I know a lot of us, myself included, like to believe that piracy allows us to consume problematic media without supporting artists we do not like. But piracy demand also indicates to companies an untapped market that they could tap if they create the right product. HBO is absolutely keeping tabs on piracy of their show now and seeing our traffic the same way Crunchyroll used to keep tabs on pirated fan-translated anime back when they cared.
Also, there is a similar ethical zero-sum game with all other Harry Potter media and products. Normally we can buy on the secondary market if we need a hard copy to scan and rip but don’t want to support the creators. But almost every Harry Potter book in circulation is purchased by someone with intention to sell for a profit, and HBO is also likely keeping tabs on sales and resales of DVDs of the old movies. Every time money leaves your bank account for Harry Potter media, you are directly feeding the ecosystem which sustains the Queen of the TERFs.
It’s honestly pretty incredible how morally radioactive this one human is. Orson Scott Card is equally repugnant, but the Ender’s Game series doesn’t even have a small fraction of the market share of Harry Potter (IMHO this is the fault of that movie being just okayish, not good or bad, but that’s another topic.) Trump’s MAGA movement is comparable in badness, but there really isn’t much most of us can do other than voting and never shutting up about how unconstitutional the things he is doing is. Rowling really is comparable to Disney or Nestlé, and she’s just one person, not a whole company.
Right now, the only ethical way to consume Harry Potter is watching or reading movies and books on your copies that either:
- you obtained before 2020
- were given to you for free in some non-trackable way, e.g. offline or sneakernet.
There is no ethical Harry Potter consumption within capitalism. We will have to see if this changes once she is dead.
I wouldn’t watch it anyways, I got tired of Harry Potter in the early 2000s.
I did not even remember about HP after childhood. However after after that game and the HBO series boycott mentions and occasional meltdowns about how you should not watch or even pirate it, it enters mine and public consciousness in general, Streisand effect or whatever. I still do not care about HP anyway and am not going to bother.
It is fine to not like someone or something, boycott and recommend others to do it for whatever reason, you do you. I must write though that even remotely comparing JK with the likes of evil conglomerates like Disney and Nestle or with MAGA effect on american and world politics is an argument in bad faith to say politely. Also no offense, your ethical rules, arguments and the post overall seem moralizing and patronizing and people that do not already agree with you beforehand do not tend to take it well whether you like it or not, that is just how it works.
Never thought I’d see the day when hexbear users would make a ton more sense than anyone else on a given topic. But here we are.
I doubt I’ll watch it, still gonna download it and put on my media server regardless. Other people will want to watch it so it’s better they watch it pirated on plex than on an official stream.
Harm reduction ftw
Meh, sail the seas and do what you want. This sounds like a plea from the corporate overlords to get you to not pirate their shit. Also, what show?
But piracy demand also indicates to companies an untapped market that they could tap if they create the right product
I agree with your conclusion of not watching it, but the reason that companies might observe and take a non-purchase as some kind of hypothetical market signal doesn’t seem like the strongest argument for that, especially if people are avoiding the purchase specifically to deny them money for ethical reasons, that’s not something they can resolve by making ‘the right product’.
If pirating a Harry Potter show provides support to its author, I think that support is going to be more in the form of cultural relevance and mindshare than anything directly financial. Being a fan of an IP gives other people a reason to engage with it because your interest signals things to other people, like it means that by not watching it they might be left out of the loop etc, and since the law enforces property rights over what can be done with it and who can profit, that adds to the power of its owner by influencing the choices and interests of other people in their favor.
That is another reason to avoid it, at least for now. If you don’t watch it, you don’t talk about it, you don’t give them free advertising. Piracy evokes demand in many ways. It will still be around in 20 years when no one is looking, anymore.
I’m just here to bring to your attention Lev Grossman’s “The Magicians”, both the books and the assorted TV show, which is quite awesome in its own right, even if it diverges from the books by quite a bit. There’s a whole world of awesome outside of HP, and even if it wasn’t, I refuse to recast in my theater of the mind the extremely talented and deeply regretted Alan Rickman and Dame Maggie Smith.
