Exciting news for who? Only the site owner is excited that a free resource now requires a subscription

“Yay! Now I have to pay another subscription! I’m so excited! Let’s celebrate with them!” - nobody

  • Zoidberg@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    So what pisses me off in these cases is this: they didn’t contribute with the data. They’re a convenient aggregator, I give them that, but the data came from third parties. If you want to start charging for convenient access to the data you should at least make all data before you started charging available in a bulk download for free.

    • Stumblinbear@pawb.social
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      1 year ago

      You just need to move to the new API, which is free, the old one is still available temporarily if you pay

        • Stumblinbear@pawb.social
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          1 year ago

          Yeah but the basic “give me my subtitles for this specific movie” very likely still works just fine, because… that’s like the whole reason they exist

    • irotsoma@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      They’re just doing what discogs did with music. They’ll create contracts with media companies to allow them to claim that all the info in their DB is copyrighted. Eventhough most of it was user created, it is technically mostly copyrighted data. And then they’ll start the legal campaigns to eliminate any competition. They’ll progressively make it more difficult to access and more difficult to update or get things corrected and it will become frustratingly bad but the only game in town.

    • beefcat@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      They aren’t charging for convenient access to the data though, they are charging for bulk access. The limitations of the new API should not impact people casually pulling in subtitles with VLC when they watch a movie, which is the purpose the API was intended to fulfill.

    • dellish@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      So… They’re following the Reddit business model? Let’s see how that works out.