the fact that Gabe said "piracy is a service problem" fifteen fucking years ago, and none of these fuckwits in content distribution have learned this at all is a source of continuous astonishment to me.
this post was submitted on 03 Mar 2026
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I havent pirated a single game since i installed steam 20 years ago
There was a short period of time where netflix was good enough so i didnt pirate movies or tv shows either
It's 100% a service problem
Same story here.
Loved Netflix at first. I used to pirate a lot of tb shows and movies and then completely stopped once Netflix became decent.
Then they turned to shit and I'm back to pirating.
But not only that, I'm actually PAYING to pirate content because its a service that just combines all content from Netflix, Disney, apple, etc into one singular app that you can stream from any android device with the app.
It can have pretty shit quality sometimes, but at least I can watch it.
I will pay for shit if it's easy access.
Fuck Netflix, Amazon, apple, Disney, etc. greedy fucks.
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The last game I pirated was Driver: San Francisco a couple years ago, because you couldn't (still can't? maybe?) buy it anywhere except for like, second-hand physical media, and I am not going through that hassle. I can't even remember the game I last pirated before that (Probably Sims 4, because fuck EA and fuck that laundry list of DLC -- but I can't be sure).
Music, movies, and TV shows, though? Oh yeah, baby, that's a weekly activity now. Netflix I dumped many years ago when the fracturing of content to twenty different streaming services happened, and Spotify I dumped just this last year for a few different reasons (the CEO donating to AI weapons programs, introducing a fuckass AI DJ, ICE ads, getting fed up with songs I either can't find or can find but aren't available in my region, or could listen to and enjoyed and then having them suddenly become unavailable, etc...)
I'm sure, someday, Steam will enshittify. Probably shortly after Gabe dies -- and it will be a dark day for me and millions of gamers worldwide. But for now, I'm more than happy to let Gabe empty my wallet with sales and convenience, because the gettin's been good for a couple decades and will likely remain so for another couple. I can't say the same for music, movies, and TV; I don't know if I'll ever end up paying for them again unless the distributors involved sort their shit out.
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The only games I pirate are those that either :
_ are completely abandoned by their publishers and literally unavailable through other means
_ are stuff I already bought long ago and this is the most convenient way to get them to run (I have occasionally bought games again if it was cheap and convenient)
_ have turned to such shitty business models I don't want to give a cent to the publishers (and I almost don't even do that one anymore since usually they've found a dozen more ways to turn the game to shit anyway).
So yeah. Totally agree with the service problem.
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In the grand scheme of things, they don't really care about piracy.
Yes, they could greatly reduce piracy by making their service affordable, available, and convenient ... but they would lose more profits from doing that than they currently do from piracy. They know enshittifying their service will result in increased piracy ... but they also know that it will result in extracting increased money from the people who do pay. And, overall, their profits are still higher despite the higher piracy levels.
(Heck, in some ways piracy has been shown to be overall beneficial. To some degree, it's free advertising, helping media spread through word of mouth. And maybe while they missed out on a media sale or subscription, they still end up making money from that pirate with a merchandise sale or something.)
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I tried to buy digital copies of an album the other day and couldn't because it was only on streaming services and DRM'd to all shit, so I just pirated it instead.
Ended up with some high quality flac too...
Have you tried Soulseek? I finally got it recently, it's kinda amazing. Like old school limewire or whatever but with fewer (no?) viruses. :3
Yeah soulseek is amazing. You should check out nicotine+ if you're using Linux. It's a very nice frontend client using the same network.
I am using Linux, I'll check it out!
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Yo ho ho. If purchase is not ownership, then piracy is not theft.
"The content isn't available in your region"
You have the content. I want to watch the content. But nooooo, I have to turn my VPN on and pretend I'm somewhere else, and you know I'm not really there because I can't magically materialize half-way across the world in 1 minute.
So what's the point? Just let me watch the damn content.
I'm sure these region locks make a lot of sense for the suits when it comes to paying royalties and whatnot but as a consumer it's infuriating. Archaic ass bullshit.
Its tied to royalties, which you mentioned, which are usually tied to archaic trade deals. The landscape may change after WW3 is done.
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and you know I’m not really there because I can’t magically materialize half-way across the world in 1 minute.
Don't give them ideas
Wife and I live in Germany, but still have some streaming services from our home country in Eastern Europe.
We started a Scream movie marathon on the weekend to catch up on the series, before we watch the newest one in cinema.
We watched the first 2, and half of the 3rd on 28th February Saturday on one of the streaming platforms (SkyShowtime). The next morning (1st of March), the movies were not available anymore.
We finished 3 and watched 4 on Amazon Prime, but within that we had to start a separate subscription for horror movies.
5 was only available in German with no subtitles, so I had to search for another source. Ended up creating a Paramount+ account, downloaded the app, and watched the movie there.
Then back to Amazon Prime, where finished the 6th Scream movie, before heading to the local cinema.
This was the last straw, we decided to go back to sail the seas after a decade of streaming service subscription. Next weekend I will take some time to figure out the setup we need to make this happen safely, as a lot has changed since I left it behind.
