"corporate fascist"
They (well, all of us whatever we do, but some more then others) operate in an imperfect system.
That versus cash.
Actually, the people have said "please stop this, this can't go on" at every election since 1992, with the possible exception of 2012 (unless you admit that 2012 President Obama was running against 2008 Candidate Obama.) They again said it in 2024.
It hasn’t been passed!
This proposed US legislation puts the power of blocking under the authority of its court system and only in the domain of copyright law. The courts are historically very concerned with upholding 1st Amendment rights to a degree that often (but not always) surpasses analogous rights in many sister liberal democracies. Anything that remotely smells of censorship would come under intense scrutiny.
And in this case, since we are talking about copyright law, the only parties with standing to sue for a block are the IP owners in the first place. So, by definition, this legislation cannot be used for censorship.
Every time a system that allows for internet content to be blocked is created, it's extended, misused and abused shortly thereafter.
"The tools already exist, why don't we use them to fight terrorists/pirates/cybercriminals/gays/undesirables too".
The slope isn't just slippery - it's made of Teflon and coated with baby oil.
Does that included movie leak?
like this: https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2025/07/28/legal-acti...
I'm pretty sure the movie isn't intended to be put on the internet or be part of internet content.
The discussion isn't about random movie leaks. It's about creating systems that allow for internet censorship.
At the same time, laws like these require creation of infrastructure that is goal-agnostic. Once you have ISPs implement mandatory blocking of websites for copyright reasons, this system can, and eventually will, be used to block other things deemed undesirable for the plebs to access.
Given the current presidential administration especially, any Democrat participating in such a project should be tarred and feathered.
Worth noting that this was introduced by Zoe Lofgren (D) the 77 year old that represents a big chunk of Silicon Valley. Disappointing.
It's a simple thing. Just a casual joke that means nothing to most people.
I worry because there are millions of young citizens who are going to have to work harder either for new political parties or to overturn this kind of language and jab.
We can't ever prove it's a higher level system that keeps every next generation in perpetual non-paying advocacy and grassroots political work. That's deeply unsettling.
Murder-for-hire? That's not only a first-degree murder charge, it's RICO. You're looking at the gurney in Terre Haute as a real possibility.
Operating a company that takes money from people on the promise that they'll be able to use it to cover medical expenses, then denying the payout because you already promised that money to shareholders who want to move to Florida to swing on and off the golf course at the retirement community they like, all while letting the person die a miserable death from a treatable illness? Perfectly legal. Encouraged. You have Congress' ear.
Same here.
Reading a book that no one wants to sell without paying for it? Intellectual property theft. Having a LLM model do the same and then charging for access to said model's output? Here's a seat behind the President at the inauguration.
... how?
I can point at myriad examples in which someone's life was ended because expending the monetary resources necessary to extend it was not in the best interests of shareholder returns.
The response to that UHC ceo is entirely his and the corporation’s fault. Actions have consequences.
It'll be a cat and mouse game, and tor could easily mitigate blocking efforts.
But this seems like a 1A violation to me.
The article says one of the requirements for the complaint needs to be that the site to be blocked must be found to be foreign based, so I guess the assumption is that the current set of laws to take down the site or sue are unavailable.
If I never paid for content again they'd still be in my debt.
You wouldn't steal a car would you? No, but I'd repossess one from some delinquent son of a bitch in a suit.
And since its a rental, and the company still retains control, that's a lot of capex they failed to declare with the IRS. And yeah, tax fraud.
There's a civil/economic argument: arguably copyright/intellectual property make for stronger societies that produce better stuff for everybody.
But there's nothing immoral about copying or watching something you came across. The author isn't injured by it- nobody is. Except, like I said, perhaps society in general.
They really, really don't. The tradeoff of offering temporary legal privileges in exchange for a future richer public domain resulted in better stuff for everybody. Those legal privileges have become effectively permanent, so the trade is broken.
They make rich people richer, we have ample evidence for that. But research ... the majority is funded by governments. But content creation ... the majority of high quality Youtube for example in funded in advance by Patreon and similar solutions.
You raise a valid point. When copyright was first envisioned in 1710, the world population was 600M, literacy rates b/w 5-25% (rural/urban).
That argument does not stand today - we don't need protections since the number of producers of better stuff will simply compete in the market of ideas. Pearl clutching of ideas isn't a problem.
As I said before: it's 2025, we shouldn't need an ad infested "website" to share, discover and download content in a p2p fashion. Kademilla and similar DHT truly decentralized tech has existed for more than 15 years...
