One ironic thing is that one of the easiest ways to find good 'pirate' sites is to simply search for the takedowns. One indirect way to do this search Google for some term like [movie_name torrent] and then go to the links in the inevitable "In response to multiple complaints that we received under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, we have removed 8 results from this page. If you wish, you may read the DMCA complaints that caused the removals at LumenDatabase.org: Complaint [1], Complaint [2], Complaint [3]." message.
Those are the results from 'interstellar torrent'.
The takedowns are largely free advertising for the legitimate sites. It requires some basic level of knowledge, but that's true of even just using e.g. torrents on average, so it's probably a quite meaningful factor in this.
If I do this (and I'm not saying I do) I tend to avoid torrents because I don't want to deal with a VPN to avoid being harrassed. I find a low-quality stream with adblock/noscript on.
Because I'm lazy in the last year I've mostly checked very old movies on archive.org
With the current trends in streaming piracy must be on the rise again. Are there any numbers on that? Ideally plotted against streaming subscriber numbers
I bet the amount of pirating of Netflix content is up since password sharing is being clamped down on—not that Netflix cares. If an unpaid user falls in a forest and nobody is around to hear it, did it make a sound?
But I can’t help but feel that 90% of the “back to the high seas” comments on Reddit or social media discussions of streaming is just pirates justifying the piracy they were already committing.
Pirates love having some moral justification. Shit, they should just admit they prefer getting something without paying for it.
Every time piracy rises to the level where it becomes a problem, the root cause is always poor product/market fit by the content owners. Every. Single. Time.
100% agree. I don't want to rent access to my music or rent access to TV/movies/anime through whatever people use now and have it able to be taken away from me or altered. Motley Crue's music is like 30 year old and was getting taken off and put back up in different compilation albums multiple times in 2019-2021. I want to own and keep forever, and it's extremely difficult to buy a copy of any of that stuff so I just go on rutracker with Firefox's translate tool and get what I want.
Piracy as a whole is absolutely seeing a resurgence. The fragmentation of cable into the streaming era started wonderfully. There was a time when one or two subscriptions could service your media needs. I think the most egregious offender is the NFL. To follow your team, you need all these services: ESPN, Peacock, Paramount+, Amazon. Or, you can pay for a sub-par service offered by the NFL.
Ultimately, we are paying more for less content with more ads than cable. AND they are selling our data on top of everything.
Piracy will gain enough momentum to warrant government intervention that will further degrade and rob us of internet freedom. Mark my words.
With Encrypted Client Hello being rolled out (default on Firefox, optional on chrome/edge with Cloudflare DNS). ISPs can't technically block any website anymore.
They used to block DNS requests, then when secure DNS rolled out, they targeted SNI requests.
But with ECH there is nothing to block except the ip address, which is dynamic and doesn't even belong to the website if it was hosted on a CDN.
I always felt blocking such sites meant even worse for the users. If you google a pirate or ahem porn right now, it will just send you even more shady sites because all legit ones are blocked. Even searching "websitename bla bla" will send you to a copy of websitename that looks like it but it is with more adware and possible malware
Imho that's because of the recent google enshitification.. make sure to add keywords such as "reddit" to get recommendations from real ppl. It's quite ironic that up until recently we could use technology to get recommendations but now we need real people.
From how out of touch I am with my generation I fail to realize how many people watch TV and anime and whatever through those weird, peculiarly named "free TV and movies" websites with the pop-up ads and kinda-okay quality that have JS scripts and tons of protections to prevent you from downloading the content, one even somehow activated my browser's back button if I opened the developer tools. Who is owning these websites and why aren't they as easily taken down? It's certainly not hard to find them if the most technologically illiterate people I know find them easily.
These sites do get taken down relatively frequently, but their owners are masters of ban evasion and quickly reopen them under another name or sell them to someone else who does, as it recently happened with a certain anime site formerly named after a green-haired swordsman.
There usually is a hefty layer of indirection and obfuscation between the sites and the actual content served, presumably to make these moves easier (moving a frontend is certainly much easier than moving a multi-terabyte library of pirated media) while also preventing other similar sites from leeching off the same content. The smaller ones additionally tend to employ fairly aggressive SEO techniques, which is why finding them is easy despite the continuous takedowns and name changes; the largest ones seem to rely mostly on word of mouth, just like their torrent counterparts.
When I got back into piracy this year, I found out my projector had both Wifi, storage, DLNA sharing and a whole modified Android OS on it
it’s really good! I’ve gone weeks without even using any of the devices connected via HDMI and a lot of the video quality is way better than what the streaming services would send, or what the stability of my internet connection would show, or what that devices version of the streaming app would show
Yeah it often makes me aware of their existence. Though I didn't really have a need to go looking for one while RARBG existed because it was so good. RIP :'(
Yes but be careful. In some countries like Germany with low consumer protections you will get extortion letters from random lawyers when you use popcorn time.
Most of the people I know that pirate movies just watch them on pirate sites.
There's a specific site for watching animation (including anime) that has a better interface and search than Crunchyroll and it's free. There are pop-up ads that are easily blocked with uBlock Origin.
On a recent trip to Canada i was surprised how many torrent/download sites blocked in the UK were accessible on a residential ISP. I assumed the block list would be about the same.
Instead of not consuming, pirates use all sort of mental gymnastics to justify their consumption without paying or following the terms involved.
I guess it’s no surprise many of these parasites are taking their ideology to retail. Millions of dollars of goods are stolen yearly, and this is why we can’t have nice things. Why pay when you can take for free?
