The craziest thing about online piracy is that Donald J. Trump is in the Epstein files.
This comment made my day
I clapped when I read because I agree with thing
It made my hole weak.
In the professional world it’s called “Distributed backups” and is recommended technique for archiving. I’m doing my bit daily at no charge to the media industry, just out of the goodness of my heart :)
It almost died when?
Any pirated content that I’ve looked for over the past 20 years has been easily accessible.
The only reason I’ve slowed down is due to the quality of today’s media, not because of availability of content.
Anime & Movie & TV streaming sites got hit pretty hard not that long ago.
That is called engagement farming, pretty common on YouTube, there are probably 50 videos like this released in the past month, they just copy paste from each other, each getting hundreds and thousands of views.
The only noticeable decline in piracy came in the year when Netflix got famous, which got reverted in the next few years due to the launch of another 100 Streaming sites and netflix’s enshittification.
It definitely had a dip. Sure you could find whatever you wanted but the amount of people doing it has declined, and ease of use. Streaming when it started was to easy and people didn’t bother. Now price increases and ads and stuff going everywhere, piracy is easier.
There may have been a “dip” but never was it close to being moribund.
Every one is else is doing piracy while I’m doing “digital content preservation”. These companies would happily send you a letter telling you to destroy all copies of a book In your house if they had the right to. You must resist.
I was thinking this while setting up RomM a few months back. Each media stack I’m running has a bit of a different reasoning behind it, but at the end of the day it’s more about convenience and owning my own library than anything cost-related.
My Jellyfin server exists because streaming services are a nightmare. Overpriced as hell, extremely limited libraries, things constantly coming and going.
I use Navidrome because Spotify supports genocide and Tidal felt too limited, and neither pays artists well. While most of my library is pirated, I make it a point to buy directly from the artists whenever possible - whether that’s digital downloads, vinyl, or merch, direct support goes much further than streaming services ever will.
RomM is about preservation and convenience for my emulation library. These aren’t hard to find online, sure, but knowing I have my own copies feels like a safety net in case of more shutdowns and lawsuits.
While most of my library is pirated, I make it a point to buy directly from the artists whenever possible - whether that’s digital downloads, vinyl, or merch, direct support goes much further than streaming services ever will.
You might already do this, but I’d suggest to further prioritize buying from up and coming and independent artists. You don’t need to support whatever random person/corporation owns the rights to the discography of a dead musician unless you have a compelling reason to so, and you don’t have to deepen the pockets of already loaded superartists/bands. Is there a Bandcamp Friday coming up, then you can wait until then to make sure a larger chunk of your money goes directly to those who made the music.
Oh yeah, absolutely
I’m thinking the same - i for example have nearly every fitgirl release stored and backuped. there is no way i can ever play them all, but last time i checked i have quite a few games that are not available to buy anymore because they were pulled from steam/gog/epic. sometime in the future i will work on making all of these games available again.
The line graphs for corporate greed and online file sharing are the same line.
Turns out people will stop caring about your property rights if you take the things thry paid for away from them. They also like things to be convenient and easy! Who knew?
They were on the right track and then greed took over yet again, injecting advertisements and making tiers. I want a video in reliable good quality, no worry about it being edited or that it will disappear, without ads. The options are buy the Bluray or pirate it, for older movies there is one option.
greed
Didn’t take over. It took the mask off.
Corpo parasite think they can abuse contract law without peasants clapping back is naive.
Also, why would I fund my enemy
Uh, because not funding them is illegal and bad and you can’t do illegal things because those would be crimes and its illegal to fo crime.
That’s right, fuck 'em 🐸
They are the criminal. Like man and domination. You aren’t winning either even though that other person/people died because of you.
That means you will have all your life stolen from you until you beg Ma to ressurect and summon you out of the void at least two big bangs from now.
Give these fucks a dozen if they’re lucky,
We understand the world in none of the same ways, and completely agree i think.
That’s because you think your death ends life.
Life can never end. It might do so here, but we live in an infinate number of infinately variant universes. That doesn’t even touch Strange 'verses which also happens. You can escape reality. Even when you die.
