Netflix Is Not Going to Kill Piracy, Research Suggests (torrentfreak.com) 158
Even as more people than ever are tuning to Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime and other streaming services to look, piracy too continues to thrive, a research suggests. An anonymous reader shares a report: Intrigued by this interplay of legal and unauthorized viewing, researchers from Carnegie Mellon University and Universidade Catolica Portuguesa carried out an extensive study. They partnered with a major telco, which is not named, to analyze if BitTorrent downloading habits can be changed by offering legal alternatives. The researchers used a piracy-tracking firm to get a sample of thousands of BitTorrent pirates at the associated ISP. Half of them were offered a free 45-day subscription to a premium TV and movies package, allowing them to watch popular content on demand. To measure the effects of video-on-demand access on piracy, the researchers then monitored the legal viewing activity and BitTorrent transfers of the people who received the free offer, comparing it to a control group. The results show that piracy is harder to beat than some would expect. Subscribers who received the free subscription watched more TV, but overall their torrenting habits didn't change significantly. "We find that, on average, households that received the gift increased overall TV consumption by 4.6% and reduced Internet downloads and uploads by 4.2% and 4.5%, respectively. However, and also on average, treated households did not change their likelihood of using BitTorrent during the experiment," the researchers write.
Re: We need severe, mandatory penalties (Score:1)
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It's not piracy, it's copyright infringement. The media owner still has possession of the original content. A better solution is to let copyrights expire after 18 years, just like patents. Copyrights assigned to corporations and not held by the original artist should have a much shorter life - no more than 3 years.
because what you want to watch isn't on netflix (Score:5, Insightful)
simple as that: if you can't find it on netflix, what then?
hulu? amazon? youtube?
when you run out of options it comes back to torrent (or whatever the kids are using)
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The article said that it didn't decrease the use of BitTorrent, but it didn't say whether the amount of material decreased.
Another poster also had a good point that streaming has a very limited selection. That probably doesn't include the recent popular titles that are most likely to be pirated.
I'm happy to pay for streaming content, but much content is either not available at all on streaming, or only included with a subscription, rather than a pay-per-use basis.
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I'd rather have my own personal digital copy that isn't encumbered by drm to only work with certain players, or require an internet connection. It's the only way to be sure I'll actually have access to it down the road maybe 10 - 15 years.
How many shows will never get a dvd or blue ray release because there isn't a wide enough audience to justify the licensing costs?
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It has for me, especially since most of the stuff I can get on Netflix was the kind of stuff I was downloading because I dind't really want to shell out money for a permanent copy of something that was average.
I still download good shit (because I'm so done with physical media), but I'll make up for it by buying a physical copy and donating it to the libra
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Netflix is kinda thin on :
- anything over five years old
- anything being actively marketed or recently in movie theaters
- tentacle porn
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Netflix is between 1-10 years behind on content, so if people find their content there they'll soon find that next episode is "only" on BitTorrent.
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I personally don't care about being 1 year behind, but for the life of me I can't stand the "content not available in your country". I don't have leprosy for fuck's sake, and no, I don't give a flying fuck about your "exclusive content deals" which prevent you from making said content available in my country.
Movies should be available worldwide, not based on past shitty contracts or exclusive deals.
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Netflix "encourages" binge-watching - so when people have binged the first 6 seasons of Mentalist there, they'll head out to find the next 4 or 5 on the seedier side of the intertubes.
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Precisely, the selection has been getting worse and worse even as they keep hiking prices.
I don't pirate things these days, but I'm definitely not going to sign up for several services because there are licensing agreements restricting which platforms have the things I'm interested in.
Netflix used to be great when they had a massive catalog available, these days it seems like not only do I have a hard time finding anything, but when I do have something specific in mind, it's not available.
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Netflix by DVD.
Still the broadest selection on the market, by far.
But which also seems to be shrinking.
