I’ve begun discontinuing many US services in favor of EU ones. However, I’ve noticed that some individuals, instead of simply ceasing to use American products, resorted to illegally downloading everything. While it’s true that the money goes to the US when you pay, it can’t justify disrespecting others’ hard work and effort while still consuming or using their products, and it is also illegal. This is especially true considering that they likely don’t have any direct connection to MAGA. This applies to actors, directors, YouTubers, and many others. We should simply cease using their products without giving them any further consideration.
Edit: adding to the last line, we should give instead more attention to locally and European made creations and products
I think actual artists get virtually nothing from streaming services. If you find art that you do like, considering directly supporting the artists. For example, go to a musical artists live show or buy merch from their website. I’m sure their are better ideas out there.
Don’t forget that the EU Commission funded a report to document the impact of file sharing and then buried it when they found out that it was actually beneficial to the creators. So if you want to engage in file sharing, you’re actually helping them.
Do what you will with that information. If you really want to boycott, then boycott the content altogether. If you can’t hold back, then download them, but you’re helping them out anyway by doing that.
The best thing you can do is support your local art scene and find better alternatives.
The last line of the post is in accord with what you said
Right, but I don’t think it’s explicitly clear - today, the US is dominant in movies for example. Supporting alternative industries could start to chip away at that dominance, and if a day comes when nobody outside the USA cares about their movies anymore because they have their own industries, that would do a lot more damage.
I think we’re in agreement, but I just want to point it out in case anyone missed that point. By promoting alternatives, getting to the point where nobody cares about US media anymore is really the ultimate goal if you’re trying to do maximum damage.
(And to be honest, American movies are really not that good. They’re very formulaic and predictable. That’s why I wouldn’t bother watching them, even if I wanted to download them for free.)
Piracy isn’t stealing because you don’t take the original away from the creator, you just create a copy which doesn’t detract at all from the original copy. In fact, copyright is more a tool for stealing than piracy, as large corporations will get small creators to sign over the rights to the content they created, consolidating ‘ownership’ rights in the hands of a bunch of greedy corporations (Disney, Microsoft, etc) rather than the people that actually created them.
To add (kinda what you said but from slightly different angle)
Intellectual property is a crime.
Just think about it, just because someone was first to fill the paper work for an idea means you have to ask their permission to express any similar idea you had yourself.
If you want to support creators there are other ways which are often more direct without middle men taking a cut.
I bet you wouldn’t be happy if something you made and that you’re trying to sell get copied and shared completely for free. Many people would use that without giving you a penny. It is not stealing in a stricter sense, but it would hurt your finances for sure.
I’m not a large company. As long as I’m credited appropriately I would be fine and hoping this newfound attention brings more customers to me to offset any “losses” from people who would have paid had they not pirated it.
As a real-life example, did you know that papers available on Sci-Hub receive statistically significantly more citations than those unavailable there? source
I wouldn’t try to sell information. Physical products, services, support, sure. But you can’t sell information which has no scarcity. Maybe you could pay for someone to create something they otherwise wouldn’t have, but not for something that already exists.
And this is the same logic that big companies are using when they rip off small scale creators to feed their AI algorithms.
The argument is more nuanced than “it isn’t stealing because it is just copying”.
With the AI stuff, they are not just copying the work, they are stealing small creators livelihoods as well as the efforts of their labour.
I know, it’s cool to say the catch phrase, “of buying isn’t owning, pirating isn’t stealing”, but ultimately this benefits the massive mega corporation’s more than the little guys.
With the AI stuff, they are not just copying the work, they are stealing small creators livelihoods as well as the efforts of their labour.
They’re also distributing the work and making profit off of it. This isn’t really comparable to someone pirating a game in the age where digital ownership is near dead and every other new game is $60 with game breaking glitches on release
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I agree, it isn’t the same, but is still a fact that this rehetoric masks the damage to the little guy whilst fuelling the rights of big companies.
No one likes that, but it remains the truth.
I’d argue it does more damage to directly contribute to triple A gaming companies by buying the crap they release than to abstain from paying for games altogether. People deserve to enjoy things without having to contribute to corporations to do so.