If you want online streaming: fmhy
If you want torrenting, make sure to bind vpn to client
If you want media server, use jellyfin with arr stack
Happy sailing :)
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Yep. I pirated when I was young because doing things "proper" was more difficult. Then they started having reasonable fees for services that were easy to use without ads.
But now the prices are outrageous, the ads are back, and everything is so fragmented. Piracy is the better user experience again. I was about to set up a NAS and start sailing again, but now storage prices are jumping.
I may just start going outside.
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Completely relatable. The prices keep going up with more and more restrictions while being enshittified with ads, tiered service, and paying twice to watch something - the streaming service fee and then a rental fee on top of that, for a movie that might be a decade or more old.
Arr…fuck that.
This is exactly why people fled cable. It was completely predictable the streaming services would enshittify just like cable.
The root of a huge percentage of humanity problems can be described by 1 single word - greed.
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The new one is: This streaming service is owned by one the most evil people on the planet, and it comes included with my phone plan, but I'm just going to pirate everything anyway, just because Fuck Them.
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Add to this, "this service will only stream in 480p on Linux"
Okay I gotta disagree partially on the third panel. I'd much rather have the option of purchasing individual movies or shows than having a subscription. Like, imagine we had Steam but instead of games, it was shows and movies? That'd be great. Imagine the sales! PatientWatchers amirite?
Unfortunately it's rarely possible to actually purchase, and definitely not without any DRM. So the third panel should really say "This show is not available for purchase" or only mention renting or specify that it's with loads of DRM or whatever.
Except after you rent/buy the video, you can only watch it as long as you pay for the subscription service you bought it from.
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"purchasing" media you mean.
Unless they let you download the file without DRM, you're just renting the video with extra steps. We have seen many times that "purchased" videos from digital vendors gets revoked and the "purchase" is gone.
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One thing that I will enjoy with the slow demise of streaming is that the current generation will git gud at IT again. It's kinda shocking, as an older millenial/xennial, how bad some of the Gen Z's I work with are with basic IT tasks whereas X's and M's are fine with it as we've had to deal with Napster and Limewire
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In instances where there is no legal way to watch something piracy hurts nobody as the company would not have made money from me anyway. It doesn't even hurt the artists, the refusal of the distributer to offer content worldwide is the real scandal that everyone in the creative industry should tackle.
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Do what you want, cuz a pirate is free
You ARRRR a pirate!
“This show is not available in your country” is the one that pisses me off the most. The Internet connects the entire world and then we have unnecessary artificial barriers like georestriction for no reason. There’s foreign shows I’ve been wanting to watch but they’re not available on torrents and only on these georestricted platforms so I can’t even watch it even if I’m willing to pay (which I am for few films).
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The difference between 20 years ago and now is companies have been slowly setting up all the dominoes to make piracy nearly impossible in the near future. I don't think people are aware of how screwed we really are.
Make it impossible how? I've been hearing similar claims for about three decades but have yet to see anything definitive happen.
With the proliferation of age checks, we're only a couple steps away from "age checks aren't sufficient to protect our children. We need ISP level whitelisting of sites that obey the law."
And then if VPNs manage to get around that with any reliability? Well, be ready for the hardware you need to take advantage of it to double every couple of years while the component supply is strangled to death.
Also, moves now to give OPERATING SYSTEM level "age verification" to any site that asks, which will ABSOLUTELY not be done to identify individuals. No sir. Not at all.
The past 30 years have been DRM. The next 30 are gonna be "You can't access the tools you need to even think about it anymore."
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What’s a good source for a noob to learn how to pirate?
The following advice does not apply to piracy, it's just general torrenting advice for downloading legally available content.
- Install qbittorrent.
- Use a VPN (windscribe has a free tier) whenever qbittorrent is running, even in the background, even when you aren't downloading. Make sure qbittorrent doesn't run on startup, it's in settings. This makes sure nobody can see that your IP is torrenting perfectly legal content, for privacy.
- Find a torrent. If you go to the pirate bay (top result on duckduckgo), be sure not to choose any copyright protected content, as torrenting that would be illegal in most places.
- Search for your legally torrentable movie/show and press the magnet (or copy the magnet link) next to the torrent with the most seeders (SE)
- paste the link into qbittorrent, optionally select "download first and last pieces first" and "download sequentially", if you want to watch while downloading.
- Always check the file extension of any files before opening - mp4 etc is safe, don't run any .exe files. There is malware out there, especially in torrented games.
- Be nice and keep seeding torrents after downloading
- Enjoy your legally acquired content!
There's a piracy comm on lemmy at lemmy.dbzer0.com.
(If any mods don't want advice for legal torrenting here, apologies and feel free to delete my comment)
be sure not to choose any copyright protected content, as torrenting that would be illegal in most places.
🤣🤣🤣
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Make sure qbittorrent doesn’t run on startup, it’s in settings
In Advanced settings there's the ability to bind to a network. Bind to the vpn and qbittorrent won't work at all without the VPN engaged.
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