Netflix presumably hopes to achieve the same thing: Letting kids share their parents' accounts before they leave home, but not after.

Also, buy an nvidia shield tv pro. It plays everything directly with no transcode, and handles all subtitles effortlessly without triggering a transcode.

I tried roku, amazon cube, apple tv, everything - the shield is the best still despite it's age. It's flawless.

I still have Netflix and Prime Video (because of AMZ Prime). I have thought about dropping Netflix more than a few times after the price hike.

qBittorrent is an open source alternative that also has my favorite feature, downloading a file in sequential order so as to stream it immediately rather than waiting until it all finishes downloading.

It’s not my crowd but it’s interesting…

I've thought about using them for non-shady data storage and transfer given the price and performance. Nothing sensitive which wasn't encrypted, obviously.

It really isn't and it's only cheaper if you don't put much value on your time.

Radarr and Sonarr don't do anything automatically. Setting them up takes more time than they are worth. I tried installing them. Most would describe me as technically savvy, but I just gave up.

example issues. Here's the quick start guide. https://wiki.servarr.com/radarr/quick-start-guide 1. Get stopped immediately at the indexer. No sane defaults there at all. No guidance either.

Plex doesn't do 4k streaming to Apple TV, doesn't do 4k to chromecast.

The movies you pirate frequently have technical problems, usually the sound is off. You are lucky to have subtitles that work(synced correctly).

Very true.

In the hours it takes to download and curate these movies and shows I've made more than enough to cover a Netflix, Disney+, Prime and HBO subscriptions for that month or pay for a few VOD titles for that month.

My time is way more fucking valuable than the time required to do this well.

And if I do without content or entertainment even better. Not everything is worth watch every month.

What I’ve noticed: a Netflix 1080p is very much worse looking than the 1080p I get off Plex.

Running a large media server can actually be pretty costly on power bills these days.

Only if using server hardware, and that isn’t a good way to do it. A recent generation igpu and a low power computer is the way to go. You’ll get 10+ streams out an Intel Nuc, or similar sff pc. The expensive bit is the storage array.

How else do you really think this whole thing works. You get to keep your money, but still get all the goods and services provided. That's just silly.

You can call it stealing metaphorically all you want, but it's not technically that (as candlemas claimed).

Where do you think pirates get their source content from? Sure if it's a movie with a blu-ray release there's a 4k high bitrate source, but if it's a netflix original the "stream compressed 4k" is the only version available.

About time anyway. Always next version of the business they put out of business. That's the way it works, especially with the deflation threat of technology. If you're a tech business and you can't maintain a margin so you have to raise rates, then something is up, broke, stockholder greed, personal greed, etc.

For the most people it’s too much struggle to run this, especially when plex has the default settings of „transcode everything to 2mbit if the server is not at home“.

I have multiple subscriptions, but most players suck (I look at you Amazon Prime). Plex is a way better experience.

Oh I use a Nvidia Shield as Client. It’s awesome!

I'd rather do without.

Then, the great splintering happened. I currently pay for 5 services, but that doesn't cover even 1/2 of what I want to watch.

All the content owners said to themselves "we can be Netflix or Amazon Prime, too" and they pulled their content into their own services.

But the biggest problem: the user experience absolutely sucks now. It's so hard to find stuff and remember where things are, there's no universal search. I have to use justwatch.com on my phone when I want to sit down to watch something new, which might mean a trip to the computer to download it if one of the many services I already pay for don't have it.

I am not going to pay to rent stuff I used to be able to encounter for free by surfing channels...well, on top of my dish/cable bill

Now, for less money, I don't even have to get off the couch. What a world!

That said, I don't know why the 48 hour limit on rentals got normalized. I've fallen asleep, gotten distracted, etc. while watching a movie and I don't like now being forced to watch it soon.

Maybe the limit could be 72 or 96 hours instead. Or you could rent it with no time limit but maybe can't ever rewind then you can make it last as long as you need but when it's done, it's done.

While I tend to agree that piracy and/or ripping isn't something everyone can do, I've filled out my Plex collection legally lately with DVD acquisitions at bargain-bin prices. Used doesn't matter if you only have to be able to read the disc once to rip it, and I'm yet to get something used off Amazon that couldn't be read once. (I haven't even had to clean it or anything, it's all just worked.)

So, my Plex install in terms of raw content isn't up to Netflix's size. However, I rather suspect there are some people reading this who have more hours of video on their Plex than Netflix even has available. And while mine isn't that large, it is much better tuned for me and my family's interests at this point. And I don't have to worry about getting halfway through a series, only for some licensor to notice it has become popular enough to pull it and run it on their own service. Netflix has the problem now that anything that becomes popular on their service will get yanked. I do not know how they overcome that. They hoped to do it with enough original content, but to my eye, that has failed, and there is now no longer enough time to fix that. While I understand the complaints that they treated it too much like "content", to be honest, I've never thought this would work out, from the moment they announced it. A single company just can't produce a sufficiently diverse set of "content" to be the everything-to-everybody they would have needed to be to justify a Netflix valuation.

The $3 is for fast-forwarding Mr Video to next week.

Understandable, I just cut back on all the TV engorging and rotate the streaming services every quarter. IMO it's a net win. Save money on the streaming services and life is better for having not watched so much television. Not going to the grave wishing I binged Season 2 of some random show one more time.

Which means that dinosaur-industry would finally have to arrive in the 21st century. People are very much willing to pay for things they enjoy - see Twitch Subscribers and Patreons for examples. Paying for shitty catalogues where the parts that you actually enjoy are distributed across multiple services just isn't cutting it.

Good riddance to all those copyright-attorneys and other parasites leeching off of the entertainment industry.

Let's talk $1 to watch something once. That's reasonable and a price I'd pay. $4-5 to watch something in my own home is not.

Better to buy a physical media.

We live in a world where 90% of the entire catalog of movies ever filmed are available to be instantly delivered to your home in 1080p for less than the cost of a Big Mac. In the 90s it cost about the same not even taking into account inflation or gas to drive to blockbuster and rent a VHS. We are living in the future!

Yet whenever I want to watch something, I have to look up which service it's on, see if it's available in my country, sign up for a subscription, possibly download an app.... Or, go to the high seas and be watching it in 4k resolution within 2 minutes.

As simple as that.

The problem, for me at least, appears where some legal rights damage technological usage.

How many times my Netflix downloads will “expire”? Is this milk or something? Why do they need to expire? Sorry, but I refuse to understand…

So if I watch it at home and remove all those costs from the cinema, surely $1 is going to be closer to what the film studio would have got if I went to the cinema?

I'd much rather go to the movie theater and pay the even higher price for admission, because that's an actual experience. You can't replicate "going to the movies" at your house very well.

The reason music streaming defeated piracy is because a single subscription gives access to most of the music in the world, including from other countries and languages as long as you can type the search query (Indian, Japanese, Turkish, Russian etc.)

The reason video piracy is resurging is that every streaming service provides 2-3 good shows and hundreds of fillers, and to have a real selection of what is currently good one would have to pay $200-300 per month for dozens of apps. On top of that, pulling the show from one app and reappearing it on another loses watch history, which is no way in the interest of the customer. Sell what the users really want to buy, and they will pay.

The last movie I pirated was directed by a man who died almost 30 years ago. Do you suppose if I subscribed to Netflix (which doesn't even have any of his movies at all as far I can tell), they'd hire a necromancer to get a few more movies out of his corpse?

We don't hire necromancers anymore, they’ve been replaced by training models on a corpus anchored by the creator’s existing work.

- Lesser Known actors - Assistant Directors - Stunt Coordinators - 2nd Unit Directors - Stunt Performers

and I'm sure there are others. Residuals factor into our income, allow us to qualify for health insurance, empower our unions, and provide a stable income to continue working in an unstable career.

All so we can make better entertainment for you! When you pirate, you're stealing money from us.

You can accuse the pirates of limiting your potential for future earnings, but that is not the same as stealing from you.

If I can't buy something for a price that's worth it to me, I will just watch something else. It doesn't mean I'm going to pay more for it.

You get the same amount of money either way.

But extracting the value of watching something without paying the fee for that service...that's stealing.

Not that it matters though, I was trying to make use of the "common knowledge" that banks make money from your deposits, and that therefore you spending your money instead of depositing it in a negative return account is costing us potential revenue. I know that's not how banks make money, but it's the culturally accepted explanation for how banks make money.

If you weren't gonna watch it, don't watch. The argument being made is you in fact, do want to watch it, you just don't wanna pay for it. That's stealing.

If you're interested in the content, but dislike the delivery mechanism, ignoring the content entirely sends the signal: "I am not interested in the content you're producing". The companies will attempt to address that signal by changing the content, to try and find content that attracts larger audiences.

Piracy sends a different signal: "I am interested in the content, but not the price or the delivery mechanism". The companies will attempt to address that signal differently. Maybe they lower the price. Maybe the ease the friction on the delivery mechanism. Maybe the increase the friction on the delivery mechanism (by adding DRM). But the signal from piracy sends a more clear message to the content companies that ignoring the content.

