Pirating the Pirates

179

ppiotrgrabowski about 3 hours ago 58 commentsRead Article on mubi.com

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Discussion (58 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

softskunk•about 2 hours ago

> Of particular note is the “remux” community, dedicated to seamlessly stitching together the best video and audio streams from different releases without any generational loss of quality.

That’s not what “remux” means. A remux is the original data from, for instance, a Blu-ray disc, transferred into a new container without re-encoding. What the author is referring to would be called a “hybrid remux”.

timdiggerm•27 minutes ago

Are you speaking purely of the technical difference, or do you know what that particular community calls itself?

hamdingers•14 minutes ago

Remux is not a community, it's a tag that pirate release groups uses to indicate that a release contains exact copies of the original video and audio streams present on the disc.

GP is correct that files with purely additive changes (like additional audio tracks) to remuxes are called hybrid remuxes.

mahboi•36 minutes ago

Is there an actual non-hybrid "remux" community?

d-e-r-e-k•about 1 hour ago

If the article gets something like that wrong, I’ll have a hard time taking any of it seriously. Pass for me.

huslage•about 1 hour ago

The Art of Internet Pedantry™

schlauerfox•about 2 hours ago

One thing to note, is that the library of congress has the power to create the exceptions to the DMCA. The EFF lobbies for expansion of the exact powers the article is advocating for. https://www.eff.org/issues/dmca-rulemaking

cosmic_cheese•about 2 hours ago

I've only barely skimmed the surface of the preservation world, but the irreverent attitude taken by the industry towards audiovisual media releases frustrates me greatly. That more accurate older releases are made unobtainable in favor of newer botched versions just adds insult to injury.

I'm grateful that diminishing returns were hit earlier with audio, though, which limits the blast radius for music releases. Most classic albums have a range of different masterings available on audio CD, many of which are available cheaply secondhand, which makes getting ahold of a good/accurate release considerably less daunting.

Movies and especially TV shows on the other hand are a mess. It shouldn't be a miracle to get a high-quality, faithful official remaster like the one Star Trek: TNG got.

Namahanna•4 minutes ago

Movies especially with re-releases. Star Wars with Lucas tinkering and blocking old copies.

But we have this - https://www.thestarwarstrilogy.com/project-4k77/

"97% of project 4K77 is from a single, original 1977 35mm Technicolor release print, scanned at full 4K, cleaned at 4K, and rendered at 4K."

Opening scene comparison - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1b47UP6ZGI

haunter•about 1 hour ago

> Movies and especially TV shows on the other hand are a mess. It shouldn't be a miracle to get a high-quality, faithful official remaster like the one Star Trek: TNG got.

TV shows are even worse because of the soundtrack.

Oh you watched this show with the iconic soundtrack? Too bad it's only available on the VHS release from 1995, they couldn't get the rights anymore so here is the same show but worse with different music

Even video games are not exempt from that. GTA games has tons of music removed from the radios with later digital re-releases so currently the original console disc versions are the only way to play the games as they were released back then https://www.reddit.com/r/GTATrilogy/comments/1gsqdc5/what_so...

AbsurdCensor•15 minutes ago

> Oh you watched this show with the iconic soundtrack? Too bad it's only available on the VHS release from 1995, they couldn't get the rights anymore so here is the same show but worse with different music

Even slightly more modern shows I think have had that happen as well. The Drew Carry show would have been a great example.

Xirdus•32 minutes ago

This isn't even the worst outcome. There are hundreds of video games that are never re-released at all and have never been available for sale digitally, entirely because of soundtrack licensing.

RunSet•21 minutes ago

> the worst outcome.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniracers#Lawsuit

mahboi•30 minutes ago

Or 007 GoldenEye where Microsoft for some reason bought the rights only to throw them into a paper shredder

cosmic_cheese•25 minutes ago

Yeah, I'm in agreement with the blog post in that I don't advocate for dismantling of copyright, but there are absurdities within the system like this that are in dire need of attention.

mahboi•23 minutes ago

Honestly I think it's fine. If corps are going to make poor decisions with their IP, oh well, their choice and their loss. There's plenty to go around.