Re: because what you want to watch isn't on netfli (Score:2)
Not available to most of the world. The UK had Lovefilm but Amazon shut that down unfortunately.
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Yah, screw that. Fuck sticks don't rewind their DVDs before returning them, and of course Netflix doesn't care so the first thing I have to do when I get the DVD is waste 15 minutes rewinding it! SAD! /s
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Explain where it says that you have an entitlement to the content that you want simply by virtue of wanting it
Also, see rationilzation #25, the Coercion Myth [ethicsalarms.com]:
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Why does the choice have to be so black and white? I'm actually in favour of copyright laws. But what Disney and the rest have done to it over the decades means it's fucking joke right now.
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Re:because what you want to watch isn't on netflix (Score:4)
Also, that list is missing the actual reasons I use to justify my piracy, but nice try
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You're just a shameless corporate shill trying to argue that corporations are the only people that should have rights.
Copyright is not some natural right. It exists merely to serve a particular public policy objective. That isn't a "rationalization". It's part of our highest law.
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It exists for purposes of control... and while it is artificial, it is an extension of the natural right of control one does have when they create a work when they don't distribute it in the first place.
The entire point of copyright is to offer the creator an artificially created form of control over the work similar to the control they would have had if they had never distributed it in exchange for distributing it publicly. In this way, it is seen that copyright promotes the sciences and arts by enric
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First off none of your "rationalizations" bear an resemblance or applicability to the real world or even the points you're responding to. Second off you are axiomatically assuming that what people are doing is unethical in the first place, as opposed to the unethical parties being the massive multinational megacorporations who've successfully engaged in bribery to corrupt governments and distort laws in their favor.
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Acceptance of copyright doesn't have to be a binary position. The person you misquoted #7 to clearly supports copyright, but only with appropriate constraints.
Once those constraints are broken then the value to society is gone, and thus society should reject it. He's rejecting the broken implementation.
That's not unethical.
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Of course... so just because the law doesn't happen to cater to *THEIR* preference, it must be a bad law, and therefore ignored.
The same argument could be made for people with compulsive kleptomania. Doesn't mean they are doing an acceptable thing by following their impulses, however.
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It's not unethical to break a bad law.
Lets cut to the chase: Would you be bitching about someone smuggling jewish people out of Poland in 1940?
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Of course... but then that boils down to what I had said in the first place about not agreeing with the ethics behind copyright.
That someone might happen to think copyright is okay in theory. but not like how it actually gets implemented in practice, even if they imagine that it could be implemented differently, is entirely irrelevant. The end result is the same.... they don't agree with copyright... any copyright they might allege to agree with is not the real world copyright that we are actually faced
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Explain where it says that you have an entitlement to the content that you want simply by virtue of wanting it
Explain how anyone is harmed when a "pirate" torrents a movie that they otherwise would not have watched at all.
Disclaimer: I don't pirate movies, but my kids do it all the time, even for movies they could watch for free with Amazon Prime.
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Fair question.
Copyright is supposed to entail the exclusive right of control over who may copy a work. If someone copies the work without permission, they deprive the copyright owner of that control, meaning that a portion of what the copyright owner was supposely supposed to have is irrecoverably lost.
That someone else might not think that causes any measurable or real harm is irrellevant.
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Actually, I said that if a person has a legally recognized right to something that they value, and you deprive them of that, then you deprive them of a corresponding measure of that value... regardless of what kind of value you or I or anyone else might place upon it.
Value may translate directly to monetary worth, but not always. I deem that the the copyrights on GPL software have value, for instance, but I would not associate any particular monetary value to them/.
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> Explain where it says that you have an entitlement to the content that you want simply by virtue of wanting it
The intellectual property clause of the US constitution.
Those artificial state granted monopolies are meant to be temporary. A good chunk of what's on Netflix, Amazon, & iTunes should rightfully be in the public domain.
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Probably true... but most of what people pirate isn't content that's been around before around 1960, is it?