Ignoring it sends a different message.

> So they should invest in locking down their content, not improve their experience.

Good luck with that.

That reminds me, what do you think about geoblocking these services? If one has a choice: buy the content, buy VPN and break the copyright by watching it in unsupported country or just break the copyright by pirating it outright, what should one do?

If you want to watch that show but you don't want to pay for subscription, let DIsney know. If the market demanded it by way of retracting their subscription dollars, they would notice.

But if you steal it because that's just how you want to do things, you're a thief.

>If the market demanded it by way of retracting their subscription dollars, they would notice.

One could say that pirating is the act of retracting the subscription dollars, but I digress. I can't retract my subscription dollars, because they won't even offer me the subscription (which I mentioned in my comment).

Could you as an knowledgeable insider actually answer the part of my previous comment you conveniently skipped, that part about what is person supposed to do if the Disney doesn't even offer the service in their country? And don't say "let Disney know", something actionable please.

>But if you steal it because that's just how you want to do things, you're a thief.

1) it's not theft, it's digital "piracy"

2) And I didn't say I pirate their stuff, the show was just an example. But I still feel discriminated on account of country I am from by them refusing to sell me their subscription service. And everyone knows that racism is worse than stealing.

Netflix did it (once upon a time. no, not the movie). I don't really care for reasons why this is hard for the industry or really anything else. As long as it doesn't economically make sense for me to give money to someone (doesn't reduce my own effort/time expenditure or provide something I can't have otherwise), I will not give money to someone. Morals be damned.

Plus, this rental will not be available in all locales, for every video, etc

It won’t work?

pay full price for the online offering (conducting the transaction in a browser) and then just download the content from BitTorrent.

I would happily defend that practice in front of a jury of my peers.

The thing they get you on with BitTorrent isn't the download part, it's the seeding part, where you're distributing the copyrighted content to other downloaders.

You could turn off seeding, but that'll get you banned from a lot of torrent sites, and it's not a technical distinction I'd want to have to explain in court to lay people.

Remember that whole Cuties debacle where Netflix sexed up a French coming-of-age about children ?

I really fail to see how a world without high-budget Marvel films will be so bad. I'd be fine watching old movies and art-house productions for the rest of my life.

How about “owning” a movie but not being able to resell it or loan it to friends. What’s that?

Please don’t use physical item terms for digital items.

Stealing something from you implied you don’t have to have it after I take it.

It’s illegal and unethical, we agree on that. But it’s not stealing.

I'm only here to pop the balloon on the consumer's perception that "it's not theft." there's a face and a name that goes along with that theft. Thousands of them.

See music streaming, the origin of video streaming, origin of steam etc

• Someone says they do not like cats and have no interest in having one as a pet. A cute stray kitten shows up on their doorstep, they take pity and feed it. They fall in love with it and keep it. They might say that the kitten "stole" their heart.

• An actor playing a minor role in a play gives a performance that outshines the performance of the stars. Many would say that the actor "stole" the show.

• An employee of a rival company poses as a janitor to gain access to your lab and takes a photo of a whiteboard containing the formula for a chemical that is a trade secret in your manufacturing process. It would be common to say that the rival company "stole" your secret formula.

• When crackers gain access to a company's list of customer email addresses, passwords, or credit card numbers, it is commonly said that the data was "stolen".

• Alice is Bob's fiancé. Mallory woos Alice without Bob's knowledge. Alice elopes with Mallory. Most would find it acceptable if Bob said that Mallory "stole" his fiancé.

• A team that has been behind since the start of the game but wins on a last second improbable play is often said to have "stolen" the game.

A great moral crime, no doubt...

The problem is once you expand the definition of 'steal' well beyond what is legally considered theft, the immorality of "stealing" is no longer a given. People who accusatorily use the word in reference to copyright violation are leaning on the 'illegal acts of theft' meaning of the term to add apparent moral weight to their argument. But when challenged on that, they retreat into these more diverse meanings of the word and pretend they never meant it that specific way. It's a Motte-and-Bailey tactic.

> the actor "stole" the show

> A team has... "stolen" the game

These examples are all obviously metaphorical and irrelevant, unless you want to talk about metaphorically stealing from people, which I don't understand to be the point of this thread.

> Mallory "stole" his fiancé

Bob has been deprived of his fiancé.

> the rival company "stole" your secret formula

> crackers gain access... the data was "stolen"

These are the only two relevant examples, and they're sufficiently debatable that it's unlikely you'd be able to prosecute either for theft or larceny. In the case of the crackers breaching an email list, many laws are broken, but I doubt "theft," or anything like it, would be one of them. In the case of the corporate espionage, if this is theft, it's theft of intellectual property. And that makes it the most direct comparison to content piracy, but it doesn't advance the conversation because it's the same debate.

Piracy is not stealing.

Maybe I didn't "steal", but I contributed to criminal activity.

Sure, copyright laws can seem absurd, but if you disagree with the laws, consider the ethics.

How would you feel if you have a business, I steal from you, and then go give random people your content? This especially when it starts to drive into your revenues.

"Only digital copy" is disingenuous. If the cost of producing the digital copy is say $40mm (an amount article says some Netflix movies can cost).

They're making copies from a digital copy, and their business is to sell access to them. If their model is "we'll replicate this copy 500 million times, and charge users $0.10 a view", every 10 copies viewed elsewhere is $1 lost.

Should a service raise the fee to say $0.12 to better cover costs?

Ultimately, theft is often subsidised by paying customers.

I'm also guilty of this. I download torrents where:

* I can't buy something because it's not available due to region restrictions, and I can't buy it via VPN (looking at Disney+)

* I can't buy it anywhere altogether.

Where I used to download maybe 50 torrents a year a decade ago, I probably do it <5 times a year now. It's stealing, or consuming stolen content.

The pricing strategies of big corp is a separate accessibility issue.

I would consider that if I am selling a product that has absolutely no scarcity, such as digital files, I have a few approaches.

- Introduce artificial scarcity with something like DRM

- Create a business model focused on the service of providing the product, rather than the product itself

I would not try to accuse my potential consumers of a crime in order to fix the flaws in my business model.

problem is that greedy media moguls want to get paid for a piece of content forever, instead of just raising enough money to cover the labor and advertising, give stakeholders some profit, and move on, so they cannot exist this way.

That is their problem though :)

The end result of my pirating is a media service that is easier to use, is higher quality and requires less effort than a streaming service (though initial costs and setup time were high).

I also pay for 3 streaming services that go unused, and this covers about half or maybe 3/4 of what I watch.

Streaming is in a dangerous place when piracy works better, looks better and is more convenient.

Edit: Call it digital trespass then. I don't really care what you call it. There are obviously fixed costs to creating content. Just because there aren't incremental costs incurred from piracy, doesn't mean there isn't harm. Lost revenue is harm.

The amount of oil is small enough that it would have absolutely no measurable effect whatsoever on Puget Sound.

Would you say that it is therefore OK for me to dump it in the ditch?

I'd say no - because it's decreasing the intrinsic value of a shared resource (whether or not it can be measured). Downloading a movie, on the other hand - doesn't decrease the intrinsic value of the media being copied.

A ride requires a vehicle, a driver, fuel, etc. You can’t freely copy a vehicle, a person’s time, or the fuel required to power the vehicle.

A theater requires electricity, seating, space for seating, an audio and video system, etc. These are also things that you can’t freely copy.

Not everyone is a A-List celeb or director.

The legal term you're looking for is probably "theft of services", e.g. https://definitions.uslegal.com/t/theft-of-services/).

And, to the people trying to play semantic games with "steal" and "theft", theft of services does have laws defining it as a criminal offense, e.g. https://oregon.public.law/statutes/ors_164.125 .

1: to take the property of another wrongfully and especially as a habitual or regular practice

Yes, piracy is stealing according to the dictionary, especially if done habitually. That the owner is left with a copy of the work is immaterial to the act of theft.

Take verb

1: remove (someone or something) from a particular place.

Piracy doesn't remove something from a particular place, so it is not taking, so it is not stealing. You know, "according to the dictionary"

(My point here is to show that quoting dictionary definitions to resolve technicalities is a worthless argument. I don't actually care whether or not piracy is classified as theft)

It would be taking and theft if you deprived the owner of their content while copying it for yourself. Like stealing money with wire transfers.

This isn't just semantics, it's important to not conflate theft and piracy. They're almost completely different, except in both cases the offender obtains something they didn't originally possess.

"You wouldn't steal a car" is mafiaa newspeak intended to maintain control of rents.

I recently went over my media collection and did some conservative guesstimation of my spending over the last 20 years. I've paid over 6 figures to consume various sorts of media.

I have absolutely zero moral or ethical qualms with downloading and/or pirating content I've already paid for. I don't give a flying fuck if the copyright holder doesn't like the means by which I get the content. The studios and copyright lobby and mafiaa are not good faith operators.