LostMyWords•32 minutes ago

Video games sign terrible licenses even for their most core parts. Many of the millions selling Forza games disappeared from the digital stores because they couldn't use the cars anymore.[0] It's almost unbelievable since cars and their makers are actually getting a big marketing push from those games, but studios cannot get better conditions.

[0] https://kotaku.com/forza-horizon-4-delisted-xbox-licensing-1...

mahboi•32 minutes ago

Yeah I bought GTA IV and still pirated it. As a bonus, don't have to launch that Steam shit every time I want to play it.

opello•27 minutes ago

> Movies and especially TV shows on the other hand are a mess. It shouldn't be a miracle to get a high-quality, faithful official remaster like the one Star Trek: TNG got.

Star Trek: TNG was a bit of a special case though, because it had to be re-cut and new digital special effects created and edited into scenes.

I think this perspective holds more true for things that were broadcast in HD but only got commercial DVD releases. That's a disappointing lapse in high quality availability where HD content was distributed, just not in a persistent form for home use. In those cases the best quality available is an HD TV or satellite recording which might not have been preserved even in online media sharing communities.

juiceland•32 minutes ago

> It shouldn't be a miracle to get a high-quality, faithful official remaster like the one Star Trek: TNG got.

Don’t get your hopes up. That release is very special. It happened at just the right time: discs were still selling and streaming had not yet taken over.

There is simply not sufficient market for such restorations any longer. They probably didn’t make back the cost of the remaster.

javcasas•about 3 hours ago

Kinda related, but I hate how the big studios go after old videogames and try to take them down. It looks like, in the future, this era will be called the "digital dark ages", not because all the stuff got lost to bitrot, but because all the stuff became illegal to own so that the studios could sell the new stuff again and again.

tombert•about 2 hours ago

The home-computer world is especially interesting for old games. If something made it to a Nintendo or Sega console, it's probably very well-preserved, but I'd be surprised if even 1% of all video games made were released on consoles.

There's an unfathomable number of games that were released on the Commodore 64, Amiga, Atari ST, and most famously DOS that were made by one or two people, self-published, and have now completely fallen into obscurity to a point where it's not 100% clear who owns the copyright and who to give money even if you wanted to, which has led to the "probably-illegal-but-not-really-enforced" term of "Abandonware".

I honestly kind of think that Abandonware should be codified into law in the same way that trademarks are; if you're not actively giving me a legitimate way to buy your game then I don't think it should be illegal for me to get it illegitimately.

acomjean•about 1 hour ago

It should be. There are lots of good ideas of modifying copyrights so that its not the automatic 70 year after life of author (or what every it is now).

>unfathomable number of games that were released

One of the problems is that there are too many and hard to find curate to separate the good from the meh.

giancarlostoro•about 1 hour ago

Not just that, but some fair use youtube channels like Digging the Greats:

https://www.youtube.com/@diggingthegreats/videos

He intentionally samples less than 5 seconds iirc, and they still ding him, take all profits from the video, which took many many hours to create, and he cannot afford a lawsuit. It's absolutely ridiculous.

Telaneo•16 minutes ago

Wait til you hear it's (or at least was) possible to get dinged for 0.00 seconds.[1] That particular issue's probably solved by now, since Youtube requires claims to include a time stamp showing where the problem clip is. Nevermind the fact that wasn't a requirement to begin with. No wonder the corps ding every creator out there. It's free money with no downside to them. Nevermind the fact they're actively destroying culture.

[1] https://youtu.be/VvFGumd_esg?&t=685

mahboi•35 minutes ago

The old video games aren't illegal to own.

the_af•about 2 hours ago

Agreed, and it was already like this in the 2000's (when I got involved in the abandonware scene). I remember the owner of Home of the Underdogs getting constantly in battles with takedown notices for games she only intended to preserve. Not piracy in the sense of "losing tons of money", nobody but enthusiasts cared about these games anymore.

charcircuit•about 1 hour ago

Isn't that one of the whole points of copyright? So the authors can print new copies and not have to compete with other people releasing copies they made?

Nothing is stopping people from keeping an archived copy until copyright expires.

