No, it is not. Compare 10,000,000 copies of something that only live on some random people’s phones or 1 copy in the library of Congress where it is someone’s job to manage and preserve it. 50 years from now I think it’s way more likely that the Library of Congress one is still around than the random ones.
now compare 10 billion copies of something that people have archived across the world all over the internet, in various different states. Now compare it to the exactly zero copies that the library of congress has because it's a random fucking video game, and the library of congress doesn't generally archive those. Also most of their shit is physical. I.E. difficult to access.
No. Consuming it is neither efficient nor reliable. How would you even know when you consume it that it is the original?
you're not wrong, but it's also important to remember that you should test backups, this also means you should do some amount of consumption on your archived content to make sure it's functional and working appropriately.
How do i know it's original? Simple, thanks to general internet consensus and the archival work of other people, it's easy to cross reference. For example, there is a known unreleased boards of canada album "play by numbers" that was never released, only snippets of songs were released, however at some point someone compiled a "play by numbers" album that was fake, and then released it, it's commonly known among boc fans looking into archived material that it exists, and is out there. There was a recent hoax done by binasty where he faked hooper bay, and people thought it was legit, and then he revealed it. Again, it's community consensus. These things are much easier to do now, than they are in the future from now.
A lot of archivists have strict standards around how they archive things as well, generally it's more about the content itself, rather than it's relevance to any one particular thing.
And none of this justifies the piracy itself as opposed to buying it and archiving it? Or if you don’t have the capabilities or means, buying a copy and then pirating that said copy as the archive.
you must be relatively privileged if you think that's trivially accessible. Why do you think lost media is a thing? How does one archive that? What about unreleased media? That's literally impossible.
Sure you could buy a copy and then pirate it, it's a valid strategy that a lot of people engage in. But in my case my primary target for archival work is YT content, it's mostly what i watch, and i find it to be an interesting space to work in. I've considered archiving blu rays. But it just doesn't seem feasible for me. For one thing i'd need a bluray drive and those are upwards of 100 USD. I'd have to stuff that in one of my machines, which would be rather tedious and time consuming. I'd need ripping software, MakeMKV exists (the discs are encrypted and it's the onyl software out there that decrypts them), but it's just one thing, and if that ever fucking explodes we're dead in the water for a bit. It's technically paid software, so the license for it is another 60 USD. Though it's in "free access beta" right now, so there's that. I'd also need physical media to archive. That gets expensive really quickly, shorter shows are often about 50 USD for a boxset. Assuming it's any good that adds quite a bit already, larger box sets are easily 100 USD. Hard to find boxsets are going to be hundreds of USD. Movies are quite a bit cheaper.
Oh but we're not done yet, not only is it a rather expensive endeavor. You also have to invest time and hardware into demystifying the fuckery they engage in with these releases. It's not uncommon for movies to have random bullshit files that don't exist, names that don't make any fucking sense, and broken metadata. Same for shows, although it's worse, because it rips as one big giant chunk of video, which you then have to split up manually you would think metadata makes that easy, but no, it's broken too. I've seen timestamps in metadata that regularly send you to a scene with a power pole in them. Almost like they paid some poor fuck to make bullshit timestamps throughout it just to piss us off or something.
And once you're done segmenting the content, you also have to transode it, unless you want to store the raw uncompressed files, which usually means using hardware encoding, doing that to a modern standard is going to require at least an arc a380 or whatever that card is, which retails for 150 USD, though i hear it was going used for 90 bucks a while ago, unsure if that's still true, or an nvidia GPU which are famously really cheap and easy to get a hold of. There are probably dedicated hw accelerators out there, but those are usually for professional work, so good luck with that. You could do software encoding, but if you want reasonable file sizes, and at reasonable quality levels, in HEVC encoding or similar, you're going to be waiting for weeks minimum.
Granted a few those are just the name of the game, it should come as no surprise to you why people don't fucking like doing this shit. I'd be more open to spending the money on it if it wasn't such a fucking disaster and they didn't try to fight us every fucking step of the way.
Oh btw, yt archival is rather trivial, you either paste a link into yt-dlp and wait, or you stuff it into something like tube archivist, and let it do it's own thing. It's really just that simple.
how does a business get paid when they fuck up and have to take a loss. How does a business get paid when they have no customers, this is literally rolled into the economics. There are very few situations where this should be a problem, unless you're withholding some draconian amount of control over the media.
If you're mega corpo billion dollar industry collapses because it can't release products that people won't pay for, that doesn't exactly sound like my problem.
Everybody needs money to live. A lot of people are fine paying a bit of money to get access to media they like. Not everyone though, and you know what? That's ok, it's free marketing. A commonly reiterated statement is that people who pirate things, aren't people who are going to pay for something to begin with. However they are significantly more likely to pay for it after the fact. Or for future releases coming from the same entity. It's still net positive income at the end of the day. Most people don't want .WAV files, or .MKVs they want to watch the content. And that's what they'll do.
Spotify basically killing limewire is not evidence of that any more than saying radio made the music industry be reasonable since it’s just as killed.
why do you think people were pirating music instead of buying albums? Why do you think spotify immediately picked up lots of users instead of people just pirating, it's basic free market swings.
Because streaming services have been charging more for less content, as the content owners have come to realize how much streaming cannibalizes purchases from other revenue streams.
yeah, and people don't like getting stiffed.