Piracy is not theft. Sometimes it's ethical and justified.

I WANT to pay. I want to give a streaming service money to curate, deliver, and maintain a library of high quality content. The industry doesn't want that to be possible, because it interferes with the bad-faith rentseeking games played with royalties and residuals. I'm done playing pretend, and will happily Pirate even new content I haven't paid for.

I will pay when there's the opportunity for good faith commerce. I'll buy discs and files directly where possible.

Taking a good or service that you don't own is stealing. That's piracy. That's theft.

You will argue that this may deprive the copyright holder of some rent if the media is for sale, but that sounds qualitatively different than taking or stealing.

- On screen performers, stunt performers like myself and actors who grind out a comfortable living. Those residuals also go to qualifying for health insurance through earnings. You are directly stealing from my ability to provide health insurance to my family.

- Assistant Directors, who are saints dealing with every logistical problem imaginable. The best of them only work 1-2 movies a year because the workload causes severe burnout.

- The Union themselves! The more money that flows through the union, the more powerful they are. The more safer movie sets become and the better life is provided for the workforce that makes your entertainment.

- Yourself! You are reducing the value of producing quality TV and Movies by stealing them. Every time one a show is pirated, there is less incentive to spend more money on an entertainment spectacle.

Go check out my imdb and see how many of my credits you've watched https://www.imdb.com/name/nm1968249/

For every show imagine that it's a nickel you stole from my income. WOuldn't be surprised if you took a buck or two out of mine. Now multiply that by all the on screen performers and ADs and others I mentioned. Now multiply that all the people who steal like you.

You're directly responsible for sucking the quality of life away from people who make your entertainment and reducing the desire to make things you enjoy. You're going to end up with shows that are AI generated CGI sponsored by Mt. Dew and Chevy trucks.

Stop stealing our shit.

Advertizements everywhere stealing my attention, public space, and landscape beauty. Stealth taxes on empty hard drives and other storage media. Hardware-destroying rootkits and other malware (lost a DVD drive to DRM, will you reimburse me?). Draconian control mechanisms and lobbying stealing my control of the devices I own. Mountains upon mountains of disposable plastic promotional crap stealing my planet and ecosystem.

I'm not stealing from you. I'm extracting some small reparation for the many toxic behaviors your industry engages in. When you start offering an honest product I'll start honest buying. And I do - I pay more combined to good people producing good content via Patreon than a monthly Netflix subscription.

Imagine a hypothetical universe where, in order to watch one of your movies, people had to a) pay you $1 and also b) let you punch them in the nose. Then, when people sensibly start pirating your content instead because they don't want to get punched, you loudly proclaim that they are stealing the $1 you are owed.

That's what's happening here. People want to watch your content, and are willing to pay for it. But they don't want to pay for it AND get punched in the nose. They pirate because your distributors, and by extension you yourself, have made it impossible to watch your content (and pay you!) in any other way.

I get that your natural rejoinder will be "if the content is not worth being punched in the nose, just don't watch it!" Which is fair. Debatable, but fair. Just don't come here pretending that all you have asked for is the reasonable sum of $1 when you are actually demanding that your customers subject themselves to the indignity of your fist.

If you live in a big city you probably walk by people in the street slowly dying from a drawn out form of suicide because you can't possible change all their lives on your way to the grocery store or coffee shop and people at large are choosing to do the same with your income stream. They opt to deal with problems more important and more personal than fixing the way in which culture is monetized so as to funnel slightly more money to rich folks who could do more for society as soylent green in hopes that a few extra bucks will stick to the hands of useful folks like yourself.

For myself I'm not angry nor do I have any intention of fixing the problem because nobody with any decision making power gives two shits what my opinion on anything is. I have monetarily in life about nothing and indeed will have nothing tomorrow and the next day. You feel like people are violating the social contract by not paying for multimedia. Part of your problem is that you even believe that we are part of the same society or share the same ethics.

We really aren't. I am not the benefactor of the current situation nor do I have any meaningful power to negotiate new ground rules or even enforce existing ones so rejection makes worlds more sense.

You say stop downloading and I hear enjoy poverty but with fewer books, music, movies, games. I wont actually be supporting the folks you mentioned to any greater degree but you will find such more ethically palatable. HALF of America is sharing 12% of the income. We don't have anything but you can stick a $200 PC and plug it into a $20 monitor and courtesy of a $10 internet essentials package download as many books music movies shows as you can possibly consume.

I don't feel like making my shitty life shittier in order for you to feel better. Artificial scarcity is a dumb way to run a society and its not my fault the people with all the money in this society have chosen it.

Jobs will be lost, just like happened with farriers and switchboard operators. Your income will disappear regardless: the demand for stunts is elastic and the supply is increasingly competitive. Blaming pirates is being unable to see the forest for the trees.

A lot of us would gladly pay the cast and crew directly to own a copy of your output that we could access on our own terms, but that isn’t a reality for most trade under capitalism. There’s a reason Googlers on HN aren’t trying to guilt trip everyone for personally stealing their income by using ad blockers. Maybe this is particularly to the entertainment industry, but most of us would shrug our shoulders at the equivalent of petty shoplifting from our employers.

There was about a decade when Netflix went full in on online streaming and was offering a fantastic service for a reasonable price with a far superior experience to piracy. That is no longer the case, and the unbundling to now a dozen+ of subscriptions is driving pretty much all my techie friends back to movie/tv piracy. I personally don't really watch much TV and might watch one or two movies a year, so I'll just not watch anything. I've already cancelled my Netflix subscription about a year ago, and I prefer playing video games and reading books anyway.

Until your industry can offer a product experience that is superior to piracy, people are going to pirate. The games and music industries have largely solved this problem. When will yours?

Until then tho..a person who steals from a moral high ground is still a thief stealing from my income.

Steam and Spotify have made it incredibly simple to just get what you want without having to juggle or manage any kind of bullshit.

As I've said in the thread, for me the alternative to movies/TV isn't piracy, it's playing games or reading books, which I do pay for because the experiences of finding what I want, buying it, and consuming it is a superior experience to piracy. If that ever changes across the entire media landscape and games/books go the way of movies/TV that may change.

Games: yes. Music: yes. Books: yes. Magazines: yes. What happened to tv and film? Where are you all?

Let's say I want to purchase The Fifth Element and throw it on my plex server so I can watch it on vacation out of the country? How can I do that? The answer is simple: you cannot. So I pirate it. And enjoy watching it. If the industry WOULD provide me with some way to purchase The Fifth Element, get a high quality mkv or mp4 or whatever download of it, I would do it in an instant.

Boutta go "steal" from you just to do it.

If it’s not easy to find and use on a subscription service that I already have, I’m just not gonna try to search for it or pay for it. What difference would it make if I pirated it and watched it anyways?

(FWIW I personally don’t pirate anything, I just really don’t see the merit to the “stealing” argument)

Even the ease of use has declined, and the affordability is down the toilet. And as usual, we have people at the top reaping record profits and making victims of their greed blame each other at the same time.

EDIT: Fixed a grammar error.

You want something. You don't want to pay for it. You take it without paying.

That's stealing.

If you really truly didn't want to watch it, you wouldn't steal it.

Edit: to be clear, I agree it's not 'theft', but am pushing back on the way this distinction is sometimes used to insinuate that it is victimless (not saying the poster above is claiming that, just that it's worth pointing out)

You can metaphorically say it's theft, but it doesn't manifest as theft of actual property.

For example: many people (myself included) have downloaded the $1.000.000 torrent (a list of files whose value amounts to a million dollars). I found nothing of use in it so I just deleted it. Did I cause a million dollars in damages? Was the damage restored when I deleted it?

If you consider the same for actual property there's no question about it. Stealing a Bugatti does cause millions to be lost, and destroying it makes it irrecoverable.

I get that you have legit reasons for feeling strongly about this topic, but this is way over the top, so please don't do it on HN. We want curious conversation here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

This is an age old argument... I'm not taking anything. I'm merely looking at something. The same way that I'm not "stealing from Leonardo" when I look at statue of David. I understand that the makers of the movie had some hopes of monetizing my looking but alas, they failed. Based on pure logic alone, it's clear that piracy is not theft, it's something else.

Nobody is TAKING anything. Everything is at the place where it belongs.

Also if you'd be able to make identical copies of money, of course people would accept it.

Which one of us gets to deposit the money?

If I copy your car key and use it to steal your car. I've copied the key but stolen your car.

If you accuse someone of stealing the income, but they haven't gotten any money out of it, how does that make sense? What you're describing is a missed opportunity for a sale; had someone 'stolen' nothing and simply passed the product by, you would still not have made that sale and nothing would have changed.

The difference is one party at a time, i.e. household, library patron, etc, can enjoy the entertainment service.

When you pirate it, The original owner of the dvd retains the service value as well as providing the service to others without any value being transferred to the workforce/IP holders.

