I think this article is jumping the gun ... Give it time ... I hadn't even heard of this show, and so obviously wasn't even looking for it ... And if it is in Swedish, I'll also have to wait for the complete English subtitles before I can watch it. (And personally, I've found that pirated TV shows / movies that are not English are, in general, difficult to find online).
FWIW I don't see any copies yet on nzbgeek.info, a popular Usenet NZB tracker. Almost no releases at all from OLLONBORRE ever, for that matter, that's the scene group the article discusses.
It’s funny how much better the Russian torrent tracker «Rutracker» is for foreign movies and serials, this show included. I love foreign movies and shows, and sometimes I literally can’t pay to watch it.
Yup. Top 2 reasons I became a pirate again after not being a pirate since maybe 15 years ago:
#1 I literally couldn't give someone money to watch/listen to what I wanted
#2 I was paying someone money to watch/listen to something and then they removed it
Even popular things like Saturday Night Live are still impossible to acquire legally in my country.
Edit: Forgot another point that became very annoying, the show is available but not with the subtitles I want and/or need. For example, watching a Swedish TV show on Spanish Netflix doesn't let me have English subtitles for example. But if I use Swedish Netflix, it would work, but technically breaking Netflix's ToS. Content rights have completely fucked up the user experience.
I sometimes pay for things and then pirate them anyway because I can adjust the subtitle position on the pirated version. Or I can rely on being able to play them offline. Or a dozen other reasons where the pirated version offers a better UX.
> I sometimes pay for things and then pirate them anyway because I can adjust the subtitle position on the pirated version. Or I can rely on being able to play them offline. Or a dozen other reasons where the pirated version offers a better UX.
I've been doing this for years. I have a stack of Blu-Ray discs I've never opened because I send a request to my home server while I'm in line to check out at the store and by the time I get home the exact same content on the disc I just purchased has already landed there exactly as if I had ripped it myself.
As you note, every element of the user experience is better with the pirated copy and absolutely nothing is worse, even for those who legitimately own it. The only way you compete with free is by being better than the free offering, and the home video industry just refuses to acknowledge that reality.
Maybe not related to this topic, but I was thinking about certain games I purchased from Ubisoft. Whenever I open Uplay, it asks me to log back in and enter a 2FA code.
So basically all my Ubisoft games are playing pirated versions after purchase.
By the way the anti-cheat system Ubisoft uses, EAC, also refuses to work at the same time as GoLand, so I can say that I really don't have a choice.
"Forgot another point that became very annoying, the show is available but not with the subtitles I want and/or need. For example, watching a Swedish TV show on Spanish Netflix doesn't let me have English subtitles for example. But if I use Swedish Netflix, it would work, but technically breaking Netflix's ToS. Content rights have completely fucked up the user experience."
I think you can set which subs (and audio tracks) should be available in you Netflix profile. I can get chinese voice and subs for a lot of stuff in Sweden.
Last I checked, a lot of the time this is entirely dependent on region. For eg. the Ghost in the Shell: Standalone Complex series on Netflix exclusively has English dubbing and English subtitles everywhere but Japan but changing these settings did not make the Japanese audio available anywhere else that I was able to find out. It's also very annoying that sometimes the only subtitles available are closed captions when I really only want dialog subtitles. It's a real pain that all dialog and subtitle options aren't available out of the gate for everything.
> I think you can set which subs (and audio tracks) should be available in you Netflix profile. I can get chinese voice and subs for a lot of stuff in Sweden.
It's a geo-content restriction of some sorts. I'm guessing some of the subtitles Netflix is leasing/renting/whatever, they only lease for specific regions.
I'm 100% sure I've watched shows in the past on Netflix where if I use a VPN to set my location to Sweden, I could get English or Swedish subtitles, but if I use it without VPN (so Spanish location), it would refuse to allow me the English subtitles and instead allows Spanish or Swedish subtitles.
I'm sure someone more knowledgeable knows exactly why that is.
