Want to know what I used to pirate, but don't anymore? Video games. Steam makes tons of money off of me and everybody else and has reasonable DRM with an easy to use store.
Piracy is a delivery problem. Make content easier to get for reasonable prices and you'll make money. Don't do that? OK. Piracy it is.
Worse, the harder they try to stop it, the shittier the experience gets for their paying customers, but not for the pirates really. At that point, why would anyone want to pay for a crappy experience being treated like a thief when you can save your money and actually be a "thief" (at least in their eyes) while being treated like a paying customer?
I used to pirate my games on linux, but it's harder than on Windows. Steam's gaming on linux experience is perfect, just download the game and hit Play.
I agree, but most games also have a higher ratio of value to cost. If I buy a game for 50 bucks, I'll play it for many hours, let's say 50. So that will be 1 per hour, pretty good. If I buy a new movie, that isn't available for subscription streaming, that ratio is easily double. If I have a subscription and need another now, that also lowers it's value. It also comes with lower comfort and ease of consumption, as you mentioned.
Another great example is YouTube premium. I'll gladly pay 5 or 7 bucks for adfree content, not 14 though. I don't need YouTube music. So I block ads where I can and donate to creators, if I can afford it. They could have had my money, but they are, simply, greedy.
I also hate it, when deals are altered without my consent. It makes me feel like a sucker, and therefore makes it less likely for me to keep investing.
I agree with your analysis, and only differ in that I do pay for YouTube Premium because I get a TON of use out of YouTube music - you really can't beat their library of obscure and live music!
Yup, if I used Youtube a lot, I'd pay. I don't though. I follow a dozen or so channels, and I stream maybe an hour a day from Youtube. So I use an ad blocker and donate to various channels. Youtube is worth e maybe $5/month to me, and I'd rather just nor use it than pay more than that.
My story but with anime. Japan has some really annoying laws requiring their shows to be blurred and dimmed during fast-paced scenes and it absolutely butchers the height of good animations.
The Blu-ray releases don't have this issue, but guess what releases aren't available for purchase/streaming for English audiences. 🫠 I want to give them money so bad, but 🤷♀️
It's an anti-seizure measure. Which makes sense for TV where kids might come across it by accident, but it doesn't make sense for streaming services where we could easily opt in/out of those versions.
Edit: This is what it looks like, compared to Blu-ray. They dim the whole screen and blend multiple frames together, which makes it hard to decipher what's going on and mutes the colors. (Another):
Sort of, but no. They're transparent because of the frame blending. Since moving objects/characters occupy different parts of the foreground across multiple frames, the background ends up getting blended into them. They call that "ghosting" because it effectively makes them transparent.
So they do lose opacity, but it's not like they're lowering an opacity value or anything.
Oh no! The poor multi-billion dollar football leagues are losing out on pennies from people who cant afford extortionate subscription services! Quick, take legal action!
I wanted to watch World Cup, so I got Peacock for a month for $5. I considered piraxy, but the cost was less than the hassle to figure out how to do it. It was in Spanish, but that was fine by me.
I didn't keep that subscription though because the value wasn't there. But Peacock got $5 from me that they wouldn't have otherwise gotten.
I'm currently in the process of ripping my DVDs and am planning to get a Blu-ray player to rip even more, because I'm fed up with paying more and getting less from various streaming services. I hadn't bought a DVD or Blu-Ray for years until Netflix started dropping shows and raising prices.
I make a good salary, but I'm not going to throw it away on low value services. I spend a ton at Steam and have spent a lot at Netflix and Disney+ in the past, but that's changing now that prices are going up, ads are increasing, and content is shrinking.
Nintendo is one of the worst companies that always want to set an "example" about the DMCA. They don't realize they are fighting a battle they cannot win. Emulators are perfectly legal as long as the emulators don't contain any code that was in ownership from them.
That being said, I'm betting some of those forks were following the DMCA but Nintendo still shut them down. This is where copyright needs to be reevaluated.