That's the difference and I personally am all in for a mythical solution that but still allows complete freedom of ownership while also stopping people from digitally reproducing assets and dispensing them exponentially.

I don't believe it will ever happen tho :/

Yes, we all know copying a digital show isn't the same exact thing as stealing your car. However, you are still taking something of value! Let's say you snuck into my band's concert venue and didn't buy a ticket. Yeah you didn't physically take anything from me, but you are having access to something you shouldn't without paying.

If you think that's a dumb deal then you don't have to take it. Pirating it is simply wrong.

Another word for it is stealing.

Is my request reasonable? Do you feel inclined to pay me? Do I incur $1000 of damages if you choose not to?

And this is again a physical situation, where one more person takes up limited space, reducing something.

Copying does not reduce anything.

It also does not contribute anything, true, so I am not saying it is always ethical to do so.

But when a poor person in bangladesh or bolivia living under very different economic realities, where 10$ means a LOT and who could never afford to pay for western realities anyway, streams some hollywood movie from a warez site - than I see zero damage. And guess what, they all do. So do poor teenagers and students in the west and they usually start paying, once they can afford it.

Judging them all as "thefts" from a position of being born into wealth, is maybe not very ethical either. So to repeat it again, stealing implies taking something away. Which is not the case here.

Since when does it matter if I would've paid for it? If someone steals a Mercedes from a dealer is it not stealing if they wouldn't have bought it anyways?

"Intellectual property" doesn't really work like that.

Do they lose more income if I watch the content with friends?

In the early days of photography, people believed that if your photo was taken, it was stealing your soul [1].

I can understand the idea of piracy being wage theft in the same way I can understand the idea of photography being soul theft, but I think both are rather silly ideas.

https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/a/8382

If you watch it with your friends, 5 people watch it for one purchase. If it's good, you all tell 3 more people. Of those 15 people, 20 percent end up purchasing a viewing and the system repeats.

When you pirate it you take all the service for zero cost. That affects real people.

How about a college dorm hosting a movie night? Maybe theft?

What if a million people watch it for one purchase? I know you think that's theft, but I'm not sure where you'd draw the line.

I think the reality is that 90% of the population won't pirate because it's too much effort and legally ambiguous. If your content becomes popular through piracy, you will absolutely reap the rewards of good content creation.

If a billion people pirated your content because it was that good, you'd have absolutely no problem monetizing. You'd be a household name. When Disney loses their copyright on the Mouse, they're still going to be a huge company capable of monetizing all things Mickey.

If we get back to a state where everyone is pirating because the content services suck, then you need to petition your content distributors to lower friction and provide an experience worth paying for, but we're nowhere near that.

Gabe does it with Steam. I used to almost exclusively pirate games, and now I almost exclusively buy them, because Steam has value adds (achievements, friends, online play, tournaments, workshop content, etc).

Also, you have to understand that many people who have large collections of pirate content see themselves more as archivists than viewers. I'd guess most pirated content never even gets consumed, just downloaded for a "later" that never comes.

If you don't, they won't, as shown by the proliferation of shitty streaming services and the gutting of content on Netflix.

It's got to suck to feel that people are stealing from you because you have no control over the content distribution mechanisms in the industry you work in, but I think you're largely engaging in fallacious argumentation here. It's pretty much the 90's version of piracy rhetoric. One pirated watch != one watch worth of income lost.

It's the "I don't want to pay for it, but I still want to watch it." that seems to be hang up for so many.

Let me explain it simply. That is stealing and it directly affects my ability to make a living as well the motivation for service providers to make more products you enjoy.

Is everyone there except me stealing? It feels to me a little bit like the N=1 vs N=0 problem of theism - I'm simply an atheist to one more god than you are. Similarly, I simply don't think it's theft to one more person in that context than you might (of course, here I'm assuming you don't think all those people are stealing).

That they want to share it is their business, not mine. If it's good, those friends will tell other friends and someone along the way will purchase it again, and I'll be even closer to my mortgage busting avocado toast

The hypothetical argument against that is "what if I get 100 friends, for 100 nights to watch it." Sure, hypothetically you could but then it'd be pretty expensive for you and added wear and tear on your home and a pretty big headache to deal with. THe only way to justify it would be to start charging, which at that point, would be stealing. So it always comes across as a thought problem, but I find it's not a real problem.

I don't mind if the town throws a movie festival once a month and plays my movie. I mind if they all get to go home with the luxory of having it on demand and the ability ot share it with everyone they know without providing the service fee requested.

> If you weren't going to watch it, you wouldn't.

This is flat out false and incredibly obviously so. You can easily see it just by cranking the numbers - if a video game is fun, but costs $500, do you really think that each person who pirates it is depriving the developer of $500? If some magical DRM scheme was implemented that could not be broken and guaranteed every person who played it, bought it, would everyone who pirated it in the previous hypothetical instead buy it for $500? No, they would ignore it, nobody would buy it, and the developer would have just as little money as they had before.

Pirating a piece of IP does not translate 1:1 into a lost sale as you keep variously asserting and acting like it does. It can even turn into a gained sale, in the case of video games or software, when people would not have bought it based on the promotional material but consider it worth buying after actually using it. You have a right to exclusivity on sales - selling pirated material is criminal - but you don't have a right to actually make any sales if nobody wants to buy it.

or he could have not watched it at all, told no one, and you would have 0% instead of 20%.

Pirating at scale is a real problem, but an individual pirate is just an opportunist. There is a difference between taking something off the shelf vs picking it out of the trash.

There is a small volume of "piracy" that could be considered "picking through the trash". Some (a lot) of entertainment looks like trash to some (a lot) of people and the only reason those people watch it is because it they get to watch it for free. And then when they are pleasantly surprised, they tell people about it. This is the heart of the "i wasnt going to pay for it anyway" argument. Its the type of person who wouldnt pay for a donut, but if you were about to throw them out theyll take one.

Id be curious to see statistics that shows the relation of being successful in the pirate world and successful in the real world. Because that is ultimately related to the argument you are making. that the current state of piracy is hurting your industry, not helping it - since you say this specific pirate is hurting you right now.

it certainly hurts the transactions bottom line when isolated to viewing your bottom line with or without pirate sales - but thats an incomplete financial scenario (this type of thing is my job). you shouldnt assume a gain of x% sales of pirates that 'would have paid for the content if they couldnt get it for free' without also subtracting y% of sales from people 'who only bought it because pirates started the conversation that ultimately led to their purchase'.

Sometimes the marketing for a movie sucks, and not a lot of people are interested in seeing it. There is a small time frame of relevance and pirates might help overcome the shortcomings of marketing efforts and make the movie more relevant which helps it reach more people than it would have.

In all of your discussion, you seem to presume that the pirates knew about and had an interest in your film to begin with. You assumed successful marketing of your film. maybe you're right, and it probably does 'hurt' (tax?) the biggest blockbuster of the year... but 'people who only watch things online for free' is a real community of maybe significant size and i dont know if there has been any work done to try to measure the impact of what penetrating that community has on the financial success of entertainment media in general.

"all theft is bad" is a nice story, but it ultimately is not always true. sometimes companies allow theft on purpose as a form of marketing. They do that as an observational response to the fact that the cause and effect of 'influencers' exists outside of the intent of the people involved.

This leads to a hypothesis that pirating is a form of marketing for your industry. If it were to become too easy to perform or too widespread, it would likely cross a line into being actually damaging. But if the people pirating it are mostly a small group of tech savvy, relatively intelligent, movie enthusiastic people (due to the technical requirements needed to pirate) then maybe when they pirate you they might be autonomously servicing your industry as an influencer. I know it sounds asinine, but if you want to talk money - there are a lot of factors to consider.

So are they stealing? sure. Are they taking money OUT of your pocket? very debatable; unclear. They are influencing with the pool of money that ends up in your pocket, and it isnt so black and white what their actions have on the size of that pool due to the complexity of your industry.

--------------- Sorry for the long post, and it isnt an attack on you or even a support of piracy in general (it might read that way) - i got caught up in mentally exploring the underlying financial model at play in the current market. fwiw im too lazy to pirate, but i still feel there is an incredible difference between people who pirate for themselves vs people who make it easy for others to pirate. People who invite some friends over to watch something they pirated, vs someone who distributes pirated content on common low-tech household media formats like USB, CD, etc.

Say you have a business idea. Perhaps something that you want to patent. I use it and start my own business, rendering your potential business moot.

Did I steal from you? If so, what did I steal?

But flogging the tired comparison between stealing physical objects and making illegal copies of content is a losing argument. Everyone instinctively knows it's not the same thing. Just because an end user gains a benefit they didn't pay for doesn't mean it's theft. The owner still has the content and can sell it to as many paying customers as they like. Once the car is gone, it's gone and unavailable to sell to someone else. Consider: what would the auto market look like if we had Star Trek-style replicators and could make copies of physical objects for pennies? Let's use bikes instead. If you had the ability to make cheap copies of a bike, would it be ethical to deny the use of a bike to a poor farmer who could use it to get goods to market and make their life better, when your marginal cost is near zero? Do the needs of the R&D people who designed the bike override that consideration?

