Uh huh, I'll stop stealing from you when you stop stealing from me.

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.

This is a joke right? Kind of like rioters looting local businesses and then saying “society stole from us first”?

Never rioted nor looted nor seen either, so can't comment. Joke, it is not.

You, personally, are stealing from my income. All those issues you raise are valid and important issues to address. Stealing because those things make you angry makes you part of the problem.

I don't personally pirate much, but I take umbrage at you characterizing it in this way. You seem to think that the issues of accessing media without subjecting yourself to user-hostile behaviors are wholly orthogonal to the issue of accessing media without paying for it. They aren't.

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.

The world is full of problems. We are looking at actual massive potentially civilization or species ending issues in the large and dealing with trying to make a living, manage illness, deal with death, parenting in the small.

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.

Film is competing against loads of free content and the industry is thrashing to avoid accepting the obvious fate: it is no longer economically rational to produce films with budgets in the hundreds of millions.

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.

If the entire world of piracy tripled tomorrow, it still wouldn’t have the tiniest shred of impact on your income compared to the decisions of rapidly consolidating tech/studio execs who are tanking your industry and fighting your unions to chase pennies.

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.

I, and nobody I know, has pirated games or music since Steam blew up about 12-15 years ago and Spotify/RDIO and similar blew up about 10 years ago.

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?

Sure you're talking about economical motivators, which I hope and fight for our Union to adjust to.

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

No, it's not economic at all. You've repeatedly failed to grasp this in this entire comments section. It's about convenience. It is actually more convenient to pirate the handful of movies or TV shows people want to watch than to maintain a dozen subscriptions or activate just the one for the handful of shows or movies they want to watch at any given time.

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

Steam charges by the game and often times you can find whatever you want on iTunes or Amazon video if you're willing to "buy" the movie/tv season. Why do you limit yourself to content that comes to you from a subscription? I'm guessing because it's kind of expensive to buy a season of tv.

I don't, actually. I pay for a number of things that I feel deliver value. I've bought movies and TV off of amazon video/youtube. I pay for some podcasts. I buy audiobooks off of Audible and eBooks from kindle (despite these being even more expensive and more convenient to pirate than movies/TV). I've commissioned some graphic design stuff for personal use. Though I'm personally not into sports, a friend of mine is super into the NFL and buys their online package (though he still has to pirate certain local games because...not enough people showed up to the stadium that day???).

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.

ah, sidenote! I watch NFL too. Generally local games are blacked out so you need to watch them on the local broadcast via antenna or a cable. I do find this annoying but I have an antenna pretty much for that reason.

It is very convenient to steal. You fail to grasp that still constitutes theft.

The only thing I pirate is movies / tv shows ... and it's extremely simple: because it's not humanly possible to purchase them digitally.

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.

Your obtuseness and just general attitude in this thread really actually makes me want to start pirating again.

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

Is it really stealing if they wouldn’t have ever paid for it in the first place?

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)

Yes, it is. But even though you didn't manage to communicate your point correctly, it still stands: the only reason streaming replaced piracy was because people could afford it and it was easier to use.

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.

Yes it is really stealing.

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.

It's not stealing, it's copyright infringement. If someone steals my car I no longer have my car. If someone copies my car my car loses values because there is now one extra copy of my car floating around.

If intellectual property is indeed property, it can be stolen. Considering (in the US, at least), intellectual property is codified within the Constitution, it's pretty hard to say it isn't real.

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)

Often when you have to qualify something (intellectual property instead of just property), it's because it's used as a metaphor instead of a subcategory. Intellectual property is a form of property as much as political science is a form of science.

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.

entertainment is a service industry. Extracting the service value without providing the requested fee is stealing.

You've posted 67 (!) comments in this thread, mostly making the same point over and over in angry ways.

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

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

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.

You don't take it, you make a new, identical copy of it, leaving any previously existing copy intact.

So if I make a new, identical copy of a GPL'ed codebase - should I feel free to use it for whatever purpose I want and ignore the GPL?

