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Piracy Movies Television

Copyright Lobby Calls Out Plex For Not Doing Enough To Stop Piracy (inputmag.com) 158

An anonymous reader shares a report: For those who don't want to dive fully into torrents, Plex is a great alternative for streaming television shows and movies for free. Officially, Plex is a "neutral" media player, and it first became popular with people looking to stream content between devices at home, like from their desktop in the study to their laptop in their bedroom. But, with Plex Media Server, users can also share media with other users to stream, creating a virtual free-for-all, and a serious problem from a copyright perspective. CreativeFuture, a pro-copyright coalition boasting more than 560 members, has taken notice and is calling out the platform, along with rival service Kodi.

"Thanks to a rapidly growing media application called Plex, torrent-based piracy is back in vogue, and better than ever (for criminals who have no problem with profiting from content that doesn't belong to them, that is)," the coalition writes in a blog post. Those who pay $4.99 per month for Plex Pass are able to share their libraries with up to 100 users. As Creative Future points out, this isn't always done for the sake of altruism, or so family's can share their legally procured copies of Frozen. Some Plex users actually charge for access to their content -- a more nefarious (though, granted, enterprising) evolution from the totally free world of torrenting. For extra sass, the shared content can be pirated to begin with.

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Copyright Lobby Calls Out Plex For Not Doing Enough To Stop Piracy

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  • Wait, people use Plex for something besides piracy?

    • Re:LOL no shit. (Score:5, Informative)

      by Joshsmac ( 791309 ) on Friday March 06, 2020 @02:20PM (#59804052)
      some of us buy and rip our own crap. we have the right to media shift our own purchases.
      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by jellomizer ( 103300 )

        The problem is having a service where you can share with people.
        This isn't ripping a DVD and saving it on a server. But Ripping the DVD and sharing it with people who may in turn share it with others.

        • by bjwest ( 14070 )

          The problem is having a service where you can share with people. This isn't ripping a DVD and saving it on a server. But Ripping the DVD and sharing it with people who may in turn share it with others.

          This isn't what this feature of Plex is intended for, it's intended for you to play your own media on any device anywhere you happen to be. Just because idiots are sharing it with OTHER PEOPLE, doesn't make it Plex's responsibility any more than it makes it Netflix's responsibility if you share your log in credentials with another person. This is the "copyright lobby" going after Plex because they assume Plex is being used for piracy.

          Note: I do use Plex, but I'm not a paid subscriber, I couldn't care less

          • by SeaFox ( 739806 )

            This isn't what this feature of Plex is intended for, it's intended for you to play your own media on any device anywhere you happen to be. Just because idiots are sharing it with OTHER PEOPLE, doesn't make it Plex's responsibility any more than it makes it Netflix's responsibility if you share your log in credentials with another person.

            No, that's not the feature they are talking about. You need to read up on everything Plex can do. You can share libraries and collections with other Plex account holders. You don't have to give them your own credentials. Go to your Settings page on the web portal and the "Users and Sharing" feature. You can create "managed users" (like Netflix profiles) to your Household, for people in your own home to track what they are watching and restrict access (like kids), but you can also add "Friends" to your serve

    • Wait, people use Plex for something besides piracy?

      Yes. I use it 100% legally.

      I use it as a DVR for my cable TV habit. I record the shows I want to see automatically and watch them at my leisure, commercial free. I also am ripping my DVD and Blu Ray collection so I can watch them on all my devices. But I have media for all the movies I have on my Plex server.

      I know there are people who share their Plex content and go out looking for content on the web, but I do not share or download stuff I don't legally have a right to watch. I have way too much to lose

    • "Those who pay $4.99 per month for Plex Pass are able to share their libraries with up to 100 users"
      I think that is the biggest problem, this reminds me of Napster during the 1990's

      It is one thing to offer software that just does something. However if you are a paying for a service, then the service provider needs to be sure they are handling legal data.

    • by Hydrian ( 183536 )
      Yes. I have 20 gallon storage bins of CDs and DVDs in my attic since I have been a music nut since the 1990s. I think I have 4 or more of those bins now. I rip any new CD or DVD that I get. Why? Do you know how hard it is to play a physical CD or DVD nowadays? Also, I have kids now. I don't want to be re-buying discs every few years because they get critically damaged. Why do I buy optical based media? I can back them up. I just put them on Plex and they can watch them from our Roku or tablet. Even when t
      • I don't bother ripping... I just use Kodi to download rips of DVDs and BluRay disks that I already paid good money for. How can that be a crime?

    • Did plex respond with âoesuck my big black cock!â

      They should have because immediately they would have questioned if what they were doing was racially motivated.

  • by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 06, 2020 @02:03PM (#59803990)

    Mass piracy is a symptom of the real problem. Fix that problem and piracy will go down.

