• bionicjoey@lemmy.ca
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      6 days ago

      Proving Netflix could be replaced outdone by five hard working people.

    • anlumo@lemmy.world
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      6 days ago

      They didn’t need the army of lawyers to get license deals, so that’s not a fair comparison.

      • FreudianCafe@lemmy.ml
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        6 days ago

        Its almost like its unecessary shit made up in order to keep profits away from working people artificially

        • WarlordSdocy@lemmy.world
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          Yeah its almost like if we didn’t keep extending copyright protections a bunch of stuff would be in the public domain and any streaming service could offer it without having to deal with licensing.

        • GBU_28@lemm.ee
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          6 days ago

          It’s true that Hollywood is corrupt and csuite pay is absurd, but those deals are the only mechanism by which ANY money makes it to the writers, actors and staff who deserve it

          • BossDj@lemm.ee
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            6 days ago

            It’s the exclusivity bullshit that gets me.

            It could be: New movie is released! Anyone who pays the price tag gets to stream it!

            But no, we must bidding war gouge.

            On top of that, X Y and Z services exist in America, but not in other countries, so in this other country, everything is on Netflix, while I had to jump between three different services at one point just to watch Stargate

            • Couldbealeotard@lemmy.world
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              6 days ago

              Hey, you’re just salty that you didn’t get in on the ground floor when Stargate was being exclusively streamed in a dedicated Stargate streaming service

      • GissaMittJobb@lemmy.ml
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        6 days ago

        Their scale was also an insignificant fraction of what Netflix has, making the point even more irrelevant.

        The best figure I could find on Jetflicks user count was 37k, where as Netflix has 269 million users.

        • calcopiritus@lemmy.world
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          6 days ago

          Prices should go down with scale not up though.

          There’s initial investment on the initial servers (and the software), and afterwards it should be a linear increase of server costs per user, with some bumps along the way to interconnect those servers.

          The cost also scales per content. Because that means more caching servers per user and bigger databases, and licenses.

          So this service has less users and more content, it should be way more expensive. The only reason they are cheaper is because they don’t pay those licenses.

          • GissaMittJobb@lemmy.ml
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            6 days ago

            The cost of storage in this case is more or less irrelevant - traffic is what matters here. You’re also not getting any mentionable bulk discount on the servers for that matter.

            The key is that you can engineer things in completely different way when you have trivial amounts of traffic hitting your systems - you can do things that will not scale in any way, shape or form.

          • zbyte64@awful.systems
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            6 days ago

            Certain types of content. But YouTube’s own existence started because people made content without licensing rights.

            • evidences@lemmy.world
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              6 days ago

              Technically YouTube exists because three horny nerds wanted a dating site with video integration. It only turned into a video sharing site when they realized they couldn’t find the clip of the Janet Jackson wardrobe malfunction and they decided they wanted to build that platform instead.

          • Cosmicomical@lemmy.world
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            6 days ago

            Not really. I can undersgand licensing but at this point it’s become a distopian practice completely separated from the basic need to monetize the content an make a profit. That’s why those companies become such gargantuans monsters.

          • uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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            5 days ago

            Nope. People will still make content. It’ll be on far less of a budget, but that didn’t stop the Film School generation of independent films in the 1970s (before which you had to sell your life and soul and beating heart to a studio). In between all the schlock were the occasional arty films we consider classics today.

            And then there’s government subsidization of art projects, as per the National Endowment of the Arts.

            I think the MCU movies, the DC movies, the many studio iterations of Spiderman have shown us what capitalism eventually churns out. Sony actually chose this path content as product the same resort to formula that plagued the music industry in the 1980s (and drove the Hip Hop Independent movement of the next half-century).

            We just need to empower artists. Make sure they don’t have to moonlight as restaurant wait staff in order to eat and pay rent while they create, and make sure they have access to half-decent (not necessarily high end) hardware with which to do their thing. And yes, as Sturgeon observes, most of it will be schlock, but through sheer quantity of content we’ll get more gems than Hollywood is putting out.

            • Couldbealeotard@lemmy.world
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              3 days ago

              If you take away the ability to own and control your intellectual property, then you won’t be empowered.

              Licensing art allows creators to earn a living off of their hard work.

              • uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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                3 days ago

                Not in the US or the EU. If you make music in the States, then RCA or Sony owns your content, not you, and when they decide they’ve paid you enough (which is much less than they’re getting) then they still own your stuff. Also, if you make an amazing film or TV series ( examples: Inception, Firefly ) and the moguls don’t like it, they’ll make sure it tanks or at least doesn’t get aftermarket support, which is why Inception doesn’t have any video games tie-ins, despite being a perfect setting for video games.