The problem is that new generations want to profit from everything and have stopped "sharing is caring"
If they choose to make retrieving my purchase from the warehouse difficult, then I will take it by force with a torrent.
Oppose this bill.
Arguing over what is or isn't piracy is a non-sequitor when it comes to government censorship of the Internet.
At this point streaming servcies have been enshitified enough to make piracy again the better experience.
Greedy companies really need to heed Gabe Newell's words.
Buying DVDs and ripping to Jellyfin is much easier.
I don't know about BitTorrent but Usenet is way up:
There are now open-source, self-hosted applications that automate that entire process, so it's as simple as requesting a movie on your phone and having it show up on your own personal streaming service on your TV a few minutes later.
Bluray 4K 100+GB copy of Dune Part 2 at >70Mbps with maybe 5 seconds of buffering at the start. Literally can’t replicate it with legal streaming.
I'm literally at the point where its looking like pirating the movies is the only way to watch them...
In contrast, Archive.org is an absolutely fantastic library, and we're happy to support them.
Way better than my public library -- especially for hard-to-find media.
I suppose it's an act of support for your public library. But no one with a financial stake in that particular media is impacted in any way by using either method to obtain the film.
I think there are plenty of problems with the streaming model, but I think it’s borderline bad faith to try and make the claim that piracy is needed because it’s hard to navigate streaming sites. It’s certainly easier than finding obscure movies was pre-streaming
A recent example is Hot l Baltimore. It's an early Norman Lear production and stared James Cromwell and Charlotte Rae.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_l_Baltimore
I planned to add Turn On (1969), Tim Conway. It was canceled while the 1st episode was airing.
But since the last time I looked for it, some ethical soul uploaded it to wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turn-On
NBC: This Was the Week That Was. TV, aired 1963-1965. Someone found acetate audio recordings of two episodes and ripped them to YT. An act of culture, done in spite of rights holders.
delve deep into most directors filmography from the 60s/70s/80s and you'll find plenty missing. Ken Russell, Robert Altman, etc
It's flagrant bullshit that physical media, with real scarcity, had better rental terms than digital.
So why the hell shouldn't I pirate it? I get a better product, it's free, and all the people who made it are dead now anyway so spare me any bullshit moralizing.
I know that it doesn't change the customer experience, but it's worth being angry at the right people...
DRM is laughable anyway, if you give me the data I have the file if I really want it.
Let me, the consumer, legally purchase a high res copy of media I can own. Why is this so hard?
That is, the window for purchasing is much longer than the window for renting.
But your point generally valid regardless.
its a great movie!!
I do love movies, particularly ones that are pre-2010 or so. I've actually started going to a local indie theater that curates excellent older stuff so I just check their calendar every once in a while and pick something that sounds interesting to go see a couple times a month. Often times it's foreign stuff or things I've never heard of but those guys have excellent taste and I have yet to see a bad film. For anyone curious, here's my spot: metrograph.com
1)Disney-adjacent properties.
Look at the amazing spiderman 1, it was better than anything Marvel has released with Spiderman, it got trashed on for a very simple reason in my eyes, Disney wanted the rights for Spiderman and tried to force them to give them it (it worked) via giving it terrible reviews.
Opposite thing happened with Star Wars, another Disney "product", the new trilogy getting "amazing" reviews at the start was ridiculous, they were very bad movies, like terrible, the first one which was the most watchable of the three was just bad acting mixed in with nostalgia bait, didn't push the universe forward at all which the prequels get hate for but they did hugely expand what star wars was, in good ways. Even midichlorians which people gave so much hate to in episode 1, makes sense if you rewatch the OT, Darth Vader suddenly turning good is like "snapping" out of the trance state he was in, because as we know now, the "force" in star wars is not like morality in the real world, while you play a part in you getting taken "over" by a side (light/dark side), once it happens you sort of lose control, sort of like a hard drug in the real world, it takes a lot for someone who has given in to the dark side to go back to normal, which I believe makes for a better science fiction universe, the concept of only giving in enough to receive the power but not enough to become evil was even explored with mace windu with Vapaad, anyways.
Lastly, Black Adam, I watched it and the movie was objectively not beyond terrible for current day standards, it was a watchable popcorn flick and the CGI was very very good compared to Marvel movies which made the movie look cool, the main villain was uninspiring but so are most first movie villains, it's all about the setup. It received beyond terrible reviews in my opinion directed from Disney/Marvel in an attempt to fully kill competition especially during Marvel's weak point post endgame. I would have enjoyed seeing a movie of Superman vs Black Adam but it is what it is.