And of course, the saying about two wrongs not making a right still applies.
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If you don't agree with the ethics of copyright in the first place, then just admit that you don't care about intellectual property in the first place instead of hiding behind the notion that you didn't have a choice in the matter, because it's plainly obvious that you do.
I think that's because it's blatantly obvious to everyone but IPR shills that it's not actual property. It's newspeak to create a fraudulent impression of a few abstract and temporary rights as granting permanent ownership and control. Even the people who think the authors of the books they read, artists they listen to, developers of the game they play and so on deserve compensation balk at the non-monetary demands and restrictions like arbitrary limitations on playback hardware and software, region locks,
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If you don't agree with the ethics of copyright in the first place, then just admit that you don't care about intellectual property in the first place
Well, that's bullshit becaue it's not either or. I support copyright, but not the perverted shitshow it's become. Firstly, the term is far, far too long. Secondly, the whole DRM thing is an attempt to do an end run ronud the entire concept. If they get it as good as they want then they will be able to completely deny access to fair use and even public domain u
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Are trying to excuse or condemn the corruption of our laws to benefit corporations.
Speaking about the theft of the public domain is no "rationalization".
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1961 my ass, everything before 1989 should be public domain.
Re:because what you want to watch isn't on netflix (Score:4, Insightful)
This is where I wish that TV/short form entertainment would go the same way as music. Have broad/permissive licensing. Any service can stream it out, they just pay a royalty like you do with music. Netflix could happily provide GoT, or The Expanse, or whatever, and just pay the appropriate people a normal, non-discriminatory royalty for the play.
I buy "The Expanse" from iTunes because I enjoy the show, and want to support it, but I'll still snag episodes to add to my media player because, well, the iTunes version dones't play everywhere, and often comes out several days later.
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I'm sure Hulu, netflix, amazon would all love to offer everything. For the low price of twice what your cable bill would be, since comcast owns hulu and cable.
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Yeah... once upon a time, you could find a decent selection of movies to stream from Netflix. Not great, but decent. Now, it seems like all of the big movie houses are developing their own streaming services and most of Netflix's new content is generated by Netflix itself.
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Indeed, I borrowed my brother's Netflix login to check it out, and I can barely find maybe 1 out of 10 titles I was looking for. Nothing truly interesting, but I give them credit for packing 1990s Star Trek series.
Re: because what you want to watch isn't on netfli (Score:1)
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The problem is that not everything is available on Netflix in perpetuity. And many things that do end up on Netflix, are not put on Netflix until they are no longer on broadcast television.
If I can find it on Netflix, I will watch it on Netflix.
If I can find it on Crunchyroll, I will watch it on Crunchyroll.
If I have to download some asinine app that requires a subscription to the local TV provider, fuck that bullshit.
If the show I want to watch is not available in my region at the same price as it is in th
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simple as that: if you can't find it on netflix, what then? hulu? amazon? youtube?
when you run out of options it comes back to torrent (or whatever the kids are using)
You'd have a point were it not for the fact that the stuff on Netflix etc is still being pirated. Your argument is as dumb as those who are pro-music piracy saying it's about DRM when Apple and Amazon do DRM free music.
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So you and your friends get together. You have fun, and the topic turns to what happened on Show #1 last week.
Well, actually it doesn't, because only two friends watched that. Another friend watched show #2, two others show #3, and you sat through show #4 because you were sticking to your principles.
Yeah, have fun talking to your friends about those storylines in that scenario. Or understanding the memes that pop up, the pop culture references inspired by shows like Game of Thrones, Walking Dead, etc.
People
Re: because what you want to watch isn't on netfli (Score:1)
Oh my fucking god, really? Seriously? I've seen the same pirate debate for about 40 years. I'm sure it's older than that. I'm not.
I have never seen anyone justify piracy based on "my friends will be talking about a show I haven't seen if I don't pirate it!"