I read the books as they came out and loved them. i tried watching the series as it was coming out but they really were so different from the books that when I had to wait for the next season I never picked it back up.
Are they worth watching though? If I go into it knowing it’ll be basically something loosely related?
I think it’s really good. The books… were frankly hard for me to get through. Not bad, but I only read the first few.
If you are going to watch the series, understand that the main cast are written as kind of assholes and are written like real people with real emotions and it’s stupid, but stupid good. Also there is an SA scene that can honestly be skipped Season 1, Episode 13 running roughly from the 40:00 to 42:00 mark.
Once you get through the first season it’s pretty smooth sailing through to the end of season 3. Then they have cancellation hanging over them so seasons 4 and 5 aren’t quite as… grand as they should have been.
I’ll add, the manga Witch Hat Atelier is a much better execution than Potter of the premise “a young orphan is abruptly brought over into a secretive world of mages overlapping with the mundane, but for mysterious reasons repeatedly draws the attention of dark forces.”
Yep Harry Potter for adults
The Magicians show lost me with the sudden graphic rape, that was then portrayed a good thing. Sucks you got raped but you get a consolation prize of extra powerful magic! Also the rapist has magic semen, and they need to get more.
Look. You’re not wrong that there is a really scary (I would perhaps say very intense and absolutely triggering, but not explicitly graphic. There’s definitely graphic violence, but yeah.) scene with SA. But the god semen thing was a different deity and they gank the original trickster deity that did the SA.
When watching I do have the timestamps for that scene written down and do skip it. I skipped it when I introduced my wife to the show.
Not telling you what to do, but there is good content there. That’s probably the single scene in the series I seriously tell people to avoid.
I’m sorry it upset you the way it did. And now I’m seriously feeling like typing this is not the right thing, but my tism brain wants to explain more and better.
It’s all good, i enjoy a good explanation! I did mix those 2 up, I got farther in the series than I remembered. I had to go look it up and it’s still bad. The way all of her remaining friends(because her friends were murdered before the rape) just brushed her off afterwards was unpleasant. She wanted justice and they didn’t help her, so she went for it on her own. That messed up their plans and they were pissed in addition to being “concerned” she was turning dark. When they had originally abandoned her and looked down on her because of her lack of magic, now all of a sudden they “care”. Quinten was such a shit friend. After all that, she chose to save them, by takeing a part her rapists to make her a goddess. Yeah, her whole arc was rage inducing. I tried to only watch what was necessary.
Yeah, I tried to get past it but there were a couple other plot lines that were fairly disturbing. The living ship, that also was SA somehow or something. Creepy Russian teacher watching them fuck as foxes. The magic system had a lot of tie ins with sex and it was ick. The guy who got stuck in the the past or something and lived a life that was erased. Idk it was just a lot.
At this point it’s only a matter of principle. JKR is a billionaire, her activism isn’t limited by money. And most HP fans don’t care or even know about her hateful views, so anything they put out will still make her millions.
There’s a bunch of flaws in your logic here, not the least of which is:
There is no ethical Harry Potter consumption within capitalism.
Privacy isn’t capitalism
My man, the reason I said that is I’m giving you an out. Direct downloads can’t be tracked in the way that streams and torrents can. Get a Google Drive link from somebody or get a Usenet subscription. I thought I was clear that I meant “within capitalism” as “everything the suits can measure and react to”.
Not only is what you said definitely not true for a lot of different reasons, but if you’re gonna be this condescending, I don’t see why I should continue having a conversation with you.
I don’t think the cached file other people cached on premiumize.me or other debrid services can be tracked but I’d love to know how I’m wrong. Out of curiosity to be clear, I’m not watching Harry Potter.
I didn’t say it could. In fact, I really hope I can’t, lol.
Direct downloads can’t be tracked in the way torrents can, as far as I know.
But privacy doesn’t cancel capitalism. HBO doesn’t need to know who downloaded, just how much people downloaded.
Capitalism is going to happen regardless of piracy. HBO is going to make the show regardless of how many people pirate it.