/Makes a Ledger laugh
In all fairness variation and work toward the the Doc’s understanding, knowledge and perception has been explicitly my objetive in study.
Thy asked for it.
/shrugs
Funny that, I do know, I have alraady seen a whole big bang roll 'verse by with absolutely zero acknowledgement or respect for the nonsense of “money” at all.
ends life
People always use these words, but the one is just a way to break line of sight and the other nobody can agree on when you really dig in.
You do gotta see, that without the F’ing, you are yourself, an entire existance of pure deception.
I’m not watching a whole ass video to tell me “because streaming fragmentation is worse than ever”
Also it’s unlikely it actually almost died
Yeah, I don’t think piracy ever came close to dying. It definitely slowed down for a small time when Netflix was the only real player in the streaming space, as a lot of pirates didn’t actually mind paying for a service as long as it worked and had content. For those people, piracy was a service issue, not a cost issue.
Now that Netflix doesn’t have anything to watch and the content is spread across dozens of networks (again), piracy is back on the menu for that specific demographic. But there will always be a demo that will pirate no matter what, be it principles or be it cost.
Yeah I’ve been on and off dabbling in downloads for probably a solid 20 years now and it never really “died”. I frequently download things like games to avoid dropping £40+ on something that might be completely worthless before I’ll throw money at it. And I know steam refunds are pretty good now but they’re not perfect and anything out of steam isn’t affected by them. Hell my most played steam game, rimworld, I initially pirated and dropped before trying again later on and buying. I’m happy to pay for things like streaming services if they actually provide something I want and I don’t have to navigate the bs. If they can’t sort out licensing then that’s not really a me problem, it’s a them problem. After Netflix started price hikes and screwing around with recommendations I dropped it.
Hell my most played steam game, rimworld, I initially pirated and dropped before trying again later on and buying.
Back in the day you could buy Rimworld directly from the developer’s website and that shit was portable. I played it off a flash drive on my high school computers. Did the same thing with FTL as well. Most of my hours in those games are not logged, lol.
me pirating everything for the last ten years
“it almost died?! On my watch!?”
Definietly not, but it dropped from the ‘mainstream’ knowledge base and people who only knew screaming are ‘discovering’ it now.
That speaks more toward general tech illiteracy than anything else.
GenZ might be even worse than boomers when it comes to learning how to use tech. That is why so many solutions are basically automated these days so that you can treat everything like it is a streaming site.
Tech illiteracy today is insane. I had to help my parents connect up the TV as a kid, and now I have to help my kids connect up their TV/PC. Obviously a lot wrong with that statement (I. E. Not everyone leans techy) but it does make me feel like my age group is the only ones that have a vauge idea what is going on
I think it’s probably being in the age range that kinda straddled the time between now - when it’s all an unshakeable piece of daily life - and the time before it existed / was commonplace. Having grown up before all of these world changing tech advances, and then being there for the ride, is just a singular experience and perspective neither our parents or our kids can possibly have.
I’m really grateful for having gotten to take the ride, but it does strike me as sad in a way.
I never stopped, OG Captain from Napster and long time NZB gang.
Dial-up BBS’es in my case. I ran a few too.
kids these days won’t know the joys of running a pirate bbs out of an abandoned subway stations connection box
Sounds like something I would’ve read about like 20 years ago in 2600 magazine.
FREE KEVIN
It was truly wild to meet him briefly at Defcon after years of seeing “FREE KEVIN” and such.
Sounds adventurous. Wanna rell me more? :)
Guys hi, just looking for some support share, a Fantasy Adventure Story, for all ages and just some entertain with some storyes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_mVIvQ1wsgg - maybe you are curious
Why are you spending this much effort on advertising unwatchable AI slop?
Piracy never got anywhere close to dying. TV and movie piracy dropped a bit when there were decent streaming services though.
Lots of people got used to watching what they want, when they want it. Now that the streaming services have all enshittified, loads of people are turning to piracy because it provides better service.
I get a stellar service from my mate’s Plex server that he doesn’t charge me to access. If there’s something I want, I request it through some automated service he has and within no time at all it’s ready to watch.