Lastly any anime movie competing with Disney, just look at the Oscars, how many anime movies get snubbed? I still remember being shocked at how when marnie was there did not win vs inside out... or how look back wasn't even nominated, lol.
TASM 1 was definitely well received when it was released. It was tarnished by the slop that was TASM 2, which lead to Sony being able to come to a licensing agreement with Marvel Studios, to use Spider-Man in the MCU. I think it's an extreme stretch to think Disney had any nefarious doings in the public opinion of those movies, Sony did that to themselves and has proven time-and-time again they cannot make a good quality movie with their Spider-Man IPs.
The Rise of Skywalker is at 51% on Rotten Tomatoes, that was universally acknowledged to be terrible, even by the "critics". Disney definitely was also not able to silence or drown-out the absolute outrage by the cast and fans of the treatment of Luke in The Last Jedi.
Why would Marvel / Disney spend any effort sabotaging the DCEU when Warner Bros. was good at doing it all themselves? If Marvel was worried about DC stealing their audience, they would have focused more on movies like The Batman, not some c-grade antihero most people have no idea about? The Rock fostered a lot of the ill-will towards that movie himself.
I say all this but I also think it's accurate still to say reviews are trustworthy but I don't think they ever have been. I don't think this is some new phenomenon, just people are more aware of the corruption embedded in the system.
For example, it tells me Wake Up Ron Burgundy (which isn't even a "real" movie) can be purchases on Prime, Fandango, or iTunes.
Actually, iTunes and Prime have mostly everything for rent, what movies were you actually looking for?
One that I wanted to watch recently was Disney's 2000 animation short John Henry. It's now part of the American Legends compilation, which is only available for purchase on Amazon, not rent. It's not even on Disney+.
Something about browsing in person is just so much more enjoyable than flipping between 9 services. Having a cinephile right there behind the desk that wants to nerd about movies and help pick something out is awesome. It's not a big store, but they've got thousands of movies in their catalog, which is (apparently) way bigger than any of the streaming services.
This doesn't solve your problem, but for the folks that are near the few remaining physical rental stores: consider supporting them, because they're great.
Edit: Actually, on the "your problem" part...maybe give the store a call? Looks like he'll mail discs too: https://myvideowave.weebly.com/services.html
I searched the biggest used online (flea)marketplace in my country and I could find the DVD for sale from several people. So I can buy it and play it right now legally if I want to, without resorting to piracy.
What point were you trying to make with this? Because I also can't buy a brand new 1969 Ford Mustang. Nothing is made forever.
Selling the game today would mean either ripping out the music which is what made the game fun, or paying the record labels more money, which will not be offset by the few sales to 30+ year old nostalgics.
But at least EA isn't actively preventing you from playing that old game if you own a licensed copy by requiring always-on DRM.
BTW: today is the last day to sign the Stop killing games EU initiative : https://www.stopkillinggames.com/eci
Well if the market can't provide, Pirate Bay can. Maybe they should fix "the market".
If that practice gets killed as well, that'd be a bonus.
Nobody wants my money, so to the bay we go.
The music industry figured this out: I pay Spotify, they have 95% of music content I could ever way, the UX is good enough. I have no reason to pirate music anymore.
Why is this so hard for the film industry?
> Why is this so hard for the film industry
Music industry runs on barely paying any artist that cant fill a stadium. Movie industry runs on constantly re-licensing content to min-max their returns from IP. Music industry can happily barely pay musicians via the spotify model, but the Movie industry can't continually re-license their stuff to a higher bidder if it's all on one site.
Are they really though? It's easier than ever for an indie creative to create and distribute their works through the many channels. Problem is, people don't spend as much money as a whole on indie works compared to focus-grouped blockbusters.
Yes, in the sense that at one point IP laws didn't exist and then we made them up. It stands to reason we could make up something better - maybe something that doesn't routinely banish media from public access.
> Why is this so hard for the film industry?
My theory is that the United States has compulsory licensing for music, but not movies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsory_license#United_Stat...
To my knowledge, a radio station or music streaming service doesn't have to negotiate with the record label to play a given song, they just have to pay a small royalty as defined by law. However, that doesn't hold true for movies. Each video streaming service has to negotiate the right to carry a given movie with the film studio that owns it. Those film studios play the streaming services against one another, often allowing the exclusive right to offer certain content for a limited time, after which they then lease the rights to a competing service.
