As an adult, I tend to pirate or buy knockoff goods precisely when it becomes more of a hassle than buying the real thing.

For example, having to go through every streaming app to work out which one has the show you want, or buying a piece of hardware sold by an American that hasn't even thought about logistics to any country that isn't the USA.

Side note: in case you didn't know, Google TV kind of solves the problem of having to go through every streaming app to find which one has the desired programme with a universal search. I just got it and find it useful.

But then multiple services, like NowTV for example, don't support Google TV but do support Amazom Fire for some reason.

Piracy for convenience happens again.

That's handy. Hopefully it stays universal - if they started charging a fee to streaming services to be included in the search we'd be back to square one.

As far as I'm aware, it's just Google Search underneath but with telly included. I doubt they'll charge for inclusion but do expect ads.

That's my experience too.

As a student, I didn't really buy the "piracy increases sales" studies, since I went from buying one thing a year to zero. Clearly, sales were lost.

As an adult, I can casually swipe my credit card and buy similar things on a whim. How much less I bought as a student is a rounding error.

Most people or organizations are either rich enough to not bother with piracy, or poor enough not to buy especially much in the first place.

I'll mention this is doubly true with industrial software. Ain't no way an individual will drop $5k on a CAD program. On the other hand, ain't no way a serious business will pirate a $5k CAD program. Having people know how to use your tools, though, drives sales.

> At some point you get old enough to not want to bother with piracy because of the hassle if you have a decent first world income.

Partially disagree. For things like music and tv series, there's more hassle when acquiring the product via "official" channels. For example, when I want to download a music video, I can just go on youtube and I can download the video with one click (using "unofficial" software). If I wanted to use "official" channels to purchase a copy of the music video, I would have to spend a lot of time just finding out which service sells it, then figure out if they actually sell this piece of music or merely rent it out, then figure out a method to register and pay, etc. In the end I have no idea if I will even acquire a mp4 file or some kind of DRM time bomb.

I can't fathom why anybody would feel like buying music is less of a hassle than downloading music without buying it.

Nearly everyone I know doesn't usually bother with music piracy because of Spotify and their competitors, which offer listening to nearly every song imaginable in a format that's IMO far more convenient than the MP3 days, piracy or otherwise.

I'm not talking about the convenience of "the MP3 days", I'm talking about the convenience today. The example I provided was one-click downloading a music video. You countered this with the ability to... stream audio temporarily from Spotify? Not sure how that's relevant. Does Spotify allow you to download mp4 music videos?

Your point seemed to be about "music" before veering into an example with music videos, in which I have no experience.

> For things like music and tv series, there's more hassle when acquiring the product via "official" channels.

> I can't fathom why anybody would feel like buying music is less of a hassle than downloading music without buying it.

> Your point seemed to be about "music" before veering into an example with music videos

True. Note that the text you quoted referred to "acquiring the product". Streaming audio from Spotify temporarily is different from "acquiring" the audio file. Do you think acquiring audio files via official channels is somehow less of a hassle than acquiring them via unofficial channels, like youtube-dl?

This is my experience. As a teenager I pirated about half the media I consumed. Now that I have a modest income I legally consume almost all my media (books, music and games), except for uni text books and scientific articles that aren't available through any of my libraries.

I tried following my linear algebra course using freely available materials and/or 2nd hand text books, but constant "new" editions and access to online study portals made 2nd hand books impractical.