this post was submitted on 21 Nov 2024

146 points (98.7% liked)

Europe

1555 readers

327 users here now

News and information from Europe 🇪🇺

(Current banner: La Mancha, Spain. Feel free to post submissions for banner images.)

Rules (2024-08-30)

This is an English-language community. Comments should be in English. Posts can link to non-English news sources when providing a full-text translation in the post description. Automated translations are fine, as long as they don't overly distort the content.
No links to misinformation or commercial advertising. When you post outdated/historic articles, add the year of publication to the post title. Infographics must include a source and a year of creation; if possible, also provide a link to the source.
Be kind to each other, and argue in good faith. Don't post direct insults nor disrespectful and condescending comments. Don't troll nor incite hatred. Don't look for novel argumentation strategies at Wikipedia's List of fallacies.
No bigotry, sexism, racism, antisemitism, dehumanization of minorities, or glorification of National Socialism.
Be the signal, not the noise: Strive to post insightful comments. Add "/s" when you're being sarcastic (and don't use it to break rule no. 3).
If you link to paywalled information, please provide also a link to a freely available archived version. Alternatively, try to find a different source.
Light-hearted content, memes, and posts about your European everyday belong in [email protected]. (They're cool, you should subscribe there too!)
Don't evade bans. If we notice ban evasion, that will result in a permanent ban for all the accounts we can associate with you.
No posts linking to speculative reporting about ongoing events with unclear backgrounds. Please wait at least 12 hours. (E.g., do not post breathless reporting on an ongoing terror attack.)

(This list may get expanded when necessary.)

We will use some leeway to decide whether to remove a comment.

If need be, there are also bans: 3 days for lighter offenses, 14 days for bigger offenses, and permanent bans for people who don't show any willingness to participate productively. If we think the ban reason is obvious, we may not specifically write to you.

If you want to protest a removal or ban, feel free to write privately to the mods: @[email protected], @[email protected], or @[email protected].

founded 4 months ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

146

Nearly half of young Norwegians are fine with piracy to save money, survey shows (www.techspot.com)

submitted 1 day ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

32 comments fedilink hide all child comments

High costs cited as the main reason for piracy acceptance

top 32 comments

sorted by: hot top controversial new old

[–] [email protected] 2 points 14 hours ago

I don't reflect upon my own piracy very much. But I guess I do engage in it a bit.

Gone are my days of cracked copies of NX and Autodesk stuff. But I still do actively acquire game roms. All for systems that have had their stores shut down, or I've modded to not need physical media anymore.

I guess I justify it to myself that getting secondhand copies of physical games doesn't help the creators anyways, and I would never buy re-releases because I don't buy new consoles.

I have downloaded shows from the streaming services I have. I view it pretty similar to the days of VHS, recording broadcast television. I hate it when there's a show on a service you love, and suddenly it's gone. Westworld on Max. My daughter's Blue's Clues disappearing from Paramount. I'm protecting for those scenarios.

The only one I sometimes feel a bit bad about is my extensive use of ad blockers and sponsor block on YouTube. I consume soooo much YouTube. And I watch too many creators to support them all on Patreon. But YouTube is basically unwatchable without an ad blocker. That pang of guilt is not even measurable on the scale when weighing whether or not to block ads.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Insert Gabe Newell quote here

[–] [email protected] 31 points 1 day ago (3 children)

Piracy is an act of robbery or criminal violence by ship or boat-borne attackers upon another ship or a coastal area, typically with the goal of stealing cargo and other valuable goods.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piracy

What nearly half of Young Norwegians are fine with is not piracy. It is unlicensed consumption of copyrighted media. There is a difference, and we should stop blurring the lines.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 22 hours ago

Exactly. Young Norwegians are okay with raiding, not pirating. When you go a-viking, you expect battle and riches, but not from within your homeland but on distant, foreign shores. Sometimes the best loot is to be found in the Christian temples in England, and doubtless it's them that these youths are okay with stealing from. I know I (as an American with some Norwegian ancestry) am.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 21 hours ago* (last edited 21 hours ago)

Surelly as the descendants of the Vikings it's not completelly senseless to think they might be fine with boarding ships on the high seas to take their stuff and with a little plundering of ill-defended costal villages!???

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I don’t know, ship-borne attackers that plunder and steal… sounds very Norwegian really. Maybe they’re just getting back to their roots.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Don't forget the killing.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

And the raping.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 23 hours ago* (last edited 23 hours ago)

Well. That turned dark quickly.

[–] [email protected] 47 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

The billionaires don't support me, why should I support the billionaires. (I don't even do piracy myself, I'm just an ideological supporter)

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 day ago

I value your support, thank you!

[–] [email protected] 30 points 1 day ago

I've been pirating movies and series on and off for a long time. The most recent revival was a few years back thanks to Paw Patrols availability in the country I live in. It is not on Netflix there, only on a national TV station and their app is terrible, so couldn't give that to my kid without causing frustration.

We travelled for holidays and I wasn't aware that Netflix had differences between the countries in what they offered to stream. Well, there Netflix had Paw Patrol. Try explaining to a 4-year old why now they can watch a series but back home it is gone.

So back home I started reading up on Jellyfin, and just pirated the whole series for my kid a few weeks down the line. Obviously no need from my end to stop there, its just so much easier than trying to jump around streaming services.

