I’ve been slowly growing a smallish server with content, I find growing the numbers to be almost more fun than actually consuming the content I have gained possession of.

(unrelated to piracy, though I agree with the main point of the post) I loved Le Bureau des Légendes! Are these shows well-subtitled/dubbed? That’s what prevents me from sharing them with my English-speaking friends usually, the language barrier is too great and it’s not as usual to watch a subtitled French show than a kdrama f.e

So many kids living in poverty that would’ve never been able to afford such content have their days slightly less miserable because of piracy. Its not like the corporations are losing a penny, those kids would never be able to pay for it anyways, not in this world of extreme under-regulated capitalism.

(Also, in a perfect world, there wouldn’t be poverty, and there would be a fair system to reward the actual content creators, not just the corporation that happens to owns the rights to the concept of that particular Movie/TV Show)

Piracy was likely the only way myself and a large number of my friends graduated college, so yeah.

Me too! The sad thing is that the whole system is set up to prevent people from being able to really choose what to watch. Even within a liberal framework, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the optimum system would be something like ‘person decides they want to watch a show with x characteristics, they discover options based on user reviews or a Wikipedia deep dive or w/e, then they click play and the appropriate rights holder is compensated’. It’s never just been about compensation though. They can’t have users going straight for the good stuff, otherwise what will they do with all the slop?

It makes me very sad tbh. My Dad watches movies all the time, but it’s always some average-to-poor Netflix original, because that’s what the app surfaces for him.

It’s been an interesting full loop. The first rise of P2P file sharing was obviously much more convenient than the combination of broadcast TV and slow-to-release and expensive physical media and the legal fight against it proved pretty useless, beyond shutting down the most obvious for-profit services. Then streaming tipped the scale of convenience, where it was simpler and easier to have an affordable Netflix account than it was to dig through sketchy sites to seek out torrents and only find out later that half of them were actually gay porn.

The history is well known, the question, I guess, is what the next loop around the enshittification path will look like. Are we always doomed to run in circles seeking the optimal experience or can we agree on what it is and deliver it in a somewhat stable fashion at some point?

For anyone else interested in Line of Duty…