Please tell me you're some dumb ass millennial idiot. It would be twice as shameful if you're a real adult saying completely idiotic nonsense like that.
Real pirates steal because they just fucking want to. They don't justify it with "but then my fri
Of course, not truely free (Score:2)
Overall I expect that legal services have had a huge impact on piracy but lots of people simply cannot afford them and so piracy will always be preferable. If we want to fix that we need to raise minimum wage.
People are not as stupid as some think. (Score:2)
*rant on*
First, give an average person a 'free' thing but with a very finite time horizon and expect them to change their behavior is ridiculous.
Widely differing amounts and types of self interest drives most peoples motivations, trying to derive a conclusion based on a single type of 'carrot' is again ridiculous.
*rant off*
I appreciate that they may actually be able to make a useful prediction from their test but on the surface I find it weak.
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Using BitTorrent is not equal to piracy.
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You are correct that using BitTorrent is not the same thing as armed robbery on the high seas. But it is copyright infringement in the majority of publicized cases. I imagine there's far more traffic from sharing Hollywood movies than from sharing free operating system distributions, though I'd appreciate evidence to the contrary.
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Not as convenient... (Score:5, Interesting)
I would use legit services if they offered the same functionality as torrents, but they just don't...
Most limit you to streaming rather than downloading... My connection isn't fast enough to stream at any decent quality, especially at times of day when i'll actually be awake. I can happily torrent overnight and watch the following day.
Sometimes i want to watch when i don't have internet (eg while travelling), downloading and watching later is useful.
Netflix has limited content and arbitrary limitations on where it can be accessed from, most other services are the same. Useless when travelling. A lot of these services don't walk at all in some of the countries i regularly visit.
DRM restricts what kind of devices and players you can use, the content available from torrents can be played on anything.
So long as the legit services are inferior to torrents, people will torrent. Make them as good or better and people will have little excuse for using torrents.
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Only your post is flawed, making meth in a lab has significant disadvantages compared to most legit jobs, there is danger from the police, from rival drug dealers, from the buyers, from the process of making the meth itself etc. The income is unreliable, and you have the added overhead of trying to create a legitimate explanation for where the income came from. None of these problems exist with a legit job, and for someone sufficiently skilled/qualified the money difference isn't so big either.
The idea of w
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I'd happily pay for such a service, it need not be free, it just has to be equivalent or better than what the pirates are offering.
I refuse to pay for an artificially inferior service.
The money you pay for these services is being used not to create a better product for you the customer, but to create a WORSE product by implementing further artificial restrictions (geoblocking, drm etc) that act directly against the interests of the customers (ie YOU).
I will not support a company that acts directly against m
Netflix can be pirated as well (Score:3)
It does not seem like the article addresses the fact that Netflix content can be pirated as well. As far as I can see, the only way that Netflix or another online streaming service would cut into piracy is if their DRM was so strong, and their content so compelling, that the pirates were forced to pay to access it.
For example, Game of Thrones seems pretty popular among people who are tech savvy enough to pirate content. If there were a way to lock down Game of Thrones, some subset of pirates would choose to pay for it because they want it THAT badly. (I know that GoT is on HBO not Netflix, I'm just using an example of popular content).
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Is it possible... (Score:5, Insightful)
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the objective was not "free tv", (most of us can get that with an antenna) or even "free tv on demand", but to watch a certain collection of titles that either (a) weren't conveniently available
Case in point: I picked two movies and a TV series, all produced prior to 1990, and looked for them on three different websites offering information about legit streaming options in the United States. I ended up with "not available" across the board [pineight.com].
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Yes.
More precisely, what the summary doesn't include is the fact that the average "fit" of the free TV service was 12%. That is, about 1 in 8 titles that people were watching were actually available on the free service. Surprise, surprise, people keep using torrent for the rest.
Legal Alternatives Suck (Score:5, Insightful)
My wife does not like the 'difficulties' of dealing with torrents, so we have a subscription to HBO. That comes with HBO Go, their online content portal.