Contrast that with my recent revival of PC gaming (thanks Steam Deck!). I could easily go for pirating there too but thanks to Steam and GOG, I don't bother. So yeah media industry. Its your own fault people do this.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 day ago (1 children)

If the people pirating weren't going to buy the product in the first place, are they even hurting anyone?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

If you pirate media, a lot of bands, execs and movie stars will have to use business class, trains or busses instead of traveling in their own private plane, like some sort of working class peasant. Could you live with that though?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 23 hours ago* (last edited 22 hours ago)

A lot of well-known musicians are actually not that well off. While Taytay has a private jet, there's a very long tail. The increased access to recording, discovery, and playback tools was not accompanied by an equal increase in money spent on pop culture. It's also not necessarily accompanied by increased fairness in the way money is being split up -- despite digital downloads/streams being being much cheaper than CD logistics.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 day ago

Yeah like no shit Sherlock...

I am neither Norwegian nor young, but can only agree with the premise. We have been paying for Netflix for many years, Netflix seemed to be back in the day a company that understood what was needed to be done against piracy. A couple of years ago we thought of adding Disney+ to our subscriptions as it is great for the kids. I'll pay happily if the service and content is worth it, but I can't justify adding also HBO, Hulu, Amazon, Apple+... Guess what happens if I can't watch a show because it's not available where I live (happens too often) or it's in yet another subscription walled platform? And that would be for content I dont even own and can watch whenever, it just might disappear... I also have what I consider a rather large collection of DVDs and BRs, at least I own those but I hate using them (too much unskippable stuff, warnings (threats) against pirating, annoying to use as I need to switch discs for changing content...), and that's just not a good way of discovering new content, its only for those I really like and want to have and rewatch.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 day ago

I've returned to piracy as well. Setup a plex server, filled it with MP3s and videos and it's great. No fucking subscription. No ads. Nobody except me can delist anything. If I want something to be there, it will be there and not on some competing streaming service. And when you take into account that Spotify will pay Rednex 0,00286€ when you stream Cotton Eye Joe, you're also not really hurting the artists.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Nearly half of young Norwegians ...

C'mon young Norwegians! You can do better than that!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago

Seems reasonable. As prices rise, more people will see it as a bad deal.

[–] [email protected] -5 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (3 children)

Anybody is perfectly free to boycott any product. But piracy doesn't feel right towards content creators. Heck, streaming services are dirty cheap these days and if you can't pay 10€ or so per month, well, you're cheap.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 22 hours ago* (last edited 22 hours ago)

Heck, streaming services are dirty cheap these days and if you can’t pay 10€ or so per month, well, you’re cheap.

Yeah, it's not about the money. The amount I spent on my personal media server could sign me up for almost every streaming services in existance ... for a decade or so.

But piracy doesn’t feel right towards content creators

I agree .. when it's like a indie creator with a few thousand youtube followers or something. I like patreon for that (and spending way too much on that, too).

But if the creators are like hollywood millionaires or studios run by massive corporations? Well, fuck'em! Hell, I wish piracy was actually stealing so I could actually financially hurt them.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 day ago (2 children)

TBH, I'm sceptical about fairness to content creators. Spotify for example is paying exactly nothing to your favourite artists. They get around 2-3€ per 1000 streams, which means that you can listen to them quite a lot without them getting rich. Go to some concerts, they will get more money than from spotify

[–] [email protected] 3 points 22 hours ago* (last edited 22 hours ago) (1 children)

Spotify's incentives also work to make new music worse. People now release "albums" with a large number of short, low-quality tracks (because each stream above the length threshold pays the same), with only one or two songs that are standouts (to gain entry into Spotify playlists which are the major discovery mechanism). It's also been proven that Spotify artificially increases the field of your competition by contracting out lowish-quality original compositions in some cases, for which they get to keep all the royalties.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 21 hours ago* (last edited 21 hours ago) (1 children)

This was already the case, well before digital music streaming: go look at music albums from the 90s and before that, and they're overwhelmingly 2 or 3 good tracks and the rest filler.

Only a few of the greatest artists would mainly escape this trend and often only in a few of their albums, and there are plenty of one-hit-wonders who only ever produced one successful album with only one popular track in it and the rest pretty much filler.

It's not by chance that even in the music disc days, there was the LP (i.e. an album) and the Single that only had a couple of the best tracks.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 21 hours ago* (last edited 21 hours ago)

You're right, the tendency for catchy singles did exist already. But still, I'd argue it used to make more sense to put work in a 30-/45-minute album worth listening to than it does now.

Anywho... *proceeds to yell at clouds*

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

Yeah, they are quite shitty. OTOH if you pirate music then artists get 0.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Yes. If it were just that, I'd be fine with it. But on top of paying them, every streaming service has their own app, website, whatever structure and I lose the priviledge of having my own digital library with my own search function integrated into my home automation and if we see that as a luxury, alright, then they're giving me 720p maximum because my computer doesn't match whatever they want me to buy and use for consuming their offers.

Piracy is a convenience problem, not a money problem.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 day ago

Netflix removed Star Trek Discovery from one season to the next. Paramount wanted to have all Star Trek on their streaming service. Sure, I could have just switched to Paramount but just for that one series? Nah, just pirated it.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 1 day ago (2 children)

What makes you think that you are entitled to all that for free? Want to own stuff? Then buy physical media and there is also Bandcamp for music. Don't want any of this? Then don't listen or watch.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 22 hours ago

We are all playing a board game where the rules say billionaires win every time. You either keep pretending that our society is just and keeping to the rules the capitalist class wrote is good for society, or you can also realize that everyone does what they can get away with and the "lost profits" of Netflix et al. are just as much collateral damage as homeless people we refuse to house because REIT line go up.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Netflix enshittified their service over time for Linux users. So they reduced their service while increasing prices and thus I enshittified my payments by stopping them.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

Nothing wrong with not paying a service you don't want.