# 3 There was 1 subscription streaming service to pay for, then 2, then 3, then 4… and eventually I decided to stop counting but the number kept on going up.
>#1 I literally couldn't give someone money to watch/listen to what I wanted
This, I'm constantly seeing reels and clips of shows and then searching for "where to stream x" on google and finding out that not only is the show not available on any of the 5 or so paid services that I have access to, it's not available for streaming at all, or if it is, it's by paying $3 per episode.
thanks I always forget the name of that site, just searching on google works so-so, sometimes the AI thing that structures the results now pops up a useful list and sometimes you just links to sketchier versions of justwatch.
As someone who pirates a lot of movies and TV, I think it's hard to justify based on ethical arguments against the industry. At a certain point, it feels like a wobbly justification to say we like using something but refuse to pay for it, and that's actually fighting the good fight. Personally, I don't like some of what these companies do, but I like other parts—like the movies and shows their dark malevolence provides me. I have to admit that the real reason I pirate is because it's more convenient and cheap.
I would naturally tend to agree with you, and when it comes to DRM-free things (like most music) I totally agree, but I genuinely think financially supporting companies using DRM is unethical. I used to buy (and still would buy) a ton of ebooks and a fair amount of movies/shows, but at this point I refuse to. The only exception is Audible. I still buy a ton of audiobooks from Audible (unless I can find them on Downpour or another DRM-free site) because I think they've gotten to a reasonably happy medium on the DRM. I would rather they drop the DRM, but it's at least not a giant pain in the ass to strip for people like me who really care about that.
I strongly want to pay people for good content, and I think they deserve to make some money for their work, but as soon as they slap DRM on it to limit my ability to back it up, consume it on whatever device I want, etc, the scales are tipped and I think piracy is actually more ethical than supporting such shit financially.
Right? "I don't like what you stand for or your views on certain topics, but I do want to enjoy the product you make, so I feel justified in not compensating you for partaking in the services you provide."
Can I stiff my Uber driver if I don't agree with their politics? If I don't like their car? Can my boss not pay me for developing software if I didn't laugh enough at his jokes?
We find it easy to say "no" in those cases. But because media piracy is pretty easy to do and pretty difficult to punish, we simply stop caring.
I'd love a better way to pay the artists of the content I end up torrenting--just so long as it actually gets to the people who made the content and not the people turning the world into a pile of telescreens.
#3 it ultimately got more inconvenient than pirating, just like 20 years ago. the streaming apps simply matched parity with the early 2000s piracy experience and then surpassed it, but then the content licensing system made it lose its advantages
Before reading the article I thought it would be because of the name, like when it was hard to find the album "The Music" by the band "The Music" in the early 2000s.
... if you live in a country where the police don't have better things to do.
There are plenty of countries where literally nothing happen no matter how much you download/upload, even when using public trackers. Police there tend to focus on people do the initial uploading, if anything.
Mostly the police don't care about this, it's the owners of the copyrights who care , they might send an email to your ISP and then you'll have to pay.
> they might send an email to your ISP and then you'll have to pay
I've probably downloaded/uploaded 10s of TBs at this point, in the two European countries I lived in since like two decades ago, and never received a single letter or had to pay anything. I'm sure there are more countries like these two.
I think this article is jumping the gun ... Give it time ... I hadn't even heard of this show, and so obviously wasn't even looking for it ... And if it is in Swedish, I'll also have to wait for the complete English subtitles before I can watch it. (And personally, I've found that pirated TV shows / movies that are not English are, in general, difficult to find online).
I literally found it in two seconds on one of the most popular non-legit streaming sites. Checked two others, and it's there as well.
The article author has no idea what they're talking about.
I may be ignorant, but streaming is not the same as torrenting, and The Pirate Bay is known for the latter.
you can couple a torrent service with something like put.io and now it's a streaming service =p
They want to talk about the series so the article isn't really jumping the gun. The title is just their hook.