Telaneo•6 minutes ago

> Isn't that one of the whole points of copyright? So the authors can print new copies and not have to compete with other people releasing copies they made?

The more important point of copyright is 'to promote the progress of the useful arts'. The 'securing for a limited time to authors and inventors, the exclusive right to their writings and inventions' is just the means. Do the means in this case seem to work well in achieving that goal?

> Nothing is stopping people from keeping an archived copy until copyright expires.

Except the 70+ years it takes before you're legally allowed to publish it, or even just adapt it. If I'm going to play things by the book, even if I archive it when I'm 10 years old, sales stop on day two of the copyright period, and the rights expire the day after it's 70 years years old, I will be 80+ years old when I'm legally allowed to let people download it, or I myself can publish an adaptation (or more likely, I'll have died and my archive version will be lost in the estate sale).

kibwen•38 minutes ago

Copyright law is about finding a balance between, on one side, incentivizing creators via granting them a legal monopoly on publishing, and on the other side, the philosophical notion of freedom of speech, which would allow anyone to republish, remix, and repurpose any preexisting work. The original formulation of this legal monopoly was that it was supposed to be short enough that it would expire well within the average person's lifetime, a notion which has long been gutted via regulatory capture.

the_af•about 1 hour ago

I think the real tragedy of abandonware is that copyright holders aggressively pursued abandonware sites "just in case", while not actually having any plans to redistribute the games legally. The abandonware sites were cracking (or making cracks available, whatever) and making these games playable in modern devices, thus ensuring these games were preserved, but copyright holders (through ESA [1] legal action or similar) simply wanted to stop this, with not plans otherwise. These games often weren't available otherwise. We're talking games of the DOS or C64 era, with no real commercial viability (unless bundled with thousand other games, which they eventually sometimes did, often using the cracks developed by the abandonware scene!).

----

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entertainment_Software_Associa...

LostMyWords•20 minutes ago

It is often very difficult or even impossible to locate who currently owns the rights to some intellectual property in order to re-release it legally.[0]

[0] https://www.fastcompany.com/3053050/how-one-company-is-bring...

mahboi•13 minutes ago

> Beyond Star Wars, an illicit cottage industry has sprung up to patch the holes in any given film’s digital representation.

I've thought about making an Oppenheimer except all scenes are in chronological order and the cringe ones are gone Edition

dewey•about 3 hours ago

> When I came to work for Arrow, I was bringing a lot of awareness of the methods of fan preservationists on the torrent sites

Very smooth way of using your torrenting skills on your CV.

sedawkgrep•about 2 hours ago

I know this is the easy take, but there really are people who are passionate about preservation beyond just acquiring things for their own use.

I'm not one of those people. :D But I do know one; he's a professional librarian.

MomsAVoxell•about 2 hours ago

I am am an amateur recordist, I absolutely love to bootleg concerts and gigs and things, as in: make my own recordings of live music and so on. I have shared everything in the appropriate places, also. I believe it is an essential artistic expression: to record the nature of the world around you for the future.

So, I do it a bit.

I think this ethos can be applied in many ways and with different media; preservationism is a high value objective. The future needs it, kinda.

theK•42 minutes ago

> to record the nature of the world around you for the future

That's cool.

> The future needs it, kinda.

Agreed but we seem to be in the minority seeing that most people nowadays seem to be speed running to make Asimov's Foundation into a documentary.

dewey•about 2 hours ago

Yep, definitely! I know of instances where professional archives and libraries work with specialized torrent sites to archive content directly and these days that's sometimes necessary with how content is locked down, games are dependent on a server or DRM schemes don't make archiving easy.

You frequently hear of cases where the last remaining official copy got lost and only due to some fan service (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49694382) data could be recovered.

Waterluvian•about 2 hours ago

I’m absolutely obsessed with it. For me it’s driven purely from childhood nostalgia. In particular, Macintosh games. I want, and want others to have that warm excitement of nostalgia when they re-discover something forgotten.

Forgeties79•about 2 hours ago

This is true but people also use it as a magic shield to (needlessly IMO) justify their piracy, even though they are 1) only downloading things they happen to like and 2) don’t even follow a basic 3-2-1 backup protocol, let alone anything remotely resembling SOP for preservation.