Calm down satan. Until you manage to manufacture physical products for free (one time cost then get inf copies, as digital content) retail theft !== digital pirating
Aside from the usual "piracy is not theft" argument, which I won't get into, you seem to be missing the fact that in a significant number of cases piracy actually drives legal sales. I have seen quite a few people who pirated a game and liked it so much that when its sequel came out they bought it on day 1 at full price, or recommended it to their friends who in turn proceeded to buy it. The movie/TV/anime merchandise market is larger than ever and I'm pretty sure even pirates like to spend a few bucks here and there if they can afford it; we already know merch is far more profitable than streaming service royalties for most musicians, so I would expect the same to be true for other parts of the media industry.
>I guess it’s no surprise many of these parasites are taking their ideology to retail. Millions of dollars of goods are stolen yearly, and this is why we can’t have nice things. Why pay when you can take for free?
lol, what a silly comment. We have plenty of nice things.
At least within the us, theft associated with things like shoplifting is dwarfed by wage theft. Companies steal from their customers and employees more than the other way around. I would argue this is the purpose of the streaming model, to make sure people can't pass their media collection on to their descendants so it has to be repurchased. Theft.
Piracy is an activity within the scope of the free market, just like this institutionalized theft. Giving companies a blank check while holding individuals to the highest standard is a more impressive feat of mental gymnastics.
[+] [-] somenameforme|2 years ago|reply
Those are the results from 'interstellar torrent'.
The takedowns are largely free advertising for the legitimate sites. It requires some basic level of knowledge, but that's true of even just using e.g. torrents on average, so it's probably a quite meaningful factor in this.
[1] - https://lumendatabase.org/notices/32859507
[2] - https://lumendatabase.org/notices/34353453
[3] - https://lumendatabase.org/notices/24237273
[+] [-] yard2010|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] slothtrop|2 years ago|reply
Because I'm lazy in the last year I've mostly checked very old movies on archive.org
[+] [-] Varloom|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iruoy|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rhino369|2 years ago|reply
But I can’t help but feel that 90% of the “back to the high seas” comments on Reddit or social media discussions of streaming is just pirates justifying the piracy they were already committing.
Pirates love having some moral justification. Shit, they should just admit they prefer getting something without paying for it.
[+] [-] bluescrn|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] slikrick|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hn8305823|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _chu1|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] justaman|2 years ago|reply
Ultimately, we are paying more for less content with more ads than cable. AND they are selling our data on top of everything.
Piracy will gain enough momentum to warrant government intervention that will further degrade and rob us of internet freedom. Mark my words.
[+] [-] musha68k|2 years ago|reply
In the long run imo only two options:
a) finally figure out licensing and platforming ambitions to unify so that the onus is not on customers
b) upgrade your democracies; become Switzerland
Ideally both.
[+] [-] Varloom|2 years ago|reply
They used to block DNS requests, then when secure DNS rolled out, they targeted SNI requests.
But with ECH there is nothing to block except the ip address, which is dynamic and doesn't even belong to the website if it was hosted on a CDN.
[+] [-] gdevenyi|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] awaythrow42|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yard2010|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _chu1|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spicyjpeg|2 years ago|reply
There usually is a hefty layer of indirection and obfuscation between the sites and the actual content served, presumably to make these moves easier (moving a frontend is certainly much easier than moving a multi-terabyte library of pirated media) while also preventing other similar sites from leeching off the same content. The smaller ones additionally tend to employ fairly aggressive SEO techniques, which is why finding them is easy despite the continuous takedowns and name changes; the largest ones seem to rely mostly on word of mouth, just like their torrent counterparts.
[+] [-] yieldcrv|2 years ago|reply
it’s really good! I’ve gone weeks without even using any of the devices connected via HDMI and a lot of the video quality is way better than what the streaming services would send, or what the stability of my internet connection would show, or what that devices version of the streaming app would show
4k rips with latest compression formats are nice
[+] [-] wkat4242|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Alifatisk|2 years ago|reply
One example is popcorntime or webtorrent + finding the movie in Yify.
[+] [-] wkat4242|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] phone8675309|2 years ago|reply
There's a specific site for watching animation (including anime) that has a better interface and search than Crunchyroll and it's free. There are pop-up ads that are easily blocked with uBlock Origin.
[+] [-] phatfish|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] musha68k|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kelthuzad|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BLKNSLVR|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] endisneigh|2 years ago|reply
I guess it’s no surprise many of these parasites are taking their ideology to retail. Millions of dollars of goods are stolen yearly, and this is why we can’t have nice things. Why pay when you can take for free?
[+] [-] yard2010|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lcnPylGDnU4H9OF|2 years ago|reply
This doesn’t seem like the right term; it’s correct from an economic perspective but nobody “consumes” movies the way they do food.
[+] [-] spicyjpeg|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Nicksil|2 years ago|reply
lol, what a silly comment. We have plenty of nice things.
[+] [-] jncfhnb|2 years ago|reply
Theft rates are falling excluding vehicle theft
[+] [-] yieldcrv|2 years ago|reply
piracy involves the item still being in the same place, so you have to prosecute the person that copied and gave it to someone else
[+] [-] yummypaint|2 years ago|reply
Piracy is an activity within the scope of the free market, just like this institutionalized theft. Giving companies a blank check while holding individuals to the highest standard is a more impressive feat of mental gymnastics.
[+] [-] wkat4242|2 years ago|reply
I did share a Netflix account before the clampdown but now I pirate again. I just take the road of least resistance. Like water.
[+] [-] phone8675309|2 years ago|reply
I think they should get the death penalty for violating the terms of service./s