FWIW I don't see any copies yet on nzbgeek.info, a popular Usenet NZB tracker. Almost no releases at all from OLLONBORRE ever, for that matter, that's the scene group the article discusses.
People may be unware of it, but yt-dlp has support for svtplay and thus can access/download the show directly. It may be geo-ip blocked however.
It’s funny how much better the Russian torrent tracker «Rutracker» is for foreign movies and serials, this show included. I love foreign movies and shows, and sometimes I literally can’t pay to watch it.
> sometimes I literally can’t pay to watch it.
Yup. Top 2 reasons I became a pirate again after not being a pirate since maybe 15 years ago:
#1 I literally couldn't give someone money to watch/listen to what I wanted
#2 I was paying someone money to watch/listen to something and then they removed it
Even popular things like Saturday Night Live are still impossible to acquire legally in my country.
Edit: Forgot another point that became very annoying, the show is available but not with the subtitles I want and/or need. For example, watching a Swedish TV show on Spanish Netflix doesn't let me have English subtitles for example. But if I use Swedish Netflix, it would work, but technically breaking Netflix's ToS. Content rights have completely fucked up the user experience.
I sometimes pay for things and then pirate them anyway because I can adjust the subtitle position on the pirated version. Or I can rely on being able to play them offline. Or a dozen other reasons where the pirated version offers a better UX.
> I sometimes pay for things and then pirate them anyway because I can adjust the subtitle position on the pirated version. Or I can rely on being able to play them offline. Or a dozen other reasons where the pirated version offers a better UX.
I've been doing this for years. I have a stack of Blu-Ray discs I've never opened because I send a request to my home server while I'm in line to check out at the store and by the time I get home the exact same content on the disc I just purchased has already landed there exactly as if I had ripped it myself.
As you note, every element of the user experience is better with the pirated copy and absolutely nothing is worse, even for those who legitimately own it. The only way you compete with free is by being better than the free offering, and the home video industry just refuses to acknowledge that reality.
Maybe not related to this topic, but I was thinking about certain games I purchased from Ubisoft. Whenever I open Uplay, it asks me to log back in and enter a 2FA code. So basically all my Ubisoft games are playing pirated versions after purchase. By the way the anti-cheat system Ubisoft uses, EAC, also refuses to work at the same time as GoLand, so I can say that I really don't have a choice.
"Forgot another point that became very annoying, the show is available but not with the subtitles I want and/or need. For example, watching a Swedish TV show on Spanish Netflix doesn't let me have English subtitles for example. But if I use Swedish Netflix, it would work, but technically breaking Netflix's ToS. Content rights have completely fucked up the user experience."
I think you can set which subs (and audio tracks) should be available in you Netflix profile. I can get chinese voice and subs for a lot of stuff in Sweden.
It is the same for Disney+ as well.
Last I checked, a lot of the time this is entirely dependent on region. For eg. the Ghost in the Shell: Standalone Complex series on Netflix exclusively has English dubbing and English subtitles everywhere but Japan but changing these settings did not make the Japanese audio available anywhere else that I was able to find out. It's also very annoying that sometimes the only subtitles available are closed captions when I really only want dialog subtitles. It's a real pain that all dialog and subtitle options aren't available out of the gate for everything.
> I think you can set which subs (and audio tracks) should be available in you Netflix profile. I can get chinese voice and subs for a lot of stuff in Sweden.
It's a geo-content restriction of some sorts. I'm guessing some of the subtitles Netflix is leasing/renting/whatever, they only lease for specific regions.
I'm 100% sure I've watched shows in the past on Netflix where if I use a VPN to set my location to Sweden, I could get English or Swedish subtitles, but if I use it without VPN (so Spanish location), it would refuse to allow me the English subtitles and instead allows Spanish or Swedish subtitles.
I'm sure someone more knowledgeable knows exactly why that is.
# 3 There was 1 subscription streaming service to pay for, then 2, then 3, then 4… and eventually I decided to stop counting but the number kept on going up.