This is just as much of a problem for all the software creators on here as for the content creators, though the rise of SAAS has changed that somewhat. Content's inherent non-scarcity is one of the best things that has ever happened to humanity, it just happens to break our pre-existing economic model and hurt the people who create it. This is a fundamental shift in our economy that's underway and we have been lurching around trying to solve it for decades now. We need to solve it, but pretending that it's the same as theft is just not going to get us to a solution.

Society being in a lurch between how we handle our physical goods and our digital goods is a very important subject that is going to get ironed out over the next few generations I'm sure.

That doesn't make it not theft, even if its' really easy to do.

As gp said, your points are valid, but you're using a word incorrectly. Just use a different word so as not to have dictionaries disagree with you. Copyright infringement.

stealing.

Not paying for things that they do not consume is voting with their dollars.

But the bottom line is, it's just not worth paying for digital content for me, merely by knowing the fact that it's available for free. A file has no intrinsic value, why should I pay for it?

I'll gladly pay for an experience, or service, such as a movie theatre or a streaming platform that does the work of delivering content to me. But there is so much free stuff out there, paying to download the latest Batman movie is simply not worth it.

When you pay for things you like, more of it gets made.

You need to consider that maybe the product you are producing is simply not that valuable.

I'm an artist myself. If someone took a photo of something I painted, and started making copies and selling them, yea I'd be pissed. That's what copyright law should be used to protect against.

If someone took a photo of my painting for their personal use, instead of buying one of the photos of my painting that I sell myself, I'd reconsider whether my business model of selling photos is the right one.

By "something else" do you mean "another activity instead of watching TV/movies/etc," or do you mean "watching TV/movies/etc, just via another method?"

If the former...who cares? That still doesn't justify it. Just because I chose another recreation activity instead of watching a movie doesn't mean that I'm entitled to the movie for free. Not choosing something doesn't have an effect on the price (at least on the micro level; on the macro level, this is of course the concept of "demand," but even if the demand is so low that the "correct" price is effectively $0, that still doesn't give you the right to steal it -- the Intellectual Property is still property of the owner, and they are the only ones who have the right to sell it or give it away, just as you or I have the right to sell or give away any of our property, be it a couch, a TV, a pair of shoes, an idea for a story, whatever. It's all property).

If the latter, what could possibly fit that criteria? You're either getting the TV/movie via official methods or piracy, there isn't any other way. It's binary. There isn't a way to get your hands on a film that is neither officially sanctioned nor piracy.

> You need to consider that maybe the product you are producing is simply not that valuable.

Not that valuable? Are you serious? We're talking about products that are considered "low budget" when they cost 1 million dollars to make and at best receive profits of hundreds of millions of dollars. The entire premise of this thread is that everyone wants to watch everything, they want access to everything (i.e. the demand is high and not going anywhere). They just don't want to pay for multiple separate services -- but only because they can compare to and prefer the brief, golden period wherein everything was accessible on Netflix and Hulu, back when they were the only two games in town and were a breath of fresh air compared to the expensive cable packages (which, might I remind you, people still paid -- economically, that means that the price is considered "fair" and commensurate to demand). Back when Netflix and Hulu were both unsustainably hemorrhaging money, I might add.

Paying for 100% of the streaming services now costs <= your typical cable package just 20 years ago, and that's not even adjusting for inflation. So things are still cheaper than they've ever been, with a not-insignificant raise in convenience and overall quality of the product to boot. Had we jumped from cable packages to the current situation, HN would be jumping with joy.

Just be honest: you want what you want, for as little as you can get it for. And that's fine! That's human nature. What's not fine is, because you can get it for $0 pretty much risk-free, you'll bend over backwards defending why doing so is okay.

(Comment too long for HN, continuing in the next one...)

Downloading a file (containing the show) from a publicly accessible server on the internet is completely outside of commercial contract so there’s no income in the first place.

Authorities can decide to make it illegal to download files from internet but it’s not "stealing"

This is obvious. It’s crazy how many of you are twisting yourself into logical knots to try to justify this action. It’s not murder, but it’s clearly wrong on its face.

Consuming media/entertainment is no human right and if it is too expensive/too inaccessible/whatever and you wish to be ethical, don't pirate it in the first place.

Humans have great difficulty controlling their impulses especially in connection to crimes that are undetectable and easy to perform but the honest will at least own up to what they do.

You could claim it’s different with digital goods, but it’s not. Money still went into making that good (whether that’s software or a movie or even just a picture) and you’re still getting the benefits of owning that good without paying for it. Put another way, how does not caring enough about something entitle you to ownership?

So you are absolutely stealing whether you would “have paid for it“ or not.

>If it’s not easy to find and use on a subscription service that I already have, I’m just not gonna try to search for it or pay for it.

That is easy to say when you just take it for free regardless. I strongly suspect people saying that would actually pay for a decent amount of it if piracy wasn't an option.

And the number of pirate I know would plop down 15 bucks for a movies (since CAMs and TSs are terrible copies) but won't pay for a movie on VOD (since they can pirate it in clear 4k) confirms my suspicions.

If you want people to "stop stealing our shit", you should really address how crappy the distribution system is.

- Can't get it in __ country

- Can only watch it on __ closed-source devices

- Can't watch it offline

- A is only available on platform 1, B is only on platform 2, and I don't want either crappy platform

Anyway, as I said, I don't really watch movies much anymore, and haven't seen any of the ones on your IMDB page, I mostly play games or read books these days, but I'd probably watch more if the distribution system was better.

- Can't get it with subtitles/dub in _ language

Which is more powerful if consumers don't steal money out of their pocket.

Pay for cool things and you'll get more cool things.

It seems to me like piracy of shows is tangential to whatever the root of the issue is. Folk are becoming disenchanted with streaming services. Whether they pirate or just stop watching instead, the services have clearly changed in ways that make them less valuable to consumers. Unless somebody figures that out, it's not going to improve. I doubt DRM is the answer, although a combination of higher prices and consolidated content might be. Folk would pay more for Netflix if it was still a "monopoly" with all the popular shows.

I think accusing folk of stealing money out of your pocket for downloading a video is quite hyperbolic and isn't winning you any arguments. You're trying to make it a moral issue, but it isn't really a moral issue, and nobody outside of the industry cares. You could claim that it's disrespectful to you as a participating member of society, and it probably is, but yelling at people to respect you more doesn't work, and has the opposite effect.

I think your point, though, is that it's a tragedy of the commons situation. The industry works as a whole because people are willing to pay a premium in exchange for entertainment. If people don't pay, then there's no incentive to produce. If folk value new entertainment, they need to support the industry that produces it.

The problem, as I see it, is entertainment is being seen as a "good" and not a "service." Physical dvds and vhs has conditioned us to think that it's a physical good, so there is no harm in replicating the digital product. In fact that emotional state derived from viewing the entertainment is the service that is being paid for.

Taking the value of receiving that entertainment without providing the cash value of that service is stealing.

Then the ephemeral luxuries, such as entertainment, begin to take a more relaxed position on our moral compass when one compares paying for entertainment services, vs, using funds for food.

I pirate-streamed the first season of discovery due to its lack of availability on other platforms. Felt like a 10 hour movie about a dystopian future with weak shallow characters rather than an episodic serial about the great people solving problems in a better society than we have today. Tried a few episodes of Picard and just didn't get into it. Neither were entertaining enough for my full attention, ended up watching on second monitor while playing a game.

I would feel like a schmuck if I paid CBS to subsidize this content: wasn't what I want more of in the world. There is no "voting with your dollar" in modern content delivery when you can't get a refund when a show ends up being a waste of time.

In the future, I suspect we'll still have storytellers for the same reason we do today. To Inspire, educate, and entertain. I cannot envision society with zero entertainment.

There is no option for refunds. Pirating first gives the user more control over which films they economically incentivize iteration on.

Netflix was on a path to successfully serve the first kind, the only remaining problems being region locking and an incomplete catalog. Demand for piracy went down. Then the industry got greedy, made one of those remaining problems much, much worse, and now the demand for piracy is on the rise again.

The industry spends a lot of resources making life worse for the second kind, in a misguided attempt to both satisfy them and fully prevent the possibility of piracy. Instead they fail at both. The result is an increased demand for piracy.

> You're directly responsible for sucking the quality of life away from people who make your entertainment and reducing the desire to make things you enjoy. You're going to end up with shows that are AI generated CGI sponsored by Mt. Dew and Chevy trucks.

So here's the problem: The only way I can spend money to encourage the production of content I want is to buy a terrible, abusive product I don't want. It only plays in 720p, it's only available through a shitty app, it may disappear from the platform it's on any time.