    • What problem? Mass piracy is a perfectly human response to the insane notion of artificial scarcity.

      • Rather, artificial scarcity is a perfectly human response to the insane notion of mass piracy.

        • It's human, but it isn't rational. What sane person would want to make a product harder to acquire legally in response to piracy? That's just stupid (and therefor rather quite human) when the intelligent move is to make it easy to pay for a legal product. That's like reasoning that because few people are buying your product because it's too expensive, that raising the cost even more would be a sure fire solution to get more people to buy it.

          Netflix figured out a way to make it easy for people to consume
  • by what2123 ( 1116571 ) on Friday March 06, 2020 @02:05PM (#59803998)
    First, didn't know they died.
    Second, the conclusion of Plex being the reason for an increase in piracy is just laughable.
    (legal) Streaming, the once great bastion into ALL-YOU-CAN-EAT at anytime and a reasonable cost is now dying. Everyone wanted their piece of the pie and the end user is adapting once again. Plex could die tomorrow and piracy numbers wouldn't blink.
  • Fixed. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by epiphani ( 254981 ) <epiphani@dal . n et> on Friday March 06, 2020 @02:09PM (#59804018)

    "Thanks to a rapidly growing media distribution landscape, with each distributor creating their own platform, torrent-based piracy is back in vogue, and better than ever (since nobody wants to buy 10 subscriptions for ten services, half of which are barely functional)"

    Fixed for you, copyright trolls.

  • It's amazing how a pro-copyright coalition of 560 members can somehow manage to waste their time focusing on something that won't help their cause at all, not that it's a cause worth supporting anyway.

    Killing plex, or any other piece of software that is literally just used to serve media from a individuals private hard drive, or a friend's hard drive will not do *anything* to prevent piracy in any way.

    I don't understand how these people can even justify copyright law to themselves in the first place.

    • by SeaFox ( 739806 )

      Killing plex, or any other piece of software that is literally just used to serve media from a individuals private hard drive, or a friend's hard drive will not do *anything* to prevent piracy in any way.

      If they were smarter, they'd be going after Sonarr and Radarr.
      Oops! Those are open-source software projects and there's no corporate entity to sue.

  • Plex serves media from someone's own PC. How should it distinguish between legitimately owned media and that which isn't?
    • Plex serves media from someone's own PC. How should it distinguish between legitimately owned media and that which isn't?

      Assumption the first: Plex knows perfectly well who has been naughty.

      Assumption the second: "Naughty" is defined as anything that the government says it does.

      Assumption the third: there are only two types of people - people who are committing IP theft and people who haven't yet been caught committing IP theft....

    • LOL.. You are new here right? (Just kidding)

      Content providers don't care about legal content or that their actions impact it. The MPAA et al. will sue the pants of anybody they can including the service providers who create the tools they deem the most problematic. They've been successful in shutting down multiple services using the "It's MOSTLY used for piracy!" argument.

      Sadly, it seems they've set their sights on Plex. Hopefully they will not succeed. I really like my Plex server running as a DVR an

  • Art lobby calls-out Sherwin Williams for not doing enough to stop piracy. "Thanks to a rapidly growing acrylic paints by Sherwin Williams, paint-based piracy is back in vogue, and better than ever."

    In the near future, nobody will be able to share a file at all. All movies, videos, and photos will have to be stored on "authorized" and "licensed" file sharing sites that scan for evil things like copyright violations, child pornography, fake news, or libertarian philosophy.

    That said, the pirates really are ruining it for those of us who use tools like Plex and OwnCloud to store and share family photos because we don't want to give it all to the government, I mean Facebook.

    (I made the same prediction in the 2000s, back when nobody used a cloud provider - today I bet 90% of internet users don't know how to share a photo with uploading it to a cloud provider. The prediction is almost true.)

    • by tepples ( 727027 )

      today I bet 90% of internet users don't know how to share a photo with uploading it to a cloud provider.

      And I bet 90 percent of this is because of widespread network address translation (NAT).

  • Kodi is an open source media player. These clowns are against Kodi because it is open source software.

  • ...to tell me i can't 'loan' something to my friends and family. sharing with them stuff i've bought (regardless of having to break the DMCA to rip it, a stupid rule that violates my fair use rights), online is no different from just handing them the DVD. Odds are whatever they're watching isn't what I'm watching at the same time, so the net effect is the same.

  • You can write or print a copy of a copyrighted text on paper. That cannot be allowed! The tool is certainly at fault for what it is used for!

    In other news, the copyright industry continues to be stupid and does its best to drive its customers away...

  • Like fuck they are the copyright lobby, just because they say so.

    Copying IS A RIGHT.

    They are the anti-copy rights-lobby.

If all the world's economists were laid end to end, we wouldn't reach a conclusion. -- William Baumol

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