when i dont even have the option to buy it. As i said, either satisfy the demand or zip it and bear the losses caused by your own incompetence. Legal or not and whether they(you) like it or not, piracy can be viewed as competition that moved on with times instead of clinging to the old ways. In the business world you either adapt to the changes in the customer preferences and to the changes in the environment, or you will fall behind. And eventually bail out because of bankruptcy........

The only thing that prevents this is their (sadly) legal monopoly.

If you don't have the option to buy it then you are not granted permission to consume it.  Period.   You cannot justify piracy because someone doesn't want to sell you the product (assuming it is even that bad and people aren't just exaggerating the conditions). You can argue that it doesn't cost them anything or that is doesn't affect their sales/revenue, but you cannot claim it as a right or entitlement.    It cannot be viewed as competition when it is illegal, no one has the right to distribute content they do not have permission for.

 

Now you are arguing that piracy is a legit form of business because the current system has some flaws which don't permit or make it hard to sell content in certain countries. 

 

It wasn't long ago that GoT would have cost me $250 a month to watch.  I chose not to pay it and I haven't seen a single episode.  I refuse to do business with corporations like that, I speak with my wallet and maintain my dignity by not insisting the world owes me anything.  If I can't afford it, then I don't have it. PERIOD.  If more people did this the price would come down naturally through normal market forces (legal competition).  But while people choose to pirate, the prices will remain high and the services will remain semi shit.  That's how humanity works like it or not.

 

 

[justpoet]

15 minutes ago, mr moose said:

If you don't have the option to buy it then you are not granted permission to consume it.  Period.   You cannot justify piracy because someone doesn't want to sell you the product (assuming it is even that bad and people aren't just exaggerating the conditions).

I would suggest that in fact DID "justify" it that way, but also that justifying something also does NOT make it legal.

[mr moose]

1 minute ago, justpoet said:

I would suggest that in fact DID "justify" it that way, but also that justifying something also does NOT make it legal.

 

To justify something literally means to make it reasonable or right, you cannot make piracy right or reasonable if the content owner does not want to give you permission.  The second they do give said permission it no longer is piracy, thus making it an impossibility to pirate something justly).

[justpoet]

50 minutes ago, mr moose said:

 

To justify something literally means to make it reasonable or right, you cannot make piracy right or reasonable if the content owner does not want to give you permission.  The second they do give said permission it no longer is piracy, thus making it an impossibility to pirate something justly).

It would be "reasonable" to suggest that finding a way to get something that is available, but not in your area, is ok, even though it is clearly not "right".  The key in the definition is the word "or".  This is the same as how VPN's to access content not for your region are considered reasonable by most, though not to the companies and their end user agreements, nor full legality, even if the content is being paid for.

[XenosTech]

Meh, I try not to pirate stuff but the whole my country getting lumped with latin america kinda pisses me off since the official language of my country is english and 9/10 streaming sites only give me spanish as an option unless I use a vpn. My second language is french ffs q.q

[AngryBeaver]

On 11/1/2019 at 7:46 AM, Tegos said:

Or as it's known in some social circles: "shit".

I don't know about Funimation's streaming platform (but seeing as its Funimation, probably not very good), but Crunchyroll is completely awful. Bad catalogue, bad community, bad everything, basically.

Oh and they're also lying about that whole "Support the anime industry by buying CR!" shtick. Most of the money coming into crunchyroll stays in crunchyroll, they barely pay studios.

I have used crunchyroll in the past and on two separate occasions the passwords and account were compromised. They claimed it was because I reused a password or shared one with another service, but since I am in this field that couldn't be farther from the truth. When I am using a password vault that is auto-generating my passwords and you tell me there is no way you were breached.... even though there are hundreds of paste's for your site all over the web.... then ya it was time for me to close my account and move on.

[mr moose]

2 hours ago, justpoet said:

It would be "reasonable" to suggest that finding a way to get something that is available, but not in your area, is ok, even though it is clearly not "right".  The key in the definition is the word "or".  This is the same as how VPN's to access content not for your region are considered reasonable by most, though not to the companies and their end user agreements, nor full legality, even if the content is being paid for.

 It is not reasonable to pirate material you do not have permission to use (regardless of why).    If it was reasonable it wouldn't be piracy.   Just because people who want to circumvent geo blocking feel that is reasonable doesn't make it actually reasonable (for many reasons like distribution licensing).   There are lots of stupid things that people think are reasonable, but it doesn't make them so.

[Kilrah]

3 hours ago, mr moose said:

  If I can't afford it, then I don't have it. PERIOD.  If more people did this the price would come down naturally through normal market forces (legal competition).

In the form being discussed in the last few posts, no. When people pirate stuff becasue it's not available to them by official means then that should incentivize the creator to sort out their crap to make it available via reasonable means.

 

And history shows that when pushed hard enough they WILL find solutions - we probably wouldn't have Netflix, Spotify and other streaming services without piracy becasue they were all created as a solution to it. Instead of selling few individual copies of something at a high price making it unattractive turned into "selling" many more copies at a much lower price through a much more user-friendly model.