The copyright holders can legally prevent their recordings from being streamed by Spotify. Famous examples were Taylor Swift and Neil Young withholding their music from Spotify.
For extra nuance, copyright holders can't stop cover songs from appearing on Spotify. So the Taylor Swift cover songs do have to pay compulsory license fees to her and her record label.
Even worse, a lot of the big studios have their own streaming service (Disney, Paramount, Peacock, Canal+ in France, etc) and have no incentive to have lease the rights to competing services.
That's ultimately what pushed Netflix to focus so much on creating their content, they knew that at some point the original content owners will realise streaming can be lucrative, and just build their own services.
It boils down to money.
Movies & tv have higher monetary value to the studios than songs to the record labels.
So the ip owners of video content get more revenue by restricting it as exclusives to their respective platforms rather than licensing it out to everybody and get a smaller fractional payment from an everything-unlimited-catalog video streaming service.
E.g. HBO would rather get 100% of their own $16.99/month subscription -- vs -- licensing entire HBO catalog to Netflix and getting a fraction% of $17.99/month.
How much extra would Netflix conceivably have to charge per month such that the fractional amounts to each movie studio (HBO, Disney, etc) would be enough $$ that the studios wouldn't bother with their own exclusive streaming platforms? $99/month? $149/month? Right now, there isn't a number that Netflix + all studios + subscribers can converge on so instead, we get the current fragmented streaming platforms of video content.
For more evidence of how video content is more valuable than music (in terms of digital streaming platforms), consider that tech giants like Netflix, Amazon, and Apple -- all created their own movie & tv studio business to produce even more exclusives for their streaming platforms. But none of them have started their own record labels to sign musicians to get exclusive songs or albums.
The logic is pretty simple:
* It has been widely demonstrated that, in the US, many consumers are willing to pay more than $100/month for cable TV, with ads.
* Netflix costs $8/month with ads.
* Why leave that money on the table?
If you, as the rightsholder can just eliminate that competition without any further effort, it makes logical sense to do so.
Excessivly long copyright is what enables this.
I'm concerned and curious about one thing, which is that tech giants have a monopoly on renting. If you want to rent a digital movie that isn't otherwise available from subscription, you might be able to get it from MSFT, Google or Amazon. Meanwhile the telecoms only seem to offer this through cable machines, just new releases at that.
I'm interested in seeing a few Korean films, the kind that aren't on criterion or mubi. Basically no legal way to see them.
Renting is sucky compared to just buying things, you could watch any movie you want and have unlimited access to it instead of juggling 5 subscriptions and get frustrated with shitty products. And publishers that make actual good movies that people want to watch would be rewarded
I don't want to buy movies, 99% of the time. Renting is cheaper, and I don't care to rewatch most things.
Games we used to rent those too, before they got to be 50-100 hours long. For several reasons it's no longer practical.
Not only you don't own anything anymore, you can't purchase anything anymore and you can't view content that the overseers deem imoral. At this point pirating is just civil disobedience against the stronghold that corporations have on the American society that ripples across the globalized world.
The current offering is just... less. I don't know if I mean in terms of sheer number of titles, but a million episodes of slop is just more slop. Netflix peaked 15 years ago and we didn't even notice.
It stinks because some of the things they tossed are mundane, but they add to the depth of the catalog if you're looking for something and improve the experience.
Now they have to secure rights for every title they want to stream. That’s a lot of work (and cost) for a hundred thousand titles, especially when your competitors own some of the studios that license those titles.
Disney, for example, owns the Disney / Marvel / Fox / Searchlight / Lucasfilm back catalogues and wants to hoard much of it for its own streaming service.
But oftentimes, that production company is closed shop. They've sold the licenses off to someone else, who split it into something else. And then there's the music rights. The whole thing becomes extremely complicated.
There's a whole set of movies that were somewhat popular that you just cannot find streaming. 100 cigarettes and Woody Allen's Crimes and Misdemeanors are good examples.
I'd say if they can't figure out the rights, just put it on YouTube.
If we had a more reasonable period like a decade, it would be a driver for creating new art, and prevent works from being locked away arbitrarily until our great-grandchildren can enjoy them (unless the art was just... lost to time).