HBO doesn’t need to know who downloaded, just how much people downloaded.
They don’t need to know either of those things
But privacy [sic] doesn’t cancel capitalism.
It kinda does, but that’s not really the point
Piracy is in a sense the purest form of capitalism. It costs slightly more than nothing to send a file over the internet, and so if the efficient market hypothesis was true everyone would be pirating all the time. The suits and the corpos know full well that their products compete with piracy’s offerings at the low, low price of free + a VPN or Usenet subscription or a 3D printer. The smarter corpos know that they can gague a market by keeping track of torrents of their movies/shows. We aren’t insulated from the free market down here just because we don’t pay for shit.
Piracy is anti-capitalism. And while it may cost you something to send a file over the Internet, it doesn’t necessarily cost me anything. And if capitalism is producing something and selling it for a profit, piracy is the opposite of that: taking a copy for free, regardless of the method. Thus: anti-capitalism
Just because of the method of piracy you happen to choose may cost you money doesn’t change those underlying facts. especially because it is perfectly possible to engage in piracy without engaging in capitalism whatsoever. just because in the example you have cited, you have chosen to commingle the two does not mean they cannot be mutually exclusive.
I think you are equating capitalism to money changing hands instead of the generation of capital. The glib version of my argument is “Piracy drives word-of-mouth advertisement which drives sales, therefore piracy increases sales.” Its obviously more complex than that, but I hope you see my position.
I don’t see the difference between the two things you just described, no… except for the circuitousness of the path of the profit/value generation. The end result is the same.
But the argument you’re making also makes a huge amount of assumptions about the individual versus about engagement in piracy by society in general. On the micro scale versus the macro scale. Is piracy of a particular piece of media ethical as an individual versus is piracy of a particular piece of media ethical at scale. The crux of your argument seems to be the value generation of “word-of-mouth“. So now you’re just arguing a matter of degrees and pedagogy.
So you’re not really arguing about capitalism or piracy at all, now you’re arguing about passing undeserved value, and the methods by which that is done and how piracy is being co-opted via capitalism.
And what this whole argument really is about is whether or not you can separate the art from the artist and still appreciate a piece of work, even though you find the artist repulsive. And none of this has to do with piracy at all, but whether you can find a way to consume an artist work without endorsing the artist. where piracy comes into the conversation is whether or not that is an acceptable means to that end, and people will always disagree on that.
The whole “capitalism” chestnut isn’t a means to untangle that because piracy is, as I’ve said, mostly anti-capitalism, and isn’t self reliant on capitalism, so the logic of that argument doesn’t really work out. It’s mostly down to personal opinion, and there really isn’t any logic to that at all.
I’ll do what I want, thanks. :)
Cause a pirate is free? :D
Yar har, fiddle de dee,
Being a transphobe is alright with me!
Fucking gross.
Wow. What a prick. It’s difficult to imagine proudly declaring that you’re transphobic in any setting, much less a piracy thread on Lemmy.
Yes, I am Rotten to the core!
Nah just a turd.
I think they were being sarcastic.
Edit: Mmmmm… Thinking about maybe they weren’t.
I initially thought they were being sarcastic too. Gross
A transphobe on a Lemmy instance, how “”““fantastic””“”.
Which is what?
The trans people asking you to not materially support someone who is harming us at scale are not your mom telling you you’re not allowed to play your video games, dude. You’re perfectly allowed to be an asshole
materially support
piracy community
Demand of any sort is still bad. This is still giving attention to a bigot and her media. This isn’t a high bar to clear at all, you can casually walk over it. But many people still seem intent on tripping over it.
Agree 100%. I’ve been in some tough conversations with fellow LGBTQ+ allies over my participation, however minor, in the Harry Potter fandom. I’m seeing a lot of “it’s fine if you liked it before we learned JKR was a bigot” but I’m also seeing a lot of people with the same story as mine — discovered the franchise back then, enjoyed it, but do not like what JKR is doing to the trans community — but also criticising me for the same. Like it’s “fine” (to some extent?) if you’re trans and JKR betrayed you, but if you’re not trans, you’re held to a higher standard as an ally. I dunno. It’s confusing. I will not, however, back down from my claim that I enjoyed the first four (+HBP) books and the first four films before I learned she was crazy… and that this year I rewatched Philosopher’s Stone in 4K (and yes, it holds up).