[mr moose]

1 minute ago, Kilrah said:

In the form being discussed in the last few posts, no. When people pirate stuff becasue it's not available to them by official means then that should incentivize the creator to sort out their crap to make it available via reasonable means.

I think you'll find that's a very small portion of people who pirate and a very small force in the market.   Although many people on these forums like to claim they don't get the content in their region, the bigger reality is that's the best argument they have to legitimize their desire to pirate instead of pay for it.  

1 minute ago, Kilrah said:

And history shows that when pushed hard enough they WILL find solutions - we probably wouldn't have Netflix, Spotify and other streaming services without piracy becasue they were all created as a solution to it. Instead of selling few individual copies of something at a high price making it unattractive turned into "selling" many more copies at a much lower price through a much more convenient model.

That's an assumption based on what?  streaming was a business development in its own right.  Services like youtube, apple music, spotify, pandora all developed when internet services made it viable.

 

[Rohith_Kumar_Sp]

 

[mr moose]

8 hours ago, leadeater said:

That is only because people wish to use a single or narrow definition of the word theft in these discussions and ignore the full meaning of it. It's still theft, the law being broken is copyright law. Theft and criminal law covers many things which are intangible, like copyrighted work is, and in fact many laws do not use the terminology theft in them, it's all just a semantics game. Outside of a legal setting theft or steal fit just as well as anything else does.

 

Edit:

And it is in my view a mistake to take law specifics in to such a debate because then we will have to start saying fraud and larceny are not theft, or similar such matters which is not at all important.

We see the same thing all the time on these forums,  people ignore great swaths of reality and get very specific with the smallest detail they can in order to justify their position.

 

People still claim it is a distribution problem yet the reality is there are few places in the world you can't get content legally yet it is still pirated massively (especially in the US, Australia and the U.K).

 

People try to claim it is a victim less crime,  if that were so there would be no legal footing for any copyright claims or intellectual property lawsuits.

 

People now try to claim the terms of service are corrupt/unfair/overpriced etc.  Simply just don't the product or service.  Not liking the conditions is never a green light to steal.

 

The only person who has made a compelling case for piracy to be reasonable (or at least warranted serious discussion) was @Rohith_Kumar_Sp , where in India there are cases that the only job opportunities (to get you out of the poverty cycle) are IT but the cost barrier to entry on the software over there is illogically high to the point it isn't entirely unreasonable to assume it might be intentional (conspiracy hat stuff I know but still worth keeping in mind). The same cannot be said for those living in the US, UK, Australia and most of Europe etc etc etc.

 

 

 

[Rohith_Kumar_Sp]

3 hours ago, mr moose said:

The only person who has made a compelling case for piracy to be reasonable (or at least warranted serious discussion) was @Rohith_Kumar_Sp , where in India there are cases that the only job opportunities (to get you out of the poverty cycle) are IT but the cost barrier to entry on the software over there is illogically high to the point it isn't entirely unreasonable to assume it might be intentional (conspiracy hat stuff I know but still worth keeping in mind). The same cannot be said for those living in the US, UK, Australia and most of Europe etc etc etc.

Also censorship. not that warrants piracy but i always find myself watching censored movie at the theaters and have rewatch it again when it comes to physical media to see the parts that were censored. 

recently i went to see Joker on Imax, boy was that an awful experience

1 - why the F are there subtitles
2 - ok but subtitles were so effin Huge, for context before it was as big as the tobacco warning, now the subtitles are so huge.!! and in the middle of the screen (i myself took this pic in the theater)
 

3 - and like fuck, who do they think the audience is for these movies? the entire intervals is all about buy this expensive clothes, this expensive phones but at the beginning they always show a small video of poor people with cancer by eating tobacco, well jeez how about you ban the damn thing if you so care that much you have to put it ppls face the entire movie 

4 - this tobacco warning came up wherever a random street person 100 feet back also smoked, suffice to say the warning never went away for 80% of the movie as joker keeps smoking in the movie, the warning was there before but was subtle and small, now it's like in white fucking background 

5 - Indian govt led by politicians who use patriotism to gain votes have made it so that National Anthem is played every screening and thus having you stand up in a movie theater you paid to be entertained. disobey, boy do i have some articles of mob lynching foragers for you.
not standing up makes you a terrorist or anti national according to the brain washed patriotic people here 
https://www.indiatimes.com/entertainment/man-arrested-for-not-standing-up-during-national-anthem-ahead-of-avengers-endgame-s-screening-367077.html
https://www.moneycontrol.com/news/trends/bengaluru-youth-attacked-by-mob-for-not-standing-up-during-national-anthem-3965511.html
https://www.indiatoday.in/trending-news/story/bengaluru-family-bullied-for-not-standing-during-national-anthem-internet-is-divided-1613673-2019-10-29
https://www.indiatimes.com/entertainment/moviegoers-called-pakistani-terrorists-for-not-standing-up-during-national-anthem-in-theatre-378779.html

6 - They give a movie A rating, which is like R rated there but still Cut down all nudity, what was the fucking point then? 