                Artists are empowered in their ability to produce art. If they have to worry about hunger and shelter, then they make less art, and art narrowly constrained to the whims of their masters. Artists are not empowered by the art they’ve already made, as that has to be sold to a patron or a marketing institution.

                No, we’d get more and better art by feeding and housing everyone (so no one has to earn a living ) and then making all works public domain in the first place.

                Intellectual property is a construct, and it’s corruption even before it was embedded in the Constitution of the United States has only assured that old art does not get archived.

                I think yes, an artist needs to eat, which is why most artists (by far) have to wait tables and drive taxicabs and during all that time on the clock, not make art. The artists not making art far outnumber the artists that get to make art. And a small, minority subset of those are the ones who profit from art or even make a living from their art, a circumstance that is perpetually precarious.

                But I also think the public needs a body of culture, and as the Game of Thrones era showed us, culture and profit run at odds. The more expensive art is, the more it’s confined to the wealthy, and the less it actually influences culture. Hence we should just feed, clothe and home artists along with everyone else, whether or not they produce good or bad art. And we’ll get culture out of it.

                You can argue that a world of guaranteed meals and homes is not the world we live in, but then I can argue that piracy (and other renegade action) absolutely is part of the world we live in and will continue to thrive so long as global IP racketeering continues. Thieves and beggars, never shall we die.

                • Couldbealeotard@lemmy.world
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                  3 days ago

                  Sorry, I’m not going to read all that, but it seems like you’re upset about the shitty deals made by record labels and other large corporations, not intellectual property rights.

    • AshMan85@lemmy.world
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      The only reason all companies prices go up these days is for CEO pay packages

      • werefreeatlast@lemmy.world
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        Like Boeing’s CEO making 300 million… imagine 300 people who worked their ass off could make million. Or 1500 hard workers could be making 200k. But nah, let’s just drag these huge bags of money into this one asshole’s account. Oh there were a couple of crashes right? 👍 Our thoughts and prayers 🙏. But not our money wagons.

      • tetris11@lemmy.ml
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        6 days ago

        Does Netflix make shows? Or does it slam its name onto filmmakers it pays to make content? If so, one of those things simply requires throwing cash at people, which I think is a skill that most people can learn.

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            5 days ago

            They had to operate under the radar to avoid the law, so you know the answer to your question

            • iopq@lemmy.world
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              So Netflix actually pays for shows to get made, so when everyone pays for Netflix, it lets everyone enjoy them. Pirate sites only extract value from the hard work of the producers, without paying them.

              • tetris11@lemmy.ml
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                23 hours ago

                producers don’t make the content, they speak to the right people in their exclusive circles to finance it, put their name on it, and then pay the directors and actors a tiny fraction of what it earned

                • iopq@lemmy.world
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                  19 hours ago

                  Okay, now tell me how pirate sites contribute to creation of said content

  • Dorkyd68@lemmy.world
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    The only thing I’m pisseed about is the fact that I was unaware of its existence. Fuck the system

  • Fedizen@lemmy.world
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    They’re here doing everyone a service. Why are there resources to prosecute this but not like elon musk’s insider trading?

  • Lad@reddthat.com
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    Five men convicted by the court of the high seas for being absolute chads

  • Blackmist@feddit.uk
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    If five people can maintain a service bigger than all those combined, then the big streamers need to buck their fucking ideas up.

  • Snapz@lemmy.world
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    Nobody gives a shit, you’re not doing enough to punish trump for his obvious, literally filmed and recorded crimes.

    This is the equivalent of the cops celebrating after beating peaceful college protesters while pissing their pants and freezing while the uvalde kids were slaughtered and psychologically tortured.

    You’re focusing on the non victory and ignoring the failures. Cowards.

    • Adalast@lemmy.world
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      When cops only legal responsibility is to enforce the law, and the laws are written to protect corporate interests, of course they will stand outside the school and arrest protesters. SCOTUS has ruled that way so many times that “to serve and protect” is literally gaslighting.

    • AHemlocksLie@lemmy.zip
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      You’re focusing on the non victory and ignoring the failures. Cowards.

      That’s not true, they successfully did their job of protecting capital and the owner class. Same reason they don’t go after Trump. He’s in the owner class, so their job is to serve and protect him.

      • AlbinoPython@lemmy.world
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        Nobody gives a shit, you’re not doing enough to punish trump for his obvious, literally filmed and recorded crimes.