>#1 I literally couldn't give someone money to watch/listen to what I wanted
This, I'm constantly seeing reels and clips of shows and then searching for "where to stream x" on google and finding out that not only is the show not available on any of the 5 or so paid services that I have access to, it's not available for streaming at all, or if it is, it's by paying $3 per episode.
In case you don't use this resource, try justwatch.com for figuring out who streams what.
thanks I always forget the name of that site, just searching on google works so-so, sometimes the AI thing that structures the results now pops up a useful list and sometimes you just links to sketchier versions of justwatch.
A big bullet point for me is that I find it unethical to support most of the studios and media companies.
As someone who pirates a lot of movies and TV, I think it's hard to justify based on ethical arguments against the industry. At a certain point, it feels like a wobbly justification to say we like using something but refuse to pay for it, and that's actually fighting the good fight. Personally, I don't like some of what these companies do, but I like other parts—like the movies and shows their dark malevolence provides me. I have to admit that the real reason I pirate is because it's more convenient and cheap.
I would naturally tend to agree with you, and when it comes to DRM-free things (like most music) I totally agree, but I genuinely think financially supporting companies using DRM is unethical. I used to buy (and still would buy) a ton of ebooks and a fair amount of movies/shows, but at this point I refuse to. The only exception is Audible. I still buy a ton of audiobooks from Audible (unless I can find them on Downpour or another DRM-free site) because I think they've gotten to a reasonably happy medium on the DRM. I would rather they drop the DRM, but it's at least not a giant pain in the ass to strip for people like me who really care about that.
I strongly want to pay people for good content, and I think they deserve to make some money for their work, but as soon as they slap DRM on it to limit my ability to back it up, consume it on whatever device I want, etc, the scales are tipped and I think piracy is actually more ethical than supporting such shit financially.
How about just not consume their products then?
Right? "I don't like what you stand for or your views on certain topics, but I do want to enjoy the product you make, so I feel justified in not compensating you for partaking in the services you provide."
Can I stiff my Uber driver if I don't agree with their politics? If I don't like their car? Can my boss not pay me for developing software if I didn't laugh enough at his jokes?
We find it easy to say "no" in those cases. But because media piracy is pretty easy to do and pretty difficult to punish, we simply stop caring.
I do that, too
Agreed.
I'd love a better way to pay the artists of the content I end up torrenting--just so long as it actually gets to the people who made the content and not the people turning the world into a pile of telescreens.
#3 it ultimately got more inconvenient than pirating, just like 20 years ago. the streaming apps simply matched parity with the early 2000s piracy experience and then surpassed it, but then the content licensing system made it lose its advantages
Aw man does anyone remember way back in the day there was a TV show produced by (I think Sony?) that was all about IRC pirating?
Edit: I think it was this, "The Scene" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scene_(miniseries)
Before reading the article I thought it would be because of the name, like when it was hard to find the album "The Music" by the band "The Music" in the early 2000s.
Never use public trackers (unless you're downloading Linux ISOs of course).
Seedboxes are a good investment :)
> Never use public trackers
... if you live in a country where the police don't have better things to do.
There are plenty of countries where literally nothing happen no matter how much you download/upload, even when using public trackers. Police there tend to focus on people do the initial uploading, if anything.
Mostly the police don't care about this, it's the owners of the copyrights who care , they might send an email to your ISP and then you'll have to pay.
> they might send an email to your ISP and then you'll have to pay
I've probably downloaded/uploaded 10s of TBs at this point, in the two European countries I lived in since like two decades ago, and never received a single letter or had to pay anything. I'm sure there are more countries like these two.
Streaming https://www.svtplay.se/the-pirate-bay works via e.g. Mullvad VPN (pick a Swedish location).
It only has audio and subtitles in Swedish though, so...
The casting is absolutely amazing.
AI generated bullshit slop it just hasn't made it to public trackers yet