I'm honestly not surprised they haven't gone after dolphin emulator since those devs contain the encryption keys to play the iso files.
Part of the problem is they apply Japanese copyright law to an international level. Wouod be cool if they hit the wrong target, got sued for trying to apply their laws to the world stage, and got matched each time they appealed until their war chest got drained dry
In Japan, there is no concept of "Fair Use", it's why they don't have a modding scene and why Japanese devs actively fight against people trying to mod their games. Nintendo uses DMCA on things that are clearly fair use (Parodies like SML, Nintendo themed mods on Garry's Mod), and people cave solely because they can't afford to go to court.
It's also literally a criminal offense in Japan to modify Pokemon data because tournaments in that scene are taken that seriously.
Or to be blunt, Nintendo abuses DMCA (an American Legal system) by applying it to things that would only be illegal in Japan, but are perfectly legal in America as it's outside of Japan, and since the courts only care about who has more money, no one's pointed this out as they'd have to do so in court in front of Nintendo's army of lawyers.
So, I agree with your general points, but I think part of the reason Nintendo is so harsh towards Yuzu is because, as far as I'm aware, Yuzu does actually contain proprietary code from Nintendo.
My understanding is that the Yuzu team used a Switch development kit instead of reverse engineering the Switch as they had claimed, so the entire code is essentially tainted because it's unclear which parts came from the development kit and which parts came from true reverse engineering
I tried looking for it, but all my searches are flooded with articles about this current takedown wave. I did find a forum post talking about it, though, so I know I'm not crazy.
I might try searching again later, in which case I'll edit this comment.
They did do shady stuff but I hate that the "TOTK worked on the Switch perfectly on release day" is thrown around as an argument. It's an emulator, emulating the switch hardware, if it does it's job well of course it'll do that.
I know that they used leaked builds but that just annoys me.
I've seen hearsay that there have been Yuzu patches specifically to aid compatibility with TOTK before it was officially out, which would have greatly supported the "mainly/primarily used for piracy" argument in court.
I would agree with you, but there was apparently evidence that specific patches were made that allowed TOTK to work. And then if you take a look at the link, there were screenshots of the Nintendo documents to suggest that TOTK apparently was not the Yuzu team's first rodeo when it came to patching for pre-release games
It doesn't matter if there's patches to make it work specifically, if they don't contain Nintendo's code. At most they could accuse whoever contributed the patch with piracy / breach of NDA or similar for having downloaded the ROM prior to release (couldn't have purchased it) but that doesn't impact the emulator itself
And if Nintendo has its way (which they did this go round) they won't have to. They got what they wanted and they're not having to spend ridiculous amounts of money (that there's basically no way to re-coup) on litigation. They sued a guy who can never pay them back what the court says he owes them. I doubt they want to go through that again. Easier to just for arbitrate the proceedings.
That's not "proprietary code", those are keys. And they actually didn't include keys, Yuzu did require you to supply a key, however a lot of them were then derived from the key supplied.
And there is no other way to do emulation and a whole host of other things if you can't use their keys. Make no mistake, Nintendo wishes it could make using the keys at all illegal.
Here's the thing. The creators of Yuzu folded which is a win as far as Nintendo is concerned and a loss for everyone else who uses the yuzu emulators. Your semantics about the situation aren't helping. All I did was supply a link to a news story that was already available on Lemmy on literally the technology community. This has already been hashed out.
since this is rating traffic as % of total... I imagine this is less a result of "bittorrent is dying/nobody uses it" and more a result of "the rest of the internet traffic has grown exponentially with the availability of ubiquitous fast connections, while the number of bittorrent consumers has been roughly steady"
no shit BitTorrent was the majority of traffic in 2004. Most connected users were still using some form of DSL or low-bandwidth cable, and some of us were even still using ISDN/Dialup. Even youtube was still a pipe-dream, so most "normal" browsing folk were loading forum web pages with sizes <50k per page. Bittorrent allowing resilient, long-term downloads over slow pipes was the only thing that even EXISTED for bulk data transfer, and could saturate a pipe for days.