In general I agree, but my understanding is that the pirate streams of live sporting events were cracked down on quite hard. There was definitely a dip at one point where the high quality SopCast and Ace Stream broadcasts that had become very popular for competitions like the Premier League (e.g. Bloodzeed) disappeared quite suddenly and weren’t replaced with anything comparable.
True, good sport streams are a lot harder to find than they used to be.
If it wasn’t for piracy I would have just kept reading books. Instead, I just watch all the bullshit.
EDIT: Most of the time, the people who make shows have a much better imagination than mine
Feels like there’s more to it than that. But yeah, we did believe the ads and want what we were promised.
Speaking personally, it’s literally that. I used to pay for Netflix, HBO, Prime and Disney+, now I don’t pay for anything.
The reasons are quite simple:
- everything got more and more expensive
- some of the services started pushing ads down my throat even though I paid for them (usually the higher tier)
So I got back to torrenting + self-hosting (had to migrate from Plex to Jellyfin because even self-hosted solutions are turning to shit).
Oh that’s definitely in there, but you feel a kind of resentment and ‘why the fuck do i need these people?’ On top of it, right?
plex to jelly fin
If you pay for it, you do not own it. Only that taken with lead steel or lies is ever really yours.
Or what’s freely given, i guess, but corporations can’t do that.
They pretty much nailed it as far as I’m concerned.
I do have the feel that gaming piracy is on a all time low. At the moment there isn’t even a single active denuvo cracker while there used to be like 3-4. Probably because stores like steam and gog, which are consumer friendly with fair prices for most products and not linked with stupid subscriptions.
On the other hand movie and shows piracy is rising for the anti-consumer platforms, who can pay $200 a month for seeing all decent shows and movies without ads? Very few people, and even then you own nothing.
I have a feel that music piracy will rise soon too. As Spotify already have started the anti consumer route. I’m pretty sure in a few years it’s subscription won’t be as worth it as it used to be, and a lot of people will find out that they have been paying for years and still own nothing.
Music piracy, while still a thing, is basically nil at this point, because the record industry didn’t fuck up streaming (for the consumer). The artists don’t get paid enough, but from a consumer perspective you don’t have to sub to all the services to get all of the music.
We were so close to that with Netflix back in the beginning. Then the studios got greedy, and here we are.
I found the easiest way to pirate music was to just grab stuff from youtube. Maybe in the future Freetube will have an option to download whole playlists, but in my middle age I am way less likely to download the whole album for “context.”
YouTube (via yt-dlp) is my fallback for if I can’t find what I need on Soulseek.
The quality is fine, but I likes my FLACs.
DLP is pretty good and has a lot of non youtube utility. For those at home, I like Stacher7 for interfacing with yt.dlp without using a command line.
Music piracy’s still alive here and there. The torrents I usually find are massive FLAC files that have very little advantage over much smaller MP3s though. I might need to buy some really fancy gear to appreciate it maybe.
Music piracy basically amounts to not using sponsored AI playlists
Listening to the music you like instead of the music you are told to like
that’s what music piracy has become today !Yeah, music piracy is kinda niche these days: mostly just people who want a local library and who have a modded iPod or similar. I use Soulseek to get flacs of the music I play on my radio show, just so I can be sure I’m offering the best possible quality.
But to be honest, I straddle both camps. I have a modded iPod full of music, but I also have Apple Music mostly for convenience.
The second that valve goes public and gets horribly enshittified , it will grow exponentially.
I have codex steamdrm crack at good custody for saving my library when it happens.
That is if you have your library downloaded already
Is that something that universally works on all Steam games? If so, is this something one can find on public torrent trackers?
I don’t know if universally but I think all that use basic steam drm.
I found in cs.rin.ru. There is even a post explaining how it works.
If you ever downloaded a game with a basic steam crack you already have it. The files are the same for all games.
How exactly is Steam consumer friendly? Or is the bar so low that companies that don’t shoot themselves in their feet by mistake because they were actually aiming for the customer are considered “consumer friendly”?