7 - went to see Hitman's Bodyguard samuel L jackson constantly swears, in one of the scenes he says "fuck fuck fuck fuck" like 5 times, they censored the first 2 Fucks but the other 3, saying it too excessive 

8 - you'd thing disney movies are safe, but they censored the words "goddammit", "shit", "holyshit" etc

9 - in GOTG2 they removed a penis joke, insecure much?

 

 

10 - they censored the word "touch" in the sentence 
are you kidding me? 
 

11 - dont even bother seeing john wick 3 in India

12 - they censored a kissing scene in James bond becasue you know, you might reproduce be just seeing it  

 

https://www.scmp.com/lifestyle/film-tv/article/1880780/no-sex-please-were-indian-james-bonds-kisses-censored-spectre

 

do watch this skit 

 

 

you'd think online content is safe? oh now they're coming for it next 

 

https://www.vice.com/en_in/article/a35jna/netflix-and-amazon-may-have-to-censor-explicit-content-in-india-soon

https://www.news18.com/news/tech/netflix-amazon-prime-may-soon-face-censorship-of-content-in-india-report-2349861.html
 

So Indian govt can fuck itself. as long as they continue to censor i'm not paying for it, Amazon has already started to self censor, i cancelled my prime, in netflix does censores i'm gonna cancel that aswell and back to being a pirate. it took OTT to catch on for a bit and people were finally starting to pay for things and just like that everyone's back to being a pirate. 
 

[mr moose]

10 minutes ago, Rohith_Kumar_Sp said:

Also censorship.

BIG FUCKING SNIP..

 

 

Thanks dude,  I wasn't expecting that.  

[Kisai]

On 11/1/2019 at 4:19 AM, Trik'Stari said:

Worth noting: You'll get a better experience pirating anything Funimation has on their streaming site than actually using their streaming site. I cancelled my subscription to them because it's complete garbage. Poorly optimized, takes forever to load, has annoying Funimation adverts (Because paying to watch on your walled garden means I need to see adverts about the walled garden) and annoyingly always reverted me to Japanese version of shows whenever I came back to the site.

 

Just complete garbage. Maybe if they spent some money on having a decent streaming service, people would be less likely to pirate. I have 1gbps fiber and their streaming site was still slow and horrible.

Only partially true.

 

Basically "pirate" content has four or so categories:

- Pirate video

- Pirate software/games

- Pirate comics

- Pirate books

 

With Video, the pirate copy is always significantly worse than the Blueray, but usually at parity with the stream because the pirates are literately ripping the stream itself. It's been known for quite some time how to do that, and sites like Crunchyroll/VRV and Funimation are very behind on that.

 

With that said, if something is not available in your region entirely due to region locking nonsense, or lack of a localized source, then piracy ends up being your only option, because the vast majority of video content will never be localized, and by the time it's localized for BD, the pirates have made it unprofitable so may as just sell the BD's for $400/ea and only make 1000 of them.

 

With software and games, the pirate version and the non-pirate version is identical, most of the time. It's been quite a while since pirates made rips of games so that they could be downloaded over usenet or dialup, so it really comes down to how much the developer cares to profit from it. Subscription software can't even be argued to be "pirated" since you lose access to the software if you're not subscribed, and "live services" games may or may not even have a base game to even buy.

 

Comics/Artbooks/Manga/Manhua/etc - Rarely localized, and what does get localized is only what larger publishers think will sell. There's entire libraries of English content that isn't available in Europe because it's not available in German or Italian or some other non-English language, even if the writer/artist wants to sell it there. So pirate copies of the English (or Japanse, or Korean, etc) comic are fan-translated into French, German, Italian or Russian, the original writer/artist gets super-annoyed but really can't do anything about it since they can't accept payments from half of Europe. 

 

Pirated books, are plentiful, easy to find, and unfortunately nobody seems to see any value in trying to have a "netflix of ebooks", because it's too easy to just rip the entirety of whatever store hosts them and then package it as one download on a pirate site.

 

Make the effort to try get something legally before resorting to piracy. Some people never want to pay for anything, no matter how easy it is to buy it, and then there are people who live in places like Australia who simply get locked out of every "online service" on account of being in Australia.

[mr moose]

3 minutes ago, Kisai said:

Make the effort to try get something legally before resorting to piracy. Some people never want to pay for anything, no matter how easy it is to buy it, and then there are people who live in places like Australia who simply get locked out of every "online service" on account of being in Australia.

I agree but partially, there are reasons we are locked out and it usually comes down to regional licensing.    Netflix Australia cannot provide GoT for example because foxtel have the license so you have to buy a foxtel package for it.  We actually have access to a lot of the US stuff and not too late now either, however the number of packages you have to buy to get it "all" is ridiculous.

[Kilrah]

I think @Kisai meant because of ridiculy slow connection or low data caps meaning that even if you could pay for the service you couldn't make the expecetd usage of it.