        This is the equivalent of the cops celebrating after bearing peaceful college protesters while pissing their pants and freezing while the uvalde kids were slaughtered and psychologically tortured.

        You’re focusing on the non victory and ignoring the failures. Cowards.

          • Lad@reddthat.com
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            Tout le monde s’en fout, vous ne faites pas assez pour punir Trump pour ses crimes évidents, littéralement filmés et enregistrés.

            C’est l’équivalent des flics qui se réjouissent d’avoir abattu des manifestants pacifiques à l’université tout en se pissant dessus et en se gelant pendant que les enfants d’uvalde se faisaient massacrer et torturer psychologiquement.

            Vous vous concentrez sur la non-victoire et ignorez les échecs. Lâches.

  • paris@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    The group used “sophisticated computer scripts” and software to scour piracy services (including the Pirate Bay and Torrentz) for illegal copies of TV episodes, which they then downloaded and hosted on Jetflicks’ servers, according to federal prosecutors.

    They probably used Sonarr and Radarr and called it a day (or similar off-the-shelf tools available on GitHub). It’s not very sophisticated at all. That combined with Jellyfin and a VPN (or Usenet or a country that doesn’t care about piracy) and you have your own up and running. You could also just use free sites with an ad blocker instead of paying $10/mo like the service this article is about charged.

    Unrelated to all of this: https://rentry.co/megathread

  • Todd Bonzalez@lemm.ee
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    Honestly pretty funny to call the site “Jetflix” and advertise it as nothing but aviation videos. Nobody would know what you’re up to until they pay you.

    How much you wanna bet a aerospace nut subscribed to this because they love Jets, and immediately reported this site to the authorities because he got the avengers movies rather than Airbus maintenance videos or something…

    Pretty stupid though to run this site out of the USA. Terrible opsec. They really just seemed to trust that nobody who cares would ever figure out what they were doing. Plenty of similar sites out there that don’t even need to hide what they are because they are well outside of American jurisdiction.

  • el_abuelo@lemmy.ml
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    5 days ago

    This is despicable. What specific service was this? So I know how to avoid it if it should resurface.

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    Love how they make this sound like some incredible feat. When you aren’t bound to license agreements, turns out it’s actually very easy to have a “massive” content library. Literally the only hurdle is storage space.

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    “Sophisticated scripts to scour pirate sites”.

    I think we’ve just found a new tagline for radarr and sonarr.

  • uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    6 days ago

    Jetflicks, which charged $9.99 per month for the streaming service, generated millions of dollars in subscription revenue and caused “substantial harm to television program copyright owners,

    The ownership class will tremble before a communist revolution!

    • LonelyWendigo@lemmy.world
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      Yeah that competition really did demonstrate what an awful service all those media monopolies provided.

      • aidan@lemmy.world
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        To be fair, the service they provide isn’t hosting the videos, it’s making them, which I assume costs a bit more

        • Cosmicomical@lemmy.world
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          To be fairer nobody asked them to produce content. They decided to create it because it’s cheaper that licensing the actual good stuff.

          • aidan@lemmy.world
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            eh some of it is good, I personally wouldn’t want to just watched licensed shows from 50 years ago

            • uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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              5 days ago

              Hence why copyright was originally in the 10-20 year range.

              Movie star isn’t supposed to be a dream job that makes you fabulously rich, but a decent living.

              Interestingly, musical artists who work off the web will do exactly that: Tour and make hundreds of thousands instead of millions (in the aughts and 2010s, so pre-inflation), rather than rolling the dice with the record labels.

              • aidan@lemmy.world
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                5 days ago

                Movie star isn’t supposed to be a dream job that makes you fabulously rich, but a decent living.

                I mean, supposed to according to who?

                • uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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                  5 days ago

                  Capitalist ideologues, for one. I remember in Macroeconomics class that wealth desparity will destroy your economy and then your civilization if you let it get out of hand.

                  So when (for example) we have eight guys that own more than the poorer half of the world population, that’s a bad sign for every economy on the planet, and is going to cause way more problems than merely discontent and social unrest.

        • uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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          5 days ago

          The service they provide (from a perspective external to obligatory capitalism) is less about making them, but providing a framework by which people engaged in artistic expression and development get paid and permitted to survive.

          As the COVID-19 Lockdown furloughs demonstrated to us, art manifests so long as people are fed and need something to do. Healthy humans can’t couch-potato for two weeks without fidgeting and whittling wood into bears. And the great resignation that followed showed that enough people were able to make it lucrative (that is, work out marketing and fulfillment enough to make it profitable enough to quit their prior job) that it lowered worker supply that we were able to contest the shit treatment, low pay and toxic work environments that were normal before the epidemic.