I know those good old school days. downloading movies, songs, games, and wares on utorrent. No ransomware, no social media giants, just sharing content and information and exploring the internet at 286kbps.
Ah, downloading postage stamp sized anime releases that still took all day. Forget binging a series in one go, you watched an episode or two a day because that was as fast as you could get them.
But you can't forget the absolute minefield of the era of Kazaa, Emule & Limewire - you never knew when you'd get a virus, something random, literally just cp or actually manage to grab the thing you intended to.
In early 2019 bittorrent's website views fluctuated between ~6M to ~9M. Now it's around 3M to 4M.
In early 2019 utorrent's visits fluctuated between ~26M to ~75M. Now it sits around 25M to 21M.
The fact that there were far more captures in early 2019 for both of them might be an indication that this was their peak, and while visits have reduced since then they're far from dying.
Streaming services may be part of the reason, though I also think it's because many games and software have switched to freemium & microtransactions so spending money is optional, along with the fact that free and open source alternatives to mainstream software have become more robust and popular. When I was a kid I torrented Sony Vegas, but now that's simply not necessary since we have DaVinci Resolve.
uTorrent sold out, its decline is not only due to BitTorrent becoming less popular, but also because what was once a very thin client at one point was bundled with malware so a lot of people kept using old versions or switched to clients like qBitTorrent
apt-get install qbittorrent why would I visit their site for any reason?
And just to add - why is torrenting associated with shady stuff? Linux isos are available and download much faster over it, same for some monolithic applications like LibreOffice and other regular stuff.
Doesn’t matter, Linux users a tiny minority of end users and those using Debian’s package manager are a minority of even that. You’re less than a rounding error.
It isn’t like I’m not willing to pay. My NAS setup wasn’t exactly cheap. But the user experience is just incredible. I had Netflix for ten years, and several others for some time. The experience is just better. Watching whatever I want synchronized with my wife across devices of any type is superb. Who else offers that?
It's not them who should learn. It's us. That it's always a game of profit maximization as that's what the system incentivises. For public companies, if something can be made worse to maximize profit extraction, it likely will be. If something can be made more expensive, it likely will be. Most companies don't make products or serve customers. They make money for and serve their major shareholders. They know what they're doing. We don't.
“Established copyright doctrine will dictate that the Times cannot prevent AI models from acquiring knowledge about facts, any more than another news organization can prevent the Times itself from re-reporting stories it had no role in investigating,” OpenAI writes.
Oh boy, their defense is that their advanced predictive text can acquire knowledge? Please, proceed.
It still is defensible. I can quote a whole bunch of lines from “talladega nights” and “old school” verbatim. I can sing the entirety of “Amish paradise”, with close to 100% accuracy.
My recall ability does not mean that I’ve violated copyright.
This doesn’t matter. You personally reciting movie quotes as a private individual is fair use. OpenAI’s ChatGPT has a commercial purpose, and you could say it does compete with The NY Times.
Only indirectly - as in airplanes competing with cars. And the law generally encourages that type of competition as it leads to substantial innovation and economic growth.
That's like saying amazon and mom and pop gift shops don't compete. Like yeah, a lot of people will still prefer the atmosphere and curation of the mom and pop shop but that doesn't fucking matter when the vast majority of people just use Amazon, driving the shop out of business. This despite the fact that Amazon is more general and only competes indirectly.
Do you have paying customers that ask you for movie scripts and song lyrics like OpenAi does? If so, the above would be flat out copyright infringement.
What does that have to do with copyright infringement though? And how would it be illegal?
I could totally start a website, maybe call it "New York Stories", read every news article about New York (I'd get a lot of them from NYT) and then working off my own memory, not copy/pasting the text write/publish the same story. That would not be copyright infringement. In fact the NYT themselves do it all the time, publishing things that were originally reported elsewhere. You're allowed to do that as long as you don't produce exact copies.