All of it is just a wrapper for content. Please sell me the content. Whatever file comes out at the end of the production process, sell it to me.

Instead I spend my money in other places. Streamers on Twitch want it. YouTubers want it. People on Patreon want it. Developers want it. Somehow they manage not to abuse the people willing to give them money.

Also, we’re going to end up with shitty generated content regardless of my $10. If you’re making strong statements like OP is stealing from _you_, then go advocate for change. You’re in the industry.

While this may be a way explain why the masses pirate, it's a poor justification for an individual to do it. If you don't find the available payment mechanisms convenient enough, then walk away and support a product that does have mechanism convenient to you. (For the same reason that you wouldn't steal from a store that only takes Amex.)

I do advocate for change, within my own union. Today I am educating consumers on who exactly they are stealing from when they pirate shows.

Amazon used to let me buy anything, and the Prime was there to entice me so I don't have to pay for individual catalog items, but that's not the case anymore.

Now I have a choice between:

1. paying for a crapton of streaming services so I can watch a handful of things I'd like

2. pirating

3. not watching most of the stuff I think I would like to watch

I'm not picking option 1 for what I hope are obvious reasons. I really don't want to pick option 2 because I empathize with people like you, who would be affected by that. For the moment, I'm picking option 3.

However, if you really want to "educate consumers", you might be more successful if you change your tone so it doesn't sound like aggressive victim-blaming. People like you and people like me are being screwed by a third group.

You have an option to pay for the service as offered, steal it, or move on.

Entertainment abounds in our society and is readily available at little to no cost all around you via local theater, open mic nights, libraries, etc.

The connivence of having that entertainment pumped directly on demand to your home is a luxury that has a certain value to it.

Currently that luxury is available via paying for the service or stealing it. The theft is relatively low risk, even by hilariously paying for a services that help hide your theft. That's the number one reason these services are being stolen.

We're living in a society where a huge number of people has experienced a good solution to the demand for that enrichment, and that good solution has been deliberately sabotaged so that a small, rich group of people could become even richer at the expense of everyone else.

Just like you argue people are not entitled to art and entertainment, so I would argue that those who deliberately restrict access to it in completely unnecessary ways are not entitled to the additional profits they squeeze out that way.

As for the comments about luxury of pumping the entertainment to our homes instead of enjoying it at little to no cost at the venues you mention, I'm reminded of Arthur Dent being told that the plans to demolish his house were on display all the time. Suffice it to say that your vision of how the majority of people live is very distorted.

What I was trying to do is have a conversation with you about why people "steal" or whatever the correct word for this thing is. Just like there are reasons people steal in real life, there are reasons for this behavior, too. You can try to understand it, or you can keep throwing everyone in the same bin, slap a label on that bin, and feel morally superior.

One of those two will lead to improvement for everyone. One of those two is easy. I'll leave it an exercise for you to figure out which one is which.

I don't think this is what you mean to do. I think you really care about this! Lay down your sword and listen. Hear what people are saying in response. Let their responses inform and refine your advocacy. You can't stroll in broadcasting an ideological, self-interested position and expect people to react well.

I'm fine with this. Some of the best movies ever were made in the 70s, after the Hollywood studio system collapsed and a ton of money was sucked out of the industry.

While I agree with your sentiment, you can also make a better product. This is an easy fix with some of the smartest minds in the industry. People showed Netflix early on they were willing to PAY for ease of use.

The big studios know how many people are watching their stuff via theft. They are going to keep producting low end crap with studio friendly sponsorships, because piracy will have taught them that is a better business model.

Pay of the things you want to see and you'll see more of them.

Where can I pay for a streaming service with no geo-blocking, no DRM quality limitations on Linux, offline viewing and all the shows/movies I want to watch? Seems the only way to vote with my wallet is to refuse to pay, which morally isn't really different to piracy.

I don't know where to find all those requirements. Perhaps they exist. If they are that big of a dealbreaker for you, don't consume the value provided by entertainment services.

When you decide that the exact moral high point is to consume the goods and services while still maintaining integrity about not providing the cash value asked of those things, you are justifying being a thief.

> When you decide that the exact moral high point is to consume the goods and services while still maintaining integrity about not providing the cash value asked of those things, you are justifying being a [pirate].

Correct, it is justifying being a pirate. The justification being exactly what you suggested: voting with my wallet. I want to watch a certain piece of entertainment, but it's producer has made it unreasonably unobtainable thus pirating it signals that it is both desired and that a sale was lost.

I think you're being angry about the wrong thing here. Consumers don't want to pirate; they are pushed to piracy by shit service. That's not a fault of the consumers, that's a fault of the seller. If you actually want to reduce piracy you should be advocating for better service rather than telling people they're stealing from you.

And he is yelling at us, which also have no control, he should be yelling at the people he works for that do have control.

And someday I'll be makign my own productions.

Thinking of all the stealing they've done from the public domain it makes my blood boil. Charging top dollar for artists work that have been dead for decades is a disgrace. How about "stealing" from the public and renting it out in perpetuity... Winnie the Pooh, anyone?

Hell of a position.

Most of those who pirate, wouldn't pay and since the content is not going away because somebody pirates it, it can't be stealing.

And Jesus...please...it's not like you're starving out there. Start producing original stories. We don't even need all that fancy and expensive CGI crap. Just start writing properly and in a creative way. Pay THOSE people more IF they deliver (though I'm not sure anymore if you really understand what's missing here with all your sequels and remakes...). We're not the audience you should cry to, go to those managers who messed up that market so piracy is coming back again.

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

Although in this case, I have to imagine that first understanding the problem would enable the industry to fix itself and then make more money.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeTybKL1pM4

When you steal cool stuff, cool stuff stops getting made.

As opposed to movies/shows already high on CGI with poor and rehashed storylines, and whitewashed to cater to CCP censorship?

When you lend it out, are you still able to enjoy the entertainment service provided by the dvd?

The answers to these questions are the answers to your questions.

Our base pay is daily rate governed through SAG-Aftra CBA with the Producer's guild and scaled off the budget of the production. Then there are OT factors and bumps that go along with how difficult the particular work is.

To put it really bluntly, pointing out how piracy is easier than paying again is not literally stealing money out of your pocket. The whole "lost sales" and "stolen income" thing doesn't always hold water, because you can't measure all the counterfactuals involved. A lot of pirates are either just data hoarders or collectors, and you aren't really in price competition with piracy as long as you are even slightly more convenient than it. Yes, that actually used to be the case for movies and TV shows, back when you could get access to everything you could ever want to watch just by subscribing to Netflix or maybe Hulu. Piracy was actually going away, right up until everyone pulled their content from Netflix to try and grab a larger slice of a smaller pie.

However, I don't want to actually trash your point too hard, because you did touch upon something worth talking about. I have noticed in HN and in other engineer-oriented spaces a certain contempt for the creative working class. I call it "kill and eat everyone below the talent line".

There's this weird meme that came about around the same time that the RIAA was indiscriminately suing casual pirates. Back then, some artists - usually ones at the start of their careers or doing it as a hobby - were distributing content over the Internet for free. In fact, some of them were even able to make money off of it through crowdfunding or advertisements without directly demanding payment to read, listen, or watch their work. So people made this assumption that this business model would be both sustainable long-term and scalable to large productions. Ergo, copyright is just an artifice of history, we can just abolish it, and the "real artists" will prosper while publishers and middlemen are out of a job.[0]

The problem is that "real artists" covers both the Toby Foxes of the world just as well as the Temmie Changs. Abolishing copyright beggars the songwriter in the name of the singer. A-list actors would actually survive and thrive in a crowdfunding-only market, because they have the name recognition to do so. But all the other people who support them would see their income shrink. And producers and publishers would just turn into the absolute worst kind of scummy for-sale pirates you could think of.[1]

The thing about piracy is that we as tinkerers and hobbyists assume it works exactly the same for everyone else as it does for us. I.e. me and my 10,000 friends all trade files around for free. Yes, a lot of pirates are data hoarders and collectors, but there's an entire world of bootlegs and knockoffs outside of the world of BitTorrent. For-profit piracy is far more pernicious than just the person with a Plex server, and it comes in a lot of forms you wouldn't even expect. For example, when Facebook launched their video service, there was an entire cottage industry of people reuploading YouTube videos and monetizing them on Facebook. This is the sort of thing that individual filesharers would not even recognize as piracy, but is absolutely immoral and wrong, and does pull nickels and dimes out of artists' pockets.

[0] The counterargument I'm making against copyright abolitionism does not apply to other things like shortening the length of copyright terms or adding more exceptions to it. Those at least still allow the existence of a creative working class.

[1] Fun fact: lousy speedsubbing jobs aren't just for modern anime pirates. Before we had international copyright, it was common for publishers to just take books published in other countries, translate themselves, and sell them before the original author could.

The concept that Pirates wouldn't have paid for it anyway is valid. Part of my problem with piracy is that so much bullshit gets consumed that without stealing, those things would be much less part of pop culture and we'd have a lot better stuff to entertain us.