I bet not even 1 in 1000 people pirating are doing it primarily as a preservation exercise.

settsu•10 minutes ago

As a side note/game: imagine you're not particularly tech savvy. Now figure how much Mubi costs using only their website.

(Why? Why do companies do that??)

juiceland•4 minutes ago

https://mubi.com/en/us/memberships

This shows the price, what am I missing?

bborud•18 minutes ago

I laughed out loud when I saw the George Lucas quote. He is the master of defiling his own work.

HelloUsername•about 1 hour ago

Interesting they chose The Good, The Bad and the Ugly, probably because of the 60th anniversary?

They didn't mention that probably the Mondo release of that film is the 'best' one? Someone else did a good version count of all releases: https://originaltrilogy.com/topic/id/136114

Curious what the upcoming DCP release is sourced on

GoodBadUgly_FTR_S-235_EN-XX_10_4K_20140330_DLA_IOP_OV

GoodBadUgly_FTR_S-235_EN-XX_10_4K_PRKC_20160613_MPS_IOP_VF

sudoevil•12 minutes ago

A praise for forensics, maybe? EN01 or raw data, that is the question.

1970-01-01•about 1 hour ago

It gets worse:

https://forums.digitalspy.com/discussion/2181751/dvds-with-t...

alabhyajindal•about 2 hours ago

Anyone here subscribed to Mubi? Would you recommend it? How different are the films compared to mainstream cinema?

dewey•about 2 hours ago

I'm not subscribed to right now, but I have been for a very long time before that. I like their curated approach a lot and it doesn't feel like you are getting drowned in crap like many other services.

It really depends what kind of films you like though, if you are looking for fast paced shows or the latest Hollywood productions you will not like it. If you enjoy going to indie cinemas, you'll like it.

eltrain•36 minutes ago

Something other replies haven’t mentioned yet is that you can use a VPN on it. A service like Disney+ for example will not let you in at all with a VPN active but no problem with Mubi. You get a pretty nice selection with that.

bpye•about 1 hour ago

I am quite happy to give Mubi my money each month, even if I don't use it a _huge_ amount. I have seen some great films on the platform, and I really do want to see them be successful.

Some content has overlap with conventional streaming services, but then films like "Do not expect much from the end of the world" probably wouldn't see a streaming release elsewhere?

anderber•about 2 hours ago

They have mostly independent films. So numerous dramas and slow-burn types. I like it. I've found some great movies on there, but also have found a bunch of duds. The problem is the pricing. Right now my main services are Criterion Channel and Eternal Family.

bbx•about 2 hours ago

I've been signed up a few months at a time over the years. It has tons of independent movies from the US/UK/France but also from lesser exposed countries (think Danish, Greek, Thai, Polish, Norwegian…). It's mostly films released recently or in the last 20 years. It also has some older classics (Memories of Murder, Carrie, Dogma, Obsession, Carlito's Way…) but there aren't that many and they're often only there temporarily.

It's worth doing the 30 days trial. I sign up for a month or two whenever I feel like the library has at least 10 films I'd want to watch.

everyone•about 1 hour ago

Of interest, another painstaking fan recreation... Alien 3: The Legacy cut

https://youtu.be/eCIXkBEoqeM?si=Ts0enOPy3z9fVBg6

(Link is just to a review of it, you need to torrent it if u want to watch it (its 41GB lol))

tancop•about 1 hour ago

I hate the way film and music pirates gatekeep everything. There are private trackers for games and software but they don't try to keep any content exclusive, you get faster downloads without random bad quality uploads and malware cluttering the site in exchange for keeping a good ratio.

tene80i•about 1 hour ago

Yeah it’s rough not to be able to get whatever you want without paying anyone or experiencing any downsides

mahboi•27 minutes ago

Surprise, piracy isn't activism, it's just people wanting free stuff or even paying some discounted rate for it

kristianpaul•about 2 hours ago

Everything is a Remix

MrBuddyCasino•25 minutes ago

Is it just me or is the Lorber version the only one with correct colors?