People Are Streaming Pirated Movies on TikTok, One Short Clip at a Time

https://www.wsj.com/tech/tiktok-pirated-movies-free-2cd9389a

by thm • 3 years ago

25 44 3 years ago

I remember those days when videos on youtube could have movie playing in a moving small rectangle bouncing around, this was done to avoid content id systems I guess. Then some movies were reflected as well.

junon2• 3 years ago

Or a small frame around with the video slowed down perfectly so you set it to 1.5x playback speed or whatever and it was back to the correct speed.

rwmj• 3 years ago

This is still a thing for Japanese game shows on Youtube. (For some reason Japanese TV channels try their very hardest to prevent people from paying to watch their content if they are outside Japan.) Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ApNCpZJawsw (from about 2 mins in)

Sakos• 3 years ago

This still happens.

passion__desire3• 3 years ago

I am sure content id system within youtube would be very sophisticated. But if I were to solve this problem simply. I would first detect edges of all the rectangles within a video. Then get a normalized RBG color historgram for a N seconds of the rectangle forming a timeseries. Then do a approximate time-series matching over all content in my database. I am sure this simple algorithm could be highly optimized further. Is there an opensource library which does something similar?

WhatsName• 3 years ago

I know TikTok is everyones favorite bogeyman, but short clips taken from movies have been on youtube for more than a century.

Also as far as I'm concerened they should be considered fair use. At best they might convince someone to actually watch the whole thing, so whos loss is it anyway?

junon2• 3 years ago

Why should they be considered fair use? Fair use very clearly dictates this is not covered.

tyingq• 3 years ago

Fair use very clearly dictates this is not covered

Fair use, to me, is anything but clear on that topic. It specifically talks about "Amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work"[1]

It then generally says "If the use includes a large portion of the copyrighted work, fair use is less likely to be found; if the use employs only a small amount of copyrighted material, fair use is more likely."

But then gives counter-examples that don't match that theme at all.

[1] https://www.copyright.gov/fair-use/

promiseofbeans2• 3 years ago

you probably mean decade, not century

LeeroyWasHere• 3 years ago

Most people don't watch a whole movie on tiktok, they'll watch a few clips in a row.

Regardless, that user doesn't go on tiktok to search or watch the movie, it just comes up in their fyp.

That user was never going to buy that movie, he might of never heard of it, but now there's a chance he might go watch it on one of the million streaming platforms.

It's the equivalent of people zapping between channels and finding something to watch.

Streaming platforms and co don't have this kind of discoverability, they should consider releasing clips themselves.

pjc502• 3 years ago

Does anyone remember Quibi?

Has anyone ever even seen Quibi content? As far as I can tell, they had the piracy locked down perfectly .. meaning nobody ever posted any clips of their shows. So nobody knew about them, nobody watched them, and nobody paid for Quibi.

bacchusracine• 3 years ago

As far as I can tell, they had the piracy locked down perfectly ..

You must not have been looking in the right places. As far as I know all their shows made appearances in places where they could be downloaded. It just wasn't compelling content and it had the misfortune of launching right when the covid lock downs started, so their target demographic wasn't out watching on public transportation.

quitit• 3 years ago

Just to be a stickler on copyright: your comment repeats a harmful falsehood. It's important to call it out as people begin to think it's normal, leading them into peril.

It is not fair use to take any amount of a copyrighted work and reproduce it arbitrarily.

While fair use involves some amount of unauthorised copying, this is secondary to the primary purpose - such as news reporting, reviews(e.g. criticism), teaching and research etc. Additionally fair use only covers the amount necessary to inform. You can't take a film, splice it up and call it research.

Fair use explainers are available at the links below. For ordinary people it's worthwhile understanding your rights and the boundaries of those rights.

https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-fairuse.html

https://copyrightalliance.org/education/copyright-law-explai...

bombcar• 3 years ago

And people should remember the difference between what is legally permissible and what is allowed to exist because it’s too complicated or hard to prosecute.

aperson_hello• 3 years ago

But there's a distinction between what should be allowed vs. what is legally allowed. You're talking about what's legally allowed, the parent comment is talking about what should be allowed.

SeanAnderson• 3 years ago

It's an exceedingly common technique for modern social media content producers/influencers to piggyback their content onto already viral content with "reaction takes." All it requires is saying you're reacting to it and either speaking over it from time to time and/or showing your face from time to time.