LLMs generally don't do exact copies of anything - they're just not exact at all. If you ask the AI exactly the same question a thousand times, you won't get precisely the same exact response twice.
For example asking "What should I eat in New York?" gave me:
New York City offers a vast array of culinary experiences, reflecting its diverse culture. Here's a mix of iconic eats and modern must-tries:
Pizza: New York-style pizza is famous worldwide. Visit classic spots like Di Fara, Lombardi's, or newer favorites like Lucali for a slice of this iconic dish.
Bagels and Lox: New York bagels are [... several more paragraphs ...]
Then the same question again:
New York City is a melting pot of cultures, making it one of the best places in the world to explore a wide variety of cuisines. Here are some iconic foods and places to consider when deciding what to eat in New York:
Pizza: New York-style pizza is famous worldwide. Look for places with a long history and great reviews, such as Lombardi's (America's first pizzeria), Di Fara Pizza, or Joe's Pizza for a classic slice.
Bagels: Another iconic New York [...]
It's approximately the same response but not exactly the same and even recommends different restaurants.
Being exact matters when it comes to copyright infringement. Like OpenAI I'm genuinely curious how they got it to output a verbatim copy of anything. That's highly unusual behaviour and if they had reported it to the company I'm sure it would have been fixed. Just like if someone posted an exact copy of an NYT article in this community it would be removed and nobody would be taken to court.
Yep. Only reason I recommend not to is if you're concerned about your ISP seeing your DNS queries. I use internally hosted DNS with forwarders to Quad9 using secure DNS so that my DNS queries are segregated and hidden from my ISP.
I've been on Quad9 and Cloudflare for a while now, and I was thinking of going back to OpenDNS as my backup, but I guess I'll use afraid.org or one of the others instead.
Yet, despite an overseas focus, Americans won't be able to avoid the proposal's requirements, which covers CDNs, virtual private servers, proxies, and domain name resolution services, among others.
... and ...
The premise is relatively simple. By having a more rigorous sign-up procedure for platforms such as Amazon’s AWS, for example, the risk of malicious actors using U.S. cloud services to attack U.S. critical infrastructure, or undermine national security in other ways, can be reduced.
No need to assume, you can see this on all of their comment history. They are claiming ownership of their words, or in the context, ownership of how they’ve arranged others words
I was thinking of using this comment to train my for-profit LLM, but now that I see the licensing agreement, I know I will never be able weather the prolonged court battles.
I was thinking of using this comment to train my for-profit LLM, but now that I see the licensing agreement,
Honestly at this point it's more about just reading the replies from people who get bent out of shape about seeing that link, than actually protecting myself from bots. It's almost like a strange Internet Rorschach test. It's honestly kind of weird how many people respond back negatively to that link.
Having said that, primarily it's an attempt to get AI companies that use bots to not use my comments to train their models, or at least give citation of my name if they do, which I've never seen any company do at this point for anything that they use to train any their models.
I know I will never be able weather the prolonged court battles.
It's a momentary copy and paste, a 'low hanging fruit' thing I can do to try to limit interaction with bots. If it works, it's a bonus.
Also, I'm retired, I have time on my hands. You never know. 🤷
"Security by obscurity" is very much an end user "i don't need to harden my server/accounts because nobody would bother hacking me" attitude and is really is "dumb as fuck"
But KYC is just expanded due diligence before providing services, thats why I thought it as privacy issue as to why someone would be against it as opposed to it security wise.
I still don't see how you've gotten from that to "nationally enforced security by obscurity" though
I think we fundamentally disagree on these ideas, and that’s ok.
“Implementing systems that are not vulnerable to attack” is an impossible task. And passing KYC legislation doesn’t preclude anyone from hardening their system and I didn’t read any signs that the government plans to leave any of its systems unhardened.
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