this post was submitted on 03 Feb 2025
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It is impossible to ban piracy. The whole concept is that it's not legal to begin with.
I bet Lars Ulrich is so proud that he killed music piracy back when he killed napster.
Except wait.....no he didn't he killed A service. Meaning singular. The concept of piracy moved on. We got limewire and torrents.
The ONLY thing that has slowed (if not stopped) music piracy is making the content readily and easily available in a convienent consumption method at a reasonable price.
Shocking, I know.
The invention of iTunes CHARGING money for music in a (at the time) new more convienent method of music consumption at a reasonable price did leaps and bounds more to destroy piracy than Napsters downfall ever could.
Now if only video services would learn this lession. Because it's the same lession. I don't know how they missed the memo on this.
Put your video in one centralized place. Make it hassle free to watch. Charge a reasonable price. Piracy dies overnight.
And just to prove it, show of hands. Who here would go through the effort and risk of pirating, if Netflix had everything you wanted to watch, for $5 a month? Who here would say no, and still pirate? Reply below and tell me if you would still pirate with those conditions?
But instead, netflix is pushing $20 a month, and the video hosting is fractured among multiple hosts, all of which overcharge, AND want to serve ads.
Oh hey, right on cue. It's a skull and bones flag approaching.
I would still pirate. I like to have the files instead of proprietary apps
What if they gave you the files, with an easy download button ( with rate limits on downloads per user to avoid mass abuse )? Then, Netflix is basically providing a debrid service, which many people who pirate already pay more than 5$ for. Your VPN for torrenting is likely more than 5$. It's already trivially easy to rip a movie off a website ( even with DRM ), so this is not a real content control loss for them.
If they offered a service like GOG for movies I think it would be worth it. I don't have much time for movies though so I actually will buy several films a year on UHD Blu-ray. I only really pirate films that are either out of print or not available in my country on disc.
Funilly enough as somebody who has been using the Internet since being a working class teen in a poor European nation in the early 90s and thus knowing all about pirating, GoG is what made me stop pirating games (and even after they came up with GoG Galaxy I still kept downloading offline installers, plus my purchases in Steam have always been pretty limited in comparison to those in GoG exactly because in Steam my access to install a game can be removed at any time) whilst things like Netflix never stopped my pirating of Movies and TV-Series exactly because it was a streaming service which I would have to pay forever to maintain access to the Films and Series I liked rather than a Film and Series store were I could buy to keep (and, adding to this, during the peak period of VHS tapes and DVDs I actually did buy a lot of physical media).
Anecdotal, I know, but it's funny that my behaviour over the years almost perfect matches what you describe.
I want to like GoG but their Linux support can be pretty awful at times. It took over a week for X4 to update the Linux version on GoG compared to steam that in the end I refunded it and bought on steam. Also proton is pretty nice to have.
Yeah, GoGo need to improve their Linux support since at the moment they seem to just "go along with it" without putting any effort into it
That said, with stuff like Lutris (can only speak of that since I never used Heroic) which can use GoG's API to access your account and download games and has GoG-specific install scripts, it's also a reasonably seamless experience to game in Linux from GoG and none of it is tied to a proprietary vendor solution like Steam + Proton, so it's a lot more flexible and friendly for those who want to do their own tweaking - for example all my games in Lutris run sandboxed using firejail for extra security and blocking network access, but I can't do that for Steam.
GoG is pretty much a totally open solution (you need not use their API and can just download an offline installer and install it however you see fit) whilst Steam is tracking and controlling your installs, game launching and in some cases game playing, so that means gaming with Steam is much more tightly coupled to both their code and their servers and thus Steam is always going to be more ill-fitted to the traditional hacker ethos in Linux than GoG.
Finally, keep in mind that Steam's enhanced Linux support is just a natural consequence of their strategy of trying to protect themselves from any Microsoft funny business with Windows by creating their own Windows-independent ecosystem, with Linux being a natural shortcut to do so cheaply.
Oh I would prefer to use GoG, the problem is that it up just isnt so good. But been playing FOSS games a bit lately so haven't been using either.