In many cases, the conglomerates aren't even making money from them. How much do you think the movie company (and all the various middlemen) are making from some obscure movie from the 80s that they don't even make available on DVD or streaming anywhere? They're just griefing the public by withholding it and not even making any money.
I can. :) But for those not so lucky, second hand stores have tons of DVDs usually for peanuts. Also your library might lend them out.
I'm still in the process of ripping our collection, but we can watch stuff on TV with Jellyfin.
But to your point, Louis Rossman suggests that when piracy provides the best experience, providers might want to rethink their strategy...
Try the library, I've found lots of things not on streaming in mine's DVD collection.
They're all scams, of varying levels of scammyness ;P
No but seriously, the pricing is intentional deceptive and a lot of werives won't offer ad free viewing, no matter how much you pay. They'll also weasel around it with "most media won't have ads, but some will". Thanks, how helpful. Paramount plus apparently doesn't consider ads for itself to be ads - so on the ad free plan, you still get ads for Paramount.
But the worst part is that every app is different and some are really, really poor quality. You'd think we would just invent an API for this and then have one viewer, like we had for TV. But then again, maybe nobody wants to reinvent TV.
Also, blocking VPNs: if I'm logged in and you know my real country and I'm paying, you don't need to block VPNs. It doesn't do anything but annoy customers
What if the "pirate site" uses foreign cloud provider, and regularly changes IP addresses? Will I lose access to all websites hosted by the foreign cloud provider once their whole ASN will be blocked?
> Block BEARD does not mention VPNs, but its broad definition of “service provider” could be interpreted to include them.
This seems easy to circumvent - you can just use foreign VPN provider, who don't advertise themselves for piracy use, for... piracy. IP/DNS blocking proven to be a good censorship tool though.
I really wish destitutely uncreative people would stop pretending to be clever.
I think it's often, maybe always, quite advertent. :)
It's not like non-backronym bills in congress have names that accurately reflect what they seek to achieve.
> Electronic Art
I actually think it's pretty clever that the lawyers who wrote the bill managed to (almost) put their employer's name in it.
So looks like this will be at the ISP level, so should be able to be circumvented easily with VPNs.
The scary part is it's likely to lead to a lockdown on VPNs in the future.
The prospect of all VPN providers being required to block pirate sites, or being unable to operate in the US, is very scary indeed
Like archive.is or other news aggregator and paywall-bypass sites.
Or, just needs 1 falsely filed DMCA to ban. And whoops, made a mistake, and no process to unban.
By sneaking in with 'piracy', they're setting the stage to block any content they don't like.
They don't rob media sales; they secure media legacies. They're hoarders, not consumers.
- Actually drafting the bill: 10 minutes
- Coming up with the perfect stupid acronym pun name: 6 months.
As far as I know, this is a uniquely American thing.
There's a number of precautions and exceptions in the bill, and they're good ones, but I don't think we've seen anything like this before.
I feel like this bill is the beginning of a type of thinking that could grow past piracy by riding the current isolationist wave in U.S. politics. I think once this passes, it's probably going to be easier to justify ordering ISP blocks of non-U.S. IPs/ASNs on other criteria.
It will also further cement social media as the primary thing that is "Internet," instead of websites or other applications based on network protocols. After all that's probably what most people think of as the Internet - social media, a few apps, and streaming. Big social media will always have an international reach as its owners are very rich, they cooperate with governments, their users are individually accountable, and those users will likely become more so over time. I bet soon, that's all that will be left to the masses - social media and streaming.
Meanwhile Altman & Co. continue to steal data at large scale. Trump himself encourages it by removing any potential for regulation the LLM industry. I guess his followers can’t be bothered to read the actual news and get angry about it.
Most politicians that stand up against this stuff aren’t allowed to succeed. Unless someone does, this pro-corporate downward spiral will continue.
Of course, because what we need is the govt deciding which sites can be banned. I'm hoping this dies in committee, however for Bay Area folks, Rep Zoe Lofgren is the house sponsor for the companion bill and Adam Schiff is the Senate co sponsor. They can be reached at
https://lofgren.house.gov/contact/offices and https://www.schiff.senate.gov/contact/
If you oppose this bill, take 5 min and let your congressperson know. They might seem to be bought and paid for by lobbyists, but they care deeply about being reelected and even a small number of constituents showing up can be effective. In order of impact personal visit > letter > call > email. The higher effort channels(visit, letter) tend to get treated more seriously. Emails are largely ignored unless they are absolutely deluged.
Varelion•21h ago