All that being said, the fears and concerns in the trans and LGBTQ+ community are valid. They may be jerks about it online, but as an ally, I can only ever strive to be a better one. I can’t change what I liked in the past and I will not deny it, even to history revisers. But I can change what I do in the present, and I can always strive to Do Better.
I don’t like the new Harry Potter series because of why it exists. JKR was disappointed the stars of the film series did not share her transphobic views, so she immediately made a point to recast Hermione and to make her completely different from Emma Watson’s portrayal, as Watson was her most outspoken critic. She didn’t make Hermione a Black girl to be inclusive, she did it to distance Watson from the character because Watson isn’t transphobic. JKR further muddied the waters by saying that Dumbledore was gay and always had been (though no evidence of this is in the books — he’s essentially treated as ace, as in, asexual, as in, his sexuality is undetermined and probably doesn’t exist, which is fitting as the entirety of his character’s relevance is mentorship to an adolescent boy). When the rest of the cast basically stood against her, she set out to recast all of them.
The new Harry Potter series looks like it might be fun, but I cannot in good conscience watch the new series. There are so many more things out there to see. Watching it with infinite time would be one thing, but I haven’t got that, have I? I was fully grown when Philosopher’s Stone came out, and I had no intention of seeing it. A coworker slipped me a bootleg copy (while it was still in cinemas!) and I watched it… twice. Then I went and saw it in cinema. I then collected the books and read them, and watched the movies, though I didn’t like it after the fourth one. It stopped being fun. I’m currently reading Dungeon Crawler Carl, and by that I mean, of course, I’m listening to the audiobooks. I’m in the second to most current book, the seventh one, and it’s still fun. It’s gotten serious, but it’s still fun. And, to the best of anyone’s knowledge, Matt Dinniman (the author) and Jeff Hays (the audiobook narrator) are not bigots. That’s the magical adventure series I’m looking forward to.
As a trans person, I have no idea why people are harping on you for liking HP before learning JKR was a bigot. As such, I never ascribe bigotry to people who simply purchase HP-related stuff. They may not know and may not be as online as I am to know the harm that they are contributing towards. However, if after they do find out, they continue to patronize said thing, I consider them as a bigot or at least that bigotry isn’t a dealbreaker for them. I believe the saying is if you sit down at a table with 10 Nazis, there are 11 Nazis at the table.
To cap this off, though, I will paraphrase the idea of perfection being the enemy of progress.
Spot on. If you’re okay with someone being racist, a bigot then that means at least you’re cool with such bigotry being in our society. Which I see as a morale failing. Attention to such is still attention, kind of like there’s no bad PR.
Fuckin A, Misfits!
I feel like by this logic you shouldn’t have even brought it up since they also track Internet engagement…
Marketing teams only track engagement on major social media, having a discussion about it on lemmy is not going to impact their metrics or even be considered
Have you work in marketing analysis before?
yep
That’s a fair criticism. I’m gonna hope their scrapers aren’t looking at Lemmy, but they probably are.
Lemmy is well known by every major AI. It can even talk about the histories between various instances either some accuracy. Unless there’s some reason that commercial scraping companies would include Lemmy for an AI corpus but not include it for a marketing department’s research file, I’d say it’s safe to assume we’re included in that.
All scrapers look at Lemmy. When you search on google, Lemmy pops up in the results. You can’t reasonably expect to be NOT scraped when you put things online.
I have a set of the books from the time of release. Strangely, I’ve never read the last one.
If you’re curious regarding the details, ContraPoints has a long form vid on the issue.
You’re not missing much. By the time the last ones came out, most fans had aged out of the target demographic.
Damn straight!
Even if I wanted to watch a worse version of the movies I already watched, no fucking support for transphobes!
