Everyone on here is smart enough. Just do not participate and save your money. Do not pay for digital goods. If Netflix raises their prices, it doesn't matter because there is a torrent of all of their shows. If Spotify raises their prices, it doesn't matter because your favorite artist has their entire library in a torrent. If some game company ask you to pay real life prices for a digital costume, find the crack online and play on a private server. If YouTube wants to interrupt your video with an ad in the middle of the sentence, download one of the many options that blocks all ads. Billion dollar companies have shown they do not care about you. The people who complain about losing their salary, should just get replies thanking them for paying.
All the sad poor people who might be hurt were already paid. The caterer on your favorite show is not getting residuals. NBC also isn't going to stop making TV shows because that is all they can do. Content creators also existed on the internet long before that was a job. They just did it because they cared about it not for ad money. If you really want to support the artist directly go to a concert or just mail them a check. If you can't actually identify a person who might be hurt, then do not care.
Imo it’s not about you accessing things you want for free. If your family purchased a disc copy of the goonies before you were born and you watched it as a kid, your accessing of that content you wanted for free has no moral bearing. The core question is what impact does your consumption have, and I don’t think that participating in the streaming landscape is making things any better for anyone but their ceos.
The comment I was responding to certainly seemed to be advocating uninhibited free access via torrents, but your point is reasonable. I don't think streaming is a great way to support artists either, though I do think it's better than nothing.
I just don’t think streaming is really working for anybody. Artists are being given less and less creative control as time goes on as each streaming company attempts to optimize itself in a largely fixed market. It’s working the same way cable used to work. I think a disruption is in order, but last time disruption started with people moving to nascent torrent sites.
I guess the way I’d put it is that if you can only get some particular show through one company, that company gets to treat you shitty, cause where else are you gonna go. Torrenting, even just widespread knowledge of torrenting, gives the customer more leverage.
But is torrenting better than buying music e.g. through bandcamp or directly from the artist's label? I do a combination of streaming for exploratory listening and buying to support artists. And live shows when I can. I'm not trying to suggest I'm holier than thou, but I really don't think torrents are the answer to this equation. However I strongly agree that the current system isn't working for artists and needs disruption.
Also if you pirate everything you're not incentivizing people to make things in a more ethical manner. I've mostly cancelled my streaming services (I'll get different ones for a month at a time for specific shows) but I still pay for Dropout.tv (when they turned a profit they paid out a dividend to actors) and Patreon for YouTube creators that have high quality content.
I think the point is, using Spotify is already essentially listening to your artists without supporting them. You might as well do that without supporting a company that is harming them.
A whole lot of people in the tech scene got really mad when Huawei was using obviously stolen Cisco designs and code for their switches. Didn’t humanity benefit from having cheaper access to switches because they didn’t have to pay for Cisco’s sunk costs? A whole lot of people got mad when Microsoft reportedly ganked open source code for things like DNS. Didn’t humanity benefit from one of the world’s most popular server OSs having more reliable name resolution?
Oh, but corporations were the primary beneficiaries, right?
Well, corporations are the primary beneficiaries of this too from a financial perspective. A vanishingly small percentage of people will run, let alone train these models themselves— it’s almost exclusively used to make commercial services that directly compete against the people that made the initial ” data“. But, the vanishingly small percentage of people that directly utilize this stuff for non-commercial use frequent echo chambers like this that make them think more regular people benefit directly. And the companies that are competing directly with creatives and intellectuals using their stolen work employ a whole lot of people here, directly or not.
The distinction between a reason and a justification gets pretty difficult to distinguish the closer you are to the group benefiting from injustice.
> I’d completely disagree, because China was the beneficiary and it destroyed North American jobs.
a) The whole point of commercial NN services is to replace human labor, and jobs are paid labor. Literally the entire point of LLMs is to destroy jobs; this isn't hypothetical-- US companies have openly talked about having fired people and not filled roles because they either have increased or hope to increase efficiency with LLMs. And that's in tech where there's a chance more jobs will be created as a result-- the situation is far worse in creative fields. I personally know quite a few north American creative workers that have lost their jobs because the studios they work for have replaced almost the entire department with image generators that the remaining workers use to spray-and-pray concept art and game assets. Comparatively, the argument that they will create more jobs-- even as many jobs-- as they destroy is pure speculation.
b) Considering you're willing to have in-group protectionism in the form of nationalism, I'm guessing you're willing to extend that to industry, so creative workers don't count? Is it only American tech jobs that count or are you against American LLMs that replace any American workers, also?
> China needs to respect the American trademark system!