I wanted to watch one of their new shows (The Deuce. If you liked the Wire, check it out. It's pretty good.) I was able to watch the first couple episodes online just fine. Then one night, I had a glitch with my USB port and I pulled my headphones out in the middle of watching an episode. After I reconnected them, the sound didn't work.
I worked with HBO tech support. They pointed the finger at Frontier, my ISP. They pointed the finger at Adobe (who makes the Flash Player plug-in required to watch their stream). They pointed the finger at Microsoft (I was using IE because Chrome doesn't support Flash). I tried Firefox as well, but the problem persisted. (Sound worked just fine everywhere else. Windows. Browsers. Games. Applications. Just not the HBO Go website / Flash Player on the site.)
After spending the better part of 3 hours over the course of a week troubleshooting the problem, I gave up and torrented the show. I am only going to jump through so many hoops to watch content, that I am PAYING FOR, on my computer. I pay the monthly fee to HBO. If they can't deliver the content to me on the device I want to watch it on, I will do it myself.
The thing with piracy is that it is the best technical option. Computers want to play the media. The content companies try to lock it behind layers of DRM and other hurdles. Those layers are flakey and cause problems. In the end, the content becomes more difficult to consume legally. And that is a problem. People want simple. As human beings we will always take the path of least resistance.
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I just use Plex. It gets the job done.
The wife doesn't like the delay, having to wait for me to download them. The occasional transcode issues. Flakey wifi.
The service we want (Score:1)
Every film and tv show ever made, with no DRM (so it works on Linux and BSD) in all countries, on one service, for a reasonable monthly fee. Until that service exists, piracy will fill the gap.
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
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It is. Netflix provides a working APK of an older version of its app on Netflix says 'This App is not compatible with your device.' [netflix.com] I'm using it without problems on a custom build of CyanogenMod.
What was the research about? (Score:2)
If Netflix was thought to possibly kill piracy it would mean that pirates were supposed to saturate their pirating urges with Netflix services. So the research was in a nutshell asking "Is vast majority of pirates going to pay for Netflix?"
Duh!!!
Effect is probably stronger than they estimated (Score:2)
1) What was this premium service? Did it have a good selection of content? A nice interface? Did it let people binge-watch a series?
2) If I was getting a premium service for free for 45 days I might binge watch some things or watch some movies, but I wouldn't use it to watch a regular series since I'd lose it after a few episodes.
3) Habits are hard to break. I'd expect the torrenting to decrease more over time as they grew more familiar with the subscription service and developed new viewing habits.
Netflix hasn't reduced piracy, it has lowerd sales (Score:2)
I haven't bought any physical or digital media since I got Netflix a while ago.
I have only purchased used physical media for about 20 years. So MPAA and friends don't make a cent off of me, except what they can extort from Netflix.
I'm legal and I'm illegal (Score:3, Interesting)
The difference is that I will not be controlled. I don't mind paying a FAIR price for content. I will view the content on the operating system and player of my choice legally, or I'll do so illegally. I will not be charged twice for same content. If I paid for it once I will not pay for it again under any circumstance. i.e. a CD of music. If I am charged the same for "un-owned/rented/streamed" content as I am for owned content, I'll just have to be illegal. The streamed/rented content needs to be WAAAAY cheaper. There is a better/cheaper alternative, although illegal so they have zero negotiating power. But even if I had to do without, I would not be forced to Windows or Apple. I just cancelled my Spectrum cable, not because I have gone completely over to Netflix or something else, but because I can no longer run a home grown DVR on linux with a cablecard tuner because of the encryption. I'll be illegal or even do without before I would give them my money.
I am ALL for a completely unencrypted, unblocked open format that is uniquely fingerprinted and traceable back to me. If I give the content away to someone else, by all means come after me. But I simply will not be sandboxed into using any operating system or player that is not open and under my control.