I’m not trying to argue that people don’t pirate less when there are cheap convenient services available. I agree with that. But that’s just people behaving in their own self-interest, not some moral good about fighting big companies or other stuff pirates say to feel better about it.
you could argue it's self interest based, but fucking anything anybody does ever is self interest based. There is no world where someone does something that isn't self interest based in even the littlest of quantities.
I'm not saying it's moral, you can argue about the morality of it all you want, but at the end of the day, i think archival is more morally respectable than killing content and removing it from the market permanently for no other reason than "haha funny"
Killing people is morally bad, killing people who kill other people is morally good. (generally)
my primary argument is that it's basic market forces driving it, arguing about morals is just appeal to the corporation for producing bad market products. If you want to appeal to someone, go donate money to the unions for actors or whatever. Go support an indie film, go donate money directly to people whom you like and support.
What I don’t accept is the self-righteous pirates who try to act like they’re doing something good for society,
how can you disagree with this? There are SO many examples of piracy done for the good of either, the public, or human history.
For example, there used to be a website that hosted all kinds of repair and service manuals for medical devices. It was DMCAd and then taken down. This website, arguably helped to save the lives of tens of thousands, probably hundreds of thousands of people throughout the years.
What about libgen? The entire purposes of this project is to bring works into the field of public access for nothing other then the benefit of the common person.
What about the darkweb for people who live in places that are overly persecutory, not exactly piracy, but distributing religious works in places where religion is restricted is equally as important for internet pirates as is archiving a culturally relevant TV show.
like I should be thanking them for downloading the shows I helped pay for
what if for example, you were, idk let's say, watching community, the iconic TV show, on a streaming service, because to my knowledge, they don't produce blurays of it anymore (it's on amazon, but i've seen it disappear before so) or maybe you just don't like blurays because optical media sucks, and bluray players are terrible. Or perhaps, like me you like a heavily integrated content system that you have full control over. Such that you can watch the content in full resolution, without being restricted, or being hit with a terrible UI, or having to deal with a logged in service, that has to have internet access. Sure you could rip a bluray, but if you think that's easy you've never tried.
Only to discover that they've pulled a few episodes, and they're considered to be "lost media" or something. Now what? You're gonna buy the bluray, and deal with using a secondary form of media just for the one episode that they pulled?
What about shows like mythbusters, which to my knowledge, have NEVER been released on physical media (though i believe they recently sold the video rights to another corpo, so maybe that already happened, or it will happen soon? IDK)
here's a fun fact, discovery+ is a terrible platform, genuinely awful video player, better hope you don't want to do any player customization what so ever. Maybe you don't feel like watching it stretched? Oops, too bad, you can only watch it stretched.
Also to be clear, i'm not saying you should thank me for shit you don't care about, that's fine. You'll find something someone archived some day and be happy that it was archived by someone like me, and really appreciate the work they've done. I'm just saying you probably shouldn't be so defensive about it. Pirates are defensive about it because the industry fucking sucks. The law fucking sucks, and politics fucking sucks. We're doing what we can the best that we can. It's not about people like you, it's about corpos like disney.
and pretending that it has no impact whatsoever on the people who depend on that for their income.
there have been a few studies regarding this topic, there was one study in the EU that was done, and it's circulated on the darknet every so often, claiming that piracy has a minimal impact. For music artists? A lot of them have material on bandcamp, or independently released services. And it's also just a fucking wav file I'm perfectly ok with paying money for music from an artist that i like and support. Primarily because it's just a WAV file, and i can just put it into a music player. That's all i need. A lot of people go to shows and buy merch or other physical garb. I'd give money directly to artists if they let me. Numerous times artists have released their music on torrents, and had it be rather successful.
There are also artists with rather hard to find albums and titles like woob, who pull entire albums. The collectors CD market is a little bit fucked. I'm not paying some random dude 50 USD for a CD of one album just because it's rare. That money doesn't even support the artist.
My single favorite thing about the internet, is that if i decided that i wanted to learn about metal casting in the early 1900's and late 1800's that i can pull up the internet archive, find some material written about it that's been archived, and then just fucking read it. There's all kinds of shit out there that's akin to that, which arguably constitutes as piracy, but is for the public good regardless.
I want an engineering tables book? That's just fucking out there, and i can have it. A book about machining? Again it's all just out there.
For you to pirate, there was already an archival copy.
is it not the case that the more archival copies there are of something the more likely it is to survive?
There is a rather simple paradox, in the world of online and digital archival where, unless you archive it, nobody else has any reason to archive it. I could simply not archive any of the stuff i have archived, under the pretense that someone else probably already archived it, but that's just a guess and i have no idea whether or not that's the case.
Once i archive something, it's possible someone else has already archived it, but i being a known archiver of that material (or not, most archives are private) also substantiates that same paradox.
And besides, let's say i am archiving, how am i supposed to verify the integrity of my archival copy? Am i not supposed to consume it? That's the most effective and reliable way to determine the integrity of an archive. Sure i could use hashes or checksums, but those are only are reliable as the original creation of the hash/checksum.
spotify basically killing services like limewire? Netflix being incredibly popular because it was a good service?
Piracy is literally just a basic supply and demand driving force. You supply content that's easily accessible, for a fair price and people will pay for it, it's as simple as that.
I can't say much about netflix originals, but any of the licensed content would've already been paid for. Netflix currently sucks, and that's not really what we're talking about, though there is a conversation to be had there.
What’s that? No? It was just convenient and cheap? I guess it is, once again, just about you not wanting to pay money for things other people make.
if this was the case why would we see piracy decline over the last decade, only to see it increase noticeably in the last 4-5 years or so.