Like a LARGE amount of Twitch's "Just Chatting" consistent of people watching YouTube with their chat and not offering anything constructive ontop of it.

It's not clear to me if that's occurring here though :)

hulitu• 3 years ago

short clips taken from movies have been on youtube for more than a century.

Full movies have also been on youtube since a long time. But TikTok = chinese = bad, youtube = american = good. /s

capableweb• 3 years ago

but short clips taken from movies have been on youtube for more than a century.

AFAIK, it seems like entire movies are being split into 40+ parts and uploaded to TikTok, no just "short clips taken from movies". That doesn't really seem like "fair use" to me.

webmobdev• 3 years ago

Youtube (and many other free video hosting services) also serve pirated TV series and movies this way. It's pretty commonand old tactic and not unique to TikTok.

promiseofbeans2• 3 years ago

https://archive.ph/RP8oj

smithcoin• 3 years ago

You’d only have to swipe 300 times to watch the Irishman.

passion__desire3• 3 years ago

I think such short clips curated, surfaced and demographic matched by the almighty, all-knowing algorithm could be considered as crowd-sourced movie trailers playing the role of modern day word of mouth. Just like google books search results are restricted to few relevant snippets / pages but not the whole book, similarly Tiktok can restrict sequentially watching a movie.

blululu• 3 years ago

Plus you get to watch it in 9:16 portrait aspect ratio, just as Martin Scorsese intended.

I would imagine the reason nobody has sent any DACMA notices or stepped up enforcement yet is because this method of piracy is almost too stupid to take seriously.

pjc502• 3 years ago

After Twitter announced they upped the length limit on videos to over two hours, there was a wave of pirated movies being posted. I wonder what happened to that.

glandium• 3 years ago

Meanwhile, in Japan https://in.ign.com/anime/193667/news/japanese-youtuber-gets-...

Havoc• 3 years ago

This reminds me of the 500 word essays split into a billion tweets.

Just use the right tool for the job...

rchaud• 3 years ago

Twitter is (was) where the people are, it makes perfect sense to distribute the essay that way. Social media sites downrank external links, and most article links these days are paywalled anyway.

distantsounds• 3 years ago

If you're watching movies on your phone through tiktok, chances are you wouldn't appreciate the source material enough to pay for it anyway.

Unfrozen06884• 3 years ago

Zoomers cant torrent and they are too poor for streaming and they dont know there are free streaming sites based on http protocol. They seem to be mentally deficient as a generation.

I say this as zoomers are the consumers of TikTok.

ryanmcbride• 3 years ago

Every single part of this comment is a wild conclusion to jump to. It's like a fractal of insane conclusions.

knaik94• 3 years ago

Correlation is not causation.

Piracy related free web streaming has existed since the moment it became possible to profit/run with ads. Looking at a list of the most popular torrents makes it clear who the largest demographic is. Z Library is an example of just how giant the TikTok userbase and how it brought younger generations into piracy.

You are misinformed.

thefurdrake4• 3 years ago

There are very few resources to provide Gen Z with the knowledge they need to establish technical competence on computers.

It is a serious issue, and it's really not their fault.

aydyn• 3 years ago

There an overabundance of resources. Even zoomers know how to use google or youtube. They just choose not to.

Unfrozen06884• 3 years ago

To open a computer with Windows 10 and open a browser and go to a website is too hard now?

Their problem, not mine.

The same books are all out there and now with youtube you can learn a lot.

There are MORE resources out now than before, not LESS.

tennisflyi• 3 years ago

Zoomers cant torrent and they are too poor for streaming and they dont know there are free streaming sites based on http protocol.

A bit blunt, but yes. The perils of "automagical."

theNJR• 3 years ago

Not going to lie, TikTok served me some clips of the Battleship movie and I ended up watching it. I never would have otherwise considered it.

Certainly not a good movie but an easy mindless watch. Exactly what I’d except from TikTok

thefurdrake4• 3 years ago

WSJ fails to establish why I should care.

This isn't news. This is Gee Whiz content that WSJ is trying to pass off as a serious issue. Such ominous phrasing.

I get it. Tiktok bad.

But this ain't why.

People Are Streaming Pirated Movies on TikTok, One Short Clip at a Time

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