However for definition sakes. Taking a service that you wouldn't have consumed by paying and using it for free is stealing.

I'm sorry, I just find it really absurd when people claim something is easier when it's just not. Perhaps you find it to be a better trade off, but it is not easier.

90% of people I know probably couldn't set this up. And the other 10% would spend more time dicking around with the set up than they would using netflix or the other services.

GabeN is not correct. Piracy is a money problem. Free is very enticing.

> "Piracy is a service problem." Valve's Gabe Newell said that years ago, touting the success of Steam, his online video game distribution service.

The UX is crap; the info architecture is obscure; it doesn't work well on macOS (or at all if I use the wrong file system); it uses confusing labels for the stash of stuff I've already bought. I don't use it often enough to know if my usr/pwd is still valid (it is, fortunately). It had some slightly odd 2FA type thing the last time I logged in. It just gives me the impression that it wants to hide games from me that I've already bought and to make new ones hard to find. I'd rather have discs in boxes taking up space (tbf I also collect vinyl so maybe I'm just anachronistic?)

The only good thing going for it is that it doesn't ever email me junk.

But I gave in after several years, and now I'm a quite happy Steam user on Linux. It works as advertised, and the only issue I have is that I haven't found a way to filter games for «Linux support» and a genre at the same time. I've used EXT4 and BTRFS as file systems while using Steam, and never had any issues with that either.

I'm inclined to agree with Gabe. I've never spent as much money on games as after I got Steam. It makes it really easy to get a new game. Without Steam, I'd probably just go without. I have lots of things to spend my time on, and sometimes I'm even a little bit bummed that wasting time on games is an option on Linux these days...

Though I also buy from Humble Bundle and GOG. I prefer GOG whenever possible, if it's DRM free. Sometimes it's the most expensive option though.

Even for the in-house games, you have to be naive to trust any sort of promise from a commercial software product that isn't in a contract. Notch supposedly once promised that Minecraft would eventually become open source; well that plan evaporated when Microsoft waved a few billion dollars in front of him. Maybe he meant it at the time he said it, but that doesn't count for anything.

many new games are free and rely on in-game transactions tied to an account outside of steam

There are no restrictions on the games I bought through steam that actually get in the way of me playing them - and there are a lot of conveniences offered like having access to my entire library on any machine with steam installed, or playing the games installed on my machine pretty much indefinitely offline. And being able to verify my game files and have them automatically fixed / updated

The games i bought a long time ago and still play have more than earned the money i spent on them anyway. if steam dies and i need to buy them again, i will and i will be happy to. if i cant find them anywhere because the games themselves died, ill make an image of my PC before upgrading it or uninstalling them and play them offline in a VM

there might be an itch here or there i cant scratch for whatever reason, but i can always buy a new game inspired by the same genre which is usually more fun than trying to recreate a nostalgic feeling anyway

Valve makes a lot of money from the steam store. They’re not going anywhere. There are competitors like gog games that sell them without DRM. You download the games anyways so I’m sure a solution will be figured out if Valve starts to have issues.

Steam provides a pretty seamless experience for gaming, and it provides useful services to developers as well. Then you have things like the steam workshop and marketplace.

And for minecraft being open source: who cares? Gamers want games that are good and fun to play. There are very few open source games that are actually fun to play.

Well, the huge dicourse in consoles atm is digital and ownership. There were several scares over the years (some that went through, some that backpedeled) on storefronts closing down and no longer being able to buy older games as a result, in a market where retro gaming is being flooded by scalpers selling stuff at 20x markups. Console players are feeling uneasy with the advent of there being "digital only" variants sneaking back in, and cloud gaming is getting bigger each year.

Maybe this is just a cacophony of old fans not getting with the times, but it seems like a signifigant enough sentiment that "so what" seems overly dismissive.

>And for minecraft being open source: who cares?

older minecraft players apparently. Granted, it hasn't really stopped their creativity and servers, so in practice it doesn't change much. But I wouldn't be surprised in some microfose move years down the line angering that playerbase.

Again, an oddly dismissive take for something that has historically happened. It's easy to say "I don't care it's convinent" until it isn't.

you found one?? please share

Other than that I can’t really think of anything other than good clones like OpenTTD or crappy clones like minetest.

Maybe Dwarf Fortress in the future if tarn or his brother open source it.

Granted, you have to buy the game to make use of these open source engines legally. But these open source engines free you from the limitations of DRM, Windows/Wine and run better than the original engines (support modern resolutions, innumerable bug fixes, etc.)

I've been using steam for over a decade and have always enjoyed that it works the way i expect a computer application to work. i can right-click on things to get to their properties and other options, i can point it to games i have installed that i didnt buy through steam and they appear next to my steam games in my library seamlessly

the store UI is.. not the most intuitive thing for me, but it seems consistent. it is very rare that i am browsing steam store to begin with, though. I am usually searching for a specific game directly, which i never have trouble finding if it's in their collection. I also like that i can add any games im interested in to a wish list and they notify me when it's on sale

i used to edit my settings in a config file in counterstrike, which required "tampering" with local files but in a way that ultimately resulted in compliant files. Finding that file was an obscure path to navigate, ill give you that - but again the organization is still consistent. all files for one game can be found in one folder with the games name on it. you can manually delete that folder and effectively uninstall the game. you can even do a custom reinstall by selectively deleting files from that folder and ask steam to replace the missing items and it will. For example, to reinstall a game without losing your save files.

Not trying to invalidate your experience, but your comment caught me by surprise because your dislike seems to be well rationed and thought out - ie genuine - so i just found it interesting

Steam provides a lot of value.

But, I will also admit that I'm a bit biased against steam due to using PC's for a lot of Visual Novels. And their VN submissions have always been a lottery of some sorts, to the confusion of readers and developers alike. Nothing worse than having an existing product on the store and then suddenly having a sequel to the product rejected, while the first product still sits on shelves.

the other problems are personal preferences that aren't universal

few things in life are. But we're on the internet, so we inevitably here a lot fo "personal preferences", often exagerrated to the point where it sounds like it's the worst thing in the world.

GabeN is partially correct: It's a money & service problem. It's money for some, service for others, sometimes a bit of both. During college I had no money, so the issue for me was money. Once I got a job after college it was service: I didn't want to drive to music store & hope they had the CD in stock that I was looking for, not when I could definitely get it in 5 minutes online. Similar issue for videogames: I didn't want to spend $30-$60 for a game I couldn't return, when my computer might choke on it & not run or if half an hour in I realized it was crap. On top of which I might have to drive around to half a dozen stores to find a copy. That was a mixture of service & money.

These days it's faster for me to pay $1 for a song than pirate it, and I can instantly buy, download, and return a game in an hour if it either doesn't run or I hate it immediately.

Free is enticing, but so is convenience & instant gratification.

However, people professing this quote everywhere should note that it's very hard to compete with "free infinite media" for those with the knowledge to pirate. So don't be surprised if instead of catering to that crowd that they instead focus on people who can't or don't want to pirate. It's a double edged sword. If I do pirate, I don't pretend I do it in some effort to make the product better. I do it accepting the risk that they may never choose to cater to me.

It's so frustrating to see that 90%of the shows I want to see are unavailable on Netflix. Video streaming is just so fragmented right now. And they try to compensate with a bunch of low quality Netflix original shows.

Why can't they just replicate what has been done in audio streaming? Spotify is what Netflix should have been. It's been years I no longer need to pirate music.

that's where the "service problem" sentiment falls apart. All companies want to be this monopoly for you with no red tape over multiple governments. But of course, companies get the best cuts (100%) from hosting it themselves and countries (and media licensed) will never agree on what's okay.

In this case, piracy is a way around a world that hasn't quite caught up with how the internet works yet. I wonder in a few decades if governments worldwide create enough enforcement on this for it to be just as inconvinent as trying to steal a CD.

I have a shared folder on my home network where I download stuff from 1-click hosters with jdownloader. I get the links all on one platform.

I got that money. I paid for Netflix once but now I can't remember the last show I watched made by them. Instead I'd have to pay for at least 3 other platforms to watch those few shows I watch throughout the year. Sometimes I'd even have to use a VPN to get it in the original language.

It only is a service problem for me.

(there is a bit revenge for their inability to provide a single platform in there too)

A service problem and a money problem are almost the same thing. Time is money, and I value my free-time very high. People will pay to not have to spend time to find the free.

Plug the PC up to display and presto.

I never have to leave my sofa. I don't have to dick around with plugging and unplugging my PC. No keyboards to manage. No OS or software to keep updated.

Your solution is easier than some other options but I'll stick with mine.

Then have a firmware update ad some advertising to the experience.

Sure beats my experience of pulling out my 12 oz keyboard plus touchpad bluetooth keyboard connected to a real PC.

I'm a 60-year-old (Do I win a kewpie doll?), and have the tech chops to pirate, but I don't want to.