          It gets worse in other industries like big pharma in which the state provides vast grants for R&D of drugs and treatments, but the company keeps all the proceeds. Contrast the space program, which is why memory foam (the material) is in the public domain, as is a fuckton of electronics and computer technologies.

          • aidan@lemmy.world
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            5 days ago

            The service they provide (from a perspective external to obligatory capitalism) is less about making them, but providing a framework by which people engaged in artistic expression and development get paid and permitted to survive.

            If it is art that other people value then that framework already existed(and there are many others who created similar tools for it) so I don’t see it as particularly valuable.

            Contrast the space program, which is why memory foam (the material) is in the public domain, as is a fuckton of electronics and computer technologies.

            There is a compelling argument that tens of billions of dollars being used productively to research anything would have at least some useful results. Memory foam, cordless drills, etc could have been developed much more cheaply than the Apollo program, GPS is extremely valuable, but Apollo wasn’t a necessary precursor to geostationary orbit.

            • uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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              5 days ago

              If it is art that other people value then that framework already existed

              From Wikipedia on Vincent Van Gogh: Van Gogh’s work began to attract critical artistic attention in the last year of his life. After his death, Van Gogh’s art and life story captured public imagination as an emblem of misunderstood genius

              The art we get from pre-made frameworks emerged because people figured out they like art, and then someone capitalized on that. Or in cases of monarchs and governments, they created a fund to allow artists to do their thing instead of waiting tables.

              There is a compelling argument that tens of billions of dollars being used productively to research anything would have at least some useful results.

              For every $1 spent on the moonshots, we got $14. Feel free to look for other investments, but big science really has proven itself.

              • aidan@lemmy.world
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                From Wikipedia on Vincent Van Gogh: Van Gogh’s work began to attract critical artistic attention in the last year of his life. After his death, Van Gogh’s art and life story captured public imagination as an emblem of misunderstood genius

                I don’t really understand how this follows from what I said.

                For every $1 spent on the moonshots, we got $14. Feel free to look for other investments, but big science really has proven itself.

                Do you have a source for that? (And what that claim actually means), afterall, plenty of “essential” inventions in the modern day(including the base of modern rocketry) came from weapons development- does that make war a good investment? (Of course its not 1-to-1 because war is destructive, but my point is putting a lot of effort and smart people into almost anything will lead to a lot of innovation)

                • uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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                  4 days ago

                  I don’t really understand how [The bit on Van Gogh – that he was only posthumously appreciated in the art sector] follows from what I said.

                  My following paragraph is about that. Art often happens before the framework made to create it. In fact, when we have set up studio, they’re already doing knock-offs, trying to repeat prior successes.

                  For every $1 spent on the moonshots, we got $14

                  Do you have a source for that?

                  This came up during a TED talk on the benefits of investing in big science. On an unrelated research effort, I found the National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958 which Eisenhower signed during his freak out over Sputnik, and the big grant to Fairchild Superconductor which kicked off the electronics boom in Silicon Valley (~San Jose, California), so the $14 value is certainly plausible.

      • uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        5 days ago

        As per Das Kapital our industrialists always move to capture regulation and seek to eliminate competition, which are the two aspects that can make capitalism work for the public. Then you have what we have today, late stage capitalism which is about tiers of rent, so everything is both shoddy and expensive.

        That’s how Disney and Warner Brothers (Warner Sister too!) end up owning all the franchises. It’s how Sony owns all the music and sues to take down dancing baby videos.

        The EU and California have both made in-roads to slowing down the steady takeover of regulatory bodies and the mulching and mass merging of megacorps into monolithic monopolies, but they can’t stop it, and both are seeing the bend into precarity that is symptomatic of late stage capitalism.

        That said, true post scarcity communism is realistically a pipe dream well beyond a few great filters we’ve yet to navigate, but we will see small victories, of which piracy – what is essentially crime against ill-gotten gains – offers more than a few.

      • aidan@lemmy.world
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        6 days ago

        To be fair, the service they provide isn’t hosting the videos, it’s making them, which I assume costs a bit more

    • GroundedGator@lemmy.world
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      5 days ago

      caused “substantial harm to television program copyright owners,_

      Maybe? People willing to copy and distribute this content will always be around and you will never catch them all. People willing to pay a discount or seek not and find said content will always be around. And there will be those who will watch a show or a movie because it is freely available, who would never pay a dime for it.

      They will never end piracy and I’d argue it might actually be bad for business if they did.