Trademarks? I assume you're talking about the patent system rather than logos... and legally they don't, actually. The US doesn't respect Chinese patents, either. How many times have you heard of a US company stopping doing something because a Chinese company patented it first? Do you really think we just invent everything first over here?
The observation being made here is that copyright law serves to protect the interests of large companies, not the public, so violating copyright law is, in and of itself, not unethical.
Whereas i agree that the current regime of "licensing" is not good, I simultaneously find it incredibly selfish to believe that one has the right to any content one likes.
"Own nothing" is bad, but so is "access and share anything." Both positions are too extreme.
I try to buy/rent/legitimately stream all the media I consume. But I've run into issues where I would "buy" a license to a movie, and suddenly I don't have access to a movie. I'm sure it was for some publishing licensing legal reason, but the fact remains that they kept my money I paid for the movie and I don't have what I paid for.
I wouldn't say I have a fundamental right to any content, but certainly I have a right to content I paid for.
Who even thinks that ethical consumption exists under any system? Any of your consumption denies it to others. Some consumption is a necessity of course. We wouldn't speak of something absurd like "ethical breathing".
if you want to support an artist go to the show and BUY MERCH at the table! almost all of their income comes from that. the importance of buying a T-shirt at the show cannot be overstated and sometimes you get to say hi to your idol, too
It's a stupid situation, though. There are many creators I'm happy to support - but for 99% of them, I don't want their stupid merch. It's mostly low-quality garbage with high markup, that nevertheless cost something to design and produce, thus wasting both precious resources and labor - an useless tax on contributions to artists that doesn't even help anything. I really wish this wasn't necessary.
(Even the okay-quality merch is a waste, since for most artists I'd want to support, I don't identify with them enough to display that stuff, so it's again just buying to put away and eventually throw away.)
What is the point of this comment? Just a stream of consciousness for a future LLM sweep? Nobody thinks that the actual creator should get nothing. Are you asking for better T shirts? Do you want more direct ways of just giving cash?
What I want more than anything is for bands to just sell me a damned CD. I've lost track of how many times an artist I want to support doesn't release their music on CD. I'd even settle for DRM-free flacs, if it costs less than a CD.
High quality sheet music would be cool. Lindsey Stirling is the only artist I can think of that does that though. Rasputina used to at one point.
lol I absolutely do not want non digital goods nor pirating. Ever. It's 2025. I don't have a cdplayer, a tape player, a blue ray player, I don't even know what the most modern "blue ray" disc would be. I have $2k worth of vinyls that are just unique copies I display as art I'll never put in my record player, that's also never been used. I don't want to constantly worry about 60gb of mp3 files.
Oh no, that TV show I'll forget about in a year cost me $15/mo instead of $60 of blurays.
I jump in my cars and hit a button and music plays. Almost any music I want. That's amazing.
I'm also not pirating games. I'm not 12 without a job. I have a job. I pay developers for their work. I want more games, like Kingdom Come 3, to come out.
Weird ass comment. You seriously think we're going to put our lives on hold to.. what, fight "digital media"? You think I care about netflix? Or societies use of it? I haven't used netflix in years. I don't know anybody under 40 with a netflix account. Everyone on your end of the pirate spectrum uses debrid nowadays, anyway.
Next you're going to tell people to install the "Black XP Windows" edition to not support Microsoft and they all get malware and their credit cards stolen because they installed some pirated and modified cracked windows. Genius.
MSNBC just cancelled Andrea Mitchells TV show, today, because she brought in no younger audiences. So yes, shows do get cancelled by not being watched.
This comment was upvoted? Hn needs a break. This is some I'm 14 and edgy bullshit that sounds like it belongs on an eastern european piracy forum.
>MSNBC just cancelled Andrea Mitchells TV show, today, because she brought in no younger audiences. So yes, shows do get cancelled by not being watched.
Did anyone, young or old, want to watch an 80 year old stumble over her words, lose her train of thought, and speak so painfully slow? She had built up connections over her long career but was basically unwatchable. The worst part of a Kamala presidency would have been her on the news and not in retirement.
You're arguing for media as a service. I think many people are tired of the SASS everything model. It's generally user hostile, you need multiple different services, there are dark patterns and you still have to endure ads. Privacy issues too. Piracy is definitely superior.
All the sad poor people who might be hurt were already paid. The caterer on your favorite show is not getting residuals. NBC also isn't going to stop making TV shows because that is all they can do. Content creators also existed on the internet long before that was a job. They just did it because they cared about it not for ad money. If you really want to support the artist directly go to a concert or just mail them a check. If you can't actually identify a person who might be hurt, then do not care.