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Piracy will always exists... (Score:2)
Piracy will always exists. The only thing that could kill it is to make all movies freely available (and without pub) for all (which will not happen).
Star Trek Discovery (Score:2)
Bullshit (Score:2)
Stupid obvious conclusion. (Score:2)
Of course you aren't going to get rid of ALL piracy. You will always have the persistent degenerates that will pirate no matter what. They aren't really worth bothering with. They aren't even worth punishing. The only reasonable thing you can do is just write them off and deal with the part of "the problem" that you can actually solve.
This "study" sounds like an excuse to discount what progress has already been achieved with "the problem".
Netflix is incomplete (Score:2)
It doesn't have all the content, it's missing episodes, seasons, movies, and shows disappear...
To get everything you are eventually going to have to spend more than cable at the rate that steaming services are splintering off.
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The Oatmeal already told us the same thing (Score:2)
Needs to be like Spotify (Score:2)
There needs to be a similar service for video - $30 a month (or whatever) and everything is there. Everything. Betwitched episode? It's there. Star Trek Discovery? It's there. Wonder Woman movie? There.
It's a little like the history of CD's VS Download (Score:2)
Remember CD's?
When Downloading or streaming music became a thing (Napster), the music industry panicked, and did all kinds of bad things in order to get their users back to their drug of choice (music industry's choice), they where old fashioned, not with the times and actually totally out of touch with their user base.
Same with traditional media like newspapers and television, it was the hardest time for them to realize everything is up to the customer and not what THEY want to sell you.
Televison and Newsp
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Remember CD's?
Yup. Still use em. Remains the cheapest way to give someone (in person) an album, or likewise a DVD for a movie. Sure, I could upload them to a cloud storage and share from there, but burning uses no bandwidth, and USB drives are not yet as cheap as disks if you are giving them away.
Re: It's a little like the history of CD's VS Down (Score:2)
What killed dvd? Having to watch previews before the movie menu. Unskippable commercials. Annoying.
Why BitTorrent ? (Score:2)
I was enjoying amazonâ(TM)s music service and listening exclusively to it. Then Iâ(TM)d notice I hadnâ(TM)t heard a song in a while. They removed it from my play list to Iâ(TM)d have to pay more for another service. So after 5 or 6 iterations of this I ga e up and went back to the torrents.
Well, duh! The industry got extra greedy... (Score:2)
The cable and copyright cartels saw those un-cool Silicon Valley types doing well and decided to try to kill the goose that laid the golden egg.
1) Comcast and Verizon broke with standard ISP peering to extort money they weren't due from Netflix. This caused Netflix to have to raise prices. And some people who used to, or still would, pay for Netflix left. And now that they have their puppet running the FCC, this problem is unlikely to be fixed for at least 3-7 years.
2) The copyright cartels decided to
Wrong (Score:2)
Two Points of Note, here (Score:2)
First, the offer was for a temporary discount on a service.
Once that temporary status expires, who here wouldn't drop the pay-for-service option and go right back to torrenting their content? Besides, who'd grab the free service knowing it would cost them later?
Second point: Bell has had their system available on their PVR boxes for restarting a show, but you can't rewind or fast forward any program you restarted.
Seriously.
This also applies to any show you're watching where you have rewound past a certain p
Question (Score:2)
Since you cannot find everything on Netflix, how many subscriptions would someone need to see everything he's interested in?
And what about countries for which Netflix blocks its contents?
It's not "netflix" vs "free", it's "netflix + VPN, amazon, hulu..." vs "single source".
Keep believing that... (Score:1)
I stopped using netflix because the content I was planning on watching would disappear before I had to chance to watch and DRM will always be a headache.
The study is flawed (Score:2)
I won't try to assume I am the same as the rest of the population, however, I do know that context and patterns are important for people. I think I can make a pretty safe assumption that a lot of people watch TV in the same way.
I