It's important for me to live a life of Personal Integrity. That stance gets a lot of chuckles with this crowd, but it's of critical importance, in my life.

I'm fortunate, in being able to afford streaming services, but find the profusion and variety to be a mess.

I like AppleTV Channels, and the way that the AppleTV Watch Now app aggregates the apps. Amazon has something similar, that my wife uses.

Unfortunately, it looks like these knuckleheads can't agree on common licensing models. I don't want the "You can have any color you want, as long as it's black." approach of cable bundlers, but I also don't like the myriad ways of subscribing, or, quite frankly, the ever-changing prices.

They need to get their shit together.

Of course, what was (past tense) also annoying was paying $100/month for a cable bundle that I rarely watched.

It's also the case that I have access to a ton of video and don't consider much to be "must see."

And to the topic at hand, I may very well cancel Netflix one of these days. There's some stuff I haven't watched yet but after I get through that I may well drop it.

If it's just as fringe as you say, and i agree, then we shouldn't entertain the idea that media is (or was, in early 2000s before Netflix) losing that much money to pirating. As i'm sure now that people start migrating to less legal avenues for digital media we'll start seeing a resurgence of cries over lost profits due to piracy.

I think you underestimate how many people pirated things before netflix existed.

Nope. Just tried it. Literally not. It gives me the option to play movies, but nope. Can only play trailers.

There are addons, but they seem to use Torrent. I have no interest in streaming up to other people and redistributing the data. Is that set up automatically, or does it reuse my internet connection without informing me?

Also, with Netflix, I don't have to worry about copyright issues. Does streamio make that as easy?

None of this sounds literally as easy.

And again, literally cannot play a movie I can easily play on Netflix.

This view is very US-centric.

In most of the "rest of the world", netflix either doesn't exist or has a very very limited show list (even here, in a relatively developed EU country), and piracy literally is the only way to get a lot of the very popular shows.

And if you already pirate 3 of the 5 shows that you watch, why would you pay for the other 2, that are available on netflix, if you can just pirate those too?

I don't mean to be rude, but in the grand scheme of things the other countries don't quite matter as much, financially speaking. And those smaller parts of the world pirating isn't a big loss. Similar to the video game industry in Japan; some games may get an overseas following, but if the domestic market is slacking, that studio may not get the chance to make a sequel for those overseas fans.

So back to the US-centric sentiment: American audiences don't have the excuse 99% of the time of "this content is region blocked in my country", so the sentiment here shifts to "I don't want to manage 4 streaming services".

In many ways, pirating is like any subscription service: signing on is a difficult decision (whether financially or technically), but once you're there and all caught up with the UI, using it again is the default move for watching your next show/movie.

In my country (slovenia) there is a very good local torrent tracker + a lot of people use the few larger general torrent sites, and even "grandpas" can use them, if their "computer-savy" kid installs them a torrent client, and shows them where to search.

In you go further down the balkans, you can find full movies even on youtube, especially local ones (because youtube doesn't remove them). Not that long ago, you could also buy or rent pirated cds/dvds literally from street vendors and "movie clubs" (think blockbuster, but smaller, more local and pirated).

Since they're in a low power-security environment, there's a lot of unexpected on-off cycles. Anyway, the whole thing still worked for them until recently and as things started failing (as they inevitably do with this max jank thing I've made them) they just figured out how to work with it.

At first, they ran out of content, so they learned how to go get it on ThePirateBay and find the right mirror.

Then OpenSubtitles (which was integrated with XBMC) stopped working on it for some reason, so they would go manually get srt files and stick them on the USB drive (visible over Samba from the network).

Then as the local external drive started failing, they used the home desktop's samba mounted drive (that I'd set up earlier).

Hilariously, the gradual collapse of the system seems to have worked as a natural training regimen, and now they're fully equipped with knowledge. So now they've got one of our old desktops in the living room hooked up to the TV, a small bluetooth keyboard lying on the coffee table, and watch pirate video on the TV.

The whole thing is positively comical because I pay for all the services so this isn't necessary at all. But availability is not complete and I'm sure it tickles them to be able to do this stuff themselves.

Anyway, thought it was a funny story. They're in their late 60s but they're doctors and last I knew, not particularly tech-savvy, so I am both proud and highly entertained.

I come from country where intellectual property was treated as a western joke.

Children younger than 10 learned how to pirate - by themselves, without knowing even English. A lot of people still can do that, and it's quite easy to find out how.

Can piracy be the bridge to tech literacy? Sure.

“It's easier just to pirate than keep up with all these streaming services.”

Which seems false on its face. Every TV has access to all these streaming services built in. Or Roku devices, which take moments to set up. This is unrelated to whether people are capable of learning, but I am even bearish on that when it comes to the average person in the current piracy environment.

You mean those same TVs and devices that plaster your screen with ads, arbitrarily modify the UI, suddenly make certain shows unavailable, spy on what you're watching, require unwieldy DRM, take minutes to turn on, interrupt your relaxation time to run "updates", randomly brick themselves, become obsolete in a short several years, and generally dictate your experience based on short-sighted corporate whims? Visiting someone else's house and seeing the garbage behavior they put up with from their "smart TV" is as mindblowing as seeing someone using a web browser without adblock!

"Piracy is easier" refers to the experience after you've gone through the work of setting up your own entertainment system. Setting it up certainly does require an investment of time and self-actualization, which for sure is more effort than searching "netflix" and following their "conversion" path. But after that, things just generally work without all of the corporate hassles. I don't foresee everyone choosing to make running a libre media setup one of their hobbies, but most people will know someone who has...

and the thread here as a whole is rebuking the argument that Netflix is losing money because people are pirating. Most people don't or can't go through this work, so that likely isn't the reason why Netflix is seeing drops.

Current market wise, I wouldn't be surprised if the Netflix situation is people canceling their membership to spend that money on a different streaming service, and then swapping between friends to get the union of shows for a similar $/month. This would explain both pushes of membership going down, plus them wanting to crack down on sharing.

ehh, It's more like a speedbump than a storm. There's too much money in the game for it to end up being caught in a hurricane.

I just see the other side on how piracy can also harm more niche mediums and discourage businesses from even bothering to compete, which is why I can't even say piracy is a 'meh' at worst.

The manga indusry outside of Japan has this problem in that it's 5+ years behind the already decade outdated online solution for digital comics. Several JP storefronts for phyical and digital manga, but that is almost non-existent in English. Manga is fantranslated so fast that there's no incentive to bother having official localizers outside of the already huge works. Easier to cash in pennies on anime adaptations and merch sales afterwards.

There are lists of how much it would cost to have all the streaming services, and for a LONG time, it was illegal for cable companies to prevent you from selecting the channels you would like a-la-carte... but it did NOT prevent them from charging too much for each channel to make that an unworkable...

"You want JUST HBO? Sure, no problem, if you don't buy it in the bundle, the individual channel cost is $29 per month!"

---

That is THE failure of "regulation" ; THE GOVERNMENT WILL MANDATE THROUGH LOBBIED REGULATION THAT ONE MUST HAVE THIS [SERVICE] - HOWEVER, WE WILL NOT REGULATE HOW MUCH YU CAN BE CHARGED FOR THE SERVICE, BUT WE WILL FINE AND PUNISH YOU IF YOU DO NOT HAVE THIS SERVICE.

The things this person lists are things I agree with, however. I actually have Amazon Prime Video but still enjoyed watching my friend's pirated copies on Plex, because there is no way to force-disable shitty compression levels, even if I have gigabit Internet.

Also, my friend can make sure their video library never changes or goes away, and that certain rarer content is archived forever, not subject to the changes of George Lucas or Disney editing out "problematic" content.

ZFS pools with full backups, redundant hardware, and highly available servers is not normal.

Installers are a thing on windows, on Ubuntu you can install software with apt. It wasn't packaged for my distro so I downloaded an archive unzipped and dropped it in /opt

Not sure why anyone would absolutely need to understand Kuberetes or even docker.

Plugging a PC up to a display has been a better TV for a while now.

I'm sure the industry will come up with new ways to intrude on the internet again to stop this before they get together to make another platform which would allow the audience to download everything in one place.

That's easy.

Most of my friends have no idea what Tor is. Many don't know the Pirate Bay, and most of those who know bittorrent haven't configured it to get past their firewall.

But you know what they do know? Turning the TV on, going to Roku, searching for a movie/show, and watching it in whatever app Roku suggests.

But if we're talking about the people who are buying all the streaming services, it's currently easier to pirate. I get that you haven't taken two seconds to do any amount of research on the matter and that complete lack of any experience whatsoever gives you a sense of expertise to call other people blind and absurd, but consider that maybe you just don't know what you're talking about?

The easy option will cost you 24000 over 10 years. If you earn 20 bucks an hour or less like near half of America this represents an additional 1200 labor hours or a full time job for 30 weeks.

You even call Netflix the easy option which is all I'm saying.

You want me to buy the apple before taking a picture?