The bar is, indeed, very low. By comparison I don’t feel as predated as in other shops.
gog is more consumer friendly but steam is pretty good too compared to the alternatives.
GOG doesn’t do regional pricing and only supports a handful of currencies. So Steam is much more consumer friendly for any of us living in countries with “weak” currencies.
well, til! :(
The fact that you can add any game to Steam is pretty consumer-friendly, I think.
Doesn’t even need to be a game
True, “add any software.” It’s just most beneficial for games.
Fair enough… I guess I was thinking emulators
Oh, I see. I consider those games as well, since you’re not going to install one without any games included. It’s also possible to make a shortcut so a single game boots up in an emulator.
I thought that crazy terf was cracking denuvo games?
Empress? She retired two years ago from cracking, and started a cult.
And good riddance to them. The TERF rants emboldening bigots to go on further rants were getting pretty old.
Lol, what a fucking loser.
i swear fitgirl can crack denuvo
Fitgirl doesn’t crack lol
I do have the feel that gaming piracy is on a all time low. At the moment there isn’t even a single active denuvo cracker while there used to be like 3-4. Probably because stores like steam and gog, which are consumer friendly with fair prices for most products and not linked with stupid subscriptions.
I don’t know the numbers so I can’t comment on that, but you do realise the vast majority of games don’t launch with Denuvo right? And plenty of games that do only have it for the first 6-12 months because it’s a subscription for them, before taking it out…
I’ve played Baldur’s Gate 3 and Avowed recently, pirated, right at launch, because they didn’t have DRM. Isn’t it still true that nothing on GOG has DRM at all?
And plenty of games that do only have it for the first 6-12 months because it’s a subscription for them, before taking it out…
Sega, Ubisoft, and Atlus being notable exceptions. They just leave that shit in forever.
If they can afford then yeah I guess. I just don’t play those games, and we should all endeavour to boycott such anti-consumer DRM. It reminds me of the Sony Music rootkit controversy.
Baldur’s Gate 3 deserved your money, but pirating Avowed was a good choice. I did as well and don’t regret it.
You’re right, it absolutely did, that’s why I bought it 12 months after it came out and replayed it finally just recently. To me pirating games is just an extended demo, and if I like them a lot I buy them.
Same, I pirated BG3 on PC and then bought it on PS5 after.
There’s a workaround for Denuvo: buying a copy of the game with pooled funds and sharing the game with all the participants using online activation. It’s not exactly cracking, but it is one way around it. The issue is knowing where to find such groups, or starting one yourself. I can get you into one, If anyone is interested. Just send me a PM asking to join.
You can get older stuff for free as well. Practically everything is free, but you’ll have to wait longer with the newer titles because people who donated funds take priority.
Note: Unfortunately, this takes place in a Discord group. You’ll have to use Discord and you’ll have to have an account that is at least one-month old to be able to participate.
Or just buy on GOG and don’t buy Denuvo games.
Sure, that’s always an option. But we’re not talking about buying here. To be precise, yes, a copy of the game is still being bought, but then it gets distributed among 100s of people. It’s pretty much like old-school piracy: VHS tapes and burning copies of games you own onto CDs.
That being said, you aren’t missing that much if you’re completely avoiding Denuvo games. Out of all the uncracked ones that I’ve tried using this method, only two games out of the last decade or so were worth the trouble (Wukong and Hi-Fi Rush).
Lots of games aren’t on GOG.
True, if there’s a game I really, really want I buy on Steam/Epic. Found out there are very few games I really want to play that much, can think of only 2 I bought like that.
Nyarrrrr Mayteyhh
Turns out making it easier to pay and access content (ie. Steam) actually encourages consumers to pay. Weird.
The corpos:
“This is outrageous! This is unfair!”
Basically Epic
You know what this means. They’re gonna be tightening things up as soon as they smell slowing down profit growth. If you live in a copyright haven, make sure your anon VPN, blocklists and all that are setup correctly.
Newbie here - Can you recommend a good Linux VPN? (For totally legal Distro Torrents, of course.)
Hoping for the Netherlands!!!
bring back shareware tbh