I know you’re probably referring mostly to indie developers though. The thing is that this feels like a moot point to argue because we have no real way of knowing how much piracy directly harms a game developer. Maybe an indie game would have performed better had someone not “cracked” it. Maybe it would have performed worse due to people who are unwilling to gamble by spending their money on a revokable game license not discovering & publicly praising it. In reality I think if it’s a good game with effort put into it, people are going to pay for it regardless - not everyone, but the vast majority of people who would be playing it, even if just because they don’t know how to pirate
I’m not thinking about indie developers… At least not just indie developers.
I’m talking about musicians, comic artists, illustrators, designers, voice over actors, animators… Whole industries that are being treated like they are disposable.
And the upshot is that the small producers will all leave and we’ll only be left with the big producers. This rhetoric around piracy plays into their hands.
I’m not against sticking it to the greedy, just in my experience they have always got a way of mitigating it at the expense of the little guy.
Honestly, framing the whole thing as “disrespecting hard work and effort” sounds suspiciously like American anarchocapitalist nonsense.
Me watching or buying stuff is not a relationship and does not express support, respect or anything other than a commercial transaction. When I want to express support I express support (primarily by voting) and when I express disapproval I express disapproval (primarily by voting for people who will properly regulate your whole deal into submission).
I don’t express myself with money, I express myself with political action, thank you very much.
Look up how much money a band will make per stream from Spotify:
Spotify pays artists between $0.003 - $0.005 per stream on average. That works out as an approx revenue split of 70/30 - so that’s 70% to the artist/rights holders and 30% to Spotify. REMEMBER: The rights holders of a song can include; the publisher, songwriter and the master recording owners (i.e. the artist and/or label if they’re signed to one).
So if you listen to your favorite album with 10 tracks, the payout will earn $0.03- $0.05 and the artist has to split that, too. If you really like the album and listen to it 100 times, that will be $3-$5. So maybe go to a concert or buy a vinyl record and everybody will be better of. The impact of you pirating an album and listening to it 10 times is null
Listening to a track 10x means Spotify says it’s worth max $0.05, $0.035 goes to not-Spotify, and a fraction again of that goes to the actual artists rather than the publishers…
So either millions of people listen to a track dozens of times or it’s not really worth being on Spotify except for the reachability, right?
Remind me how much of spotifys subscribers money went to antivax podcasts?
Starting?
Not at all related, where can you find cheap hard drives in europe?
Your local computer shop, most likely. If it’s run by some old guy with a soldering shop hosting his website on his own little server in the back room of the shop they’re probably the best, speaking from experience here (NL)
As for the Netherlands, tweakers.com their price watch has a decent database of competing prizes across Dutch web shops, even smaller ones!
To anyone reading this, please let me know if there’s websites like this for other European countries!
I have started subscribing to services in Europe now. They have different content, but that is fine. I want Europe to have more TV shows and movies. The American ones I’ll probably just pirate if I really really want to watch it. We’ll see.
I am not a huge fan of IP and copyright in the first place, I see that it has a value, but don’t like how long it lasts. There should be a reasonable time of 10-15 years or something, but not more in my opinion.
The legality is not an argument that works for me. The only thing that matters is ethics / morality.
At the moment I don’t want to support American business, and that is more important to me. I have been a paying subscriber to several services for a long time, but no more.
I guess the question is if they have lost a “sale” / “subscriber” that they would have gotten if I did not have the opportunity to pirate.
I don’t think they have, I would not want to pay if I had no other option either.
This is something that I wrestle with. There are certain companies I don’t want to spend money with, but I want to support the work and the crews who work on those things.
The argument is my money doesn’t go to the crews. But my time spent watching adds to the metrics that gets these shows and albums greenlit, but ultimately it comes down to how you feel about those quandaries.
I make games for a living so I feel that supporting is best for me. If no one bought the games I worked on I couldn’t feed my son. Instead I’m making more conscious decisions about where and how I spend my money. I just switched to Proton for my email, I use Kagi for search. I support teams I care about and support services I believe in. I buy games I want to play. I don’t think too much about the other things.
If a show is not available in my country easily, I do pirate. That’s kinda the only thing I pirate these days.
That’s ironic, considering many people have recently been moving away from Proton due to the CEO’s support for Trump
Hadn’t seen the tweet. I was using Hey but those founders have also been problematic apparenty, and the service is just expensive, not as secure as what Proton offers, and I thought I could consolidate a number of services and accounts and save some money…
Always has been.
2 day old account.
We’ve had big spikes in sign-ups recently, I don’t want to discourage new people from being active posters.
So?
FYI about two days ago there was a discussion about lemmy on the reddit equivalent of this community.