I will happily take your money and provide you with a new, identical copy of it if that's the deal you want to make.

That doesn't make any sense as an allegory.

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.

I generally support this argument, but to play devil's advocate, you might consider the bit stream used to transfer the content to be new bits. The file may be a bit-for-bit copy if you ask a computer, but streaming it required a series of voltage fluctuations that wouldn't have happened otherwise. You could consider that series of events to be roughly analogous to a CD-ROM containing some content. You can load the CD onto two computers and get two copies of its content, but there are two physically distinct CDs just like there are two physically distinct series of bits streaming to two locations.

Literally the NFT argument

An NFT is a certificate of authenticity. Copies of the associated item don't have a valid certificate. Getting satisfaction from a copy is orthogonal to the value associated with the authenticated original.

I'll go into your mailbox and take your paycheck. I'll provide you with a new identical copy of it. I'll leave the previous existing copy intact, but in my possession.

Which one of us gets to deposit the money?

You're copying the check but stealing the money. The money and the check are not the same thing.

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

You're copying the entertainment value provided and stealing the income that is related to that value.

Theft is when you take something from someone. As in, what you have materially gained, they have materially lost. Copyright infringement is not theft, and must be treated differently, because what you gain, nobody has lost; the supply is infinite.

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.

What about borrowing from public libraries? Buying a used legitimate disc at a garage sale? Are people who do this in the wrong?

Finally! I agree with this. I think that physically purchased goods should be free from any sort of "DRM." and is not stealing.

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 :/

But you agree, that there is a difference between copying information and taking physical objects away?

I seriously don't understand why this point keeps getting repeated. It is just semantics!

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.

No, I am not taking anything of value. You still have all the things of value you had before. The difference between a rivalrous good and a non-rivalrous good is not semantics.

The mental gymnastics to justify piracy as anything other than theft is always interesting to watch.

So is the substitution of moral smugness for complex thought.

Call it stealing it or not, non rivalrous or whatever, the point is that the movie owners have intellectual property rights to their movies and can decide how it is distributed.

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

piracy is receiving the service value of entertainment without providing the requested fee.

Another word for it is stealing.

For receiving the service value of entertainment of reading this comment, I request a fee of $1,000.

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

Theft is not defined by the receiving, it is defined by the taking. The moral ill is not you being enriched, it is the person who had it rightfully, being deprived of it.

"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."

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.

> Is it really stealing if they wouldn’t have ever paid for it in the first place?

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?

That's stealing because it deprives someone else of their property. The dealer cannot sell the car once you've stolen it.

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

Bandwidth, storage, and hosted servers aren't free. Neither are staff.

the income associated with IP very much does.

Just out of curiosity, do they get deprived of the income when I download the content, or when I watch it?

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

We get deprived of the income when it is consumed without providing money for that service.

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.

What if 6 people watch it for one purchase? Does it become theft then?

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.

You assume people are going to pay for it. If you provide a good service, they will, as shown by Steam and Spotify and, at least initially, Netflix.

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.

I assume that if people want to enjoy a service without paying for it, it's theft.

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.

What are your thoughts on me and all of my friends and family getting together in my home theatre and watching the latest movie that I paid 4 bucks for on something like Amazon or Youtube?

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).

I am 100 percent okay with it. One entity has provided the fee for service (and afforded me 1/100th of an avocado toast, thank you very much) and is not in their ownership to do as they like.

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.

It does not affect your ability to make a living if I consume a copy of your IP that I was not going to pay for in the first place. You have lost nothing you would not lose otherwise, and you have gained nothing you would not gain otherwise.

You gain the value of service without paying the requested fee. If you weren't going to watch it, you wouldn't. Watching it, without paying for it is theft and it takes money from me.

Proof by repeated assertion. The post you are replying to is an effective response to yours. Once more: It does not affect your ability to make a living if I consume a copy of your IP that I was not going to pay for in the first place. Watching it without paying for it does not take money from you, because you would still not have had that money if I had simply not watched it at all.

> 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.

>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.

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.

You are wrong. You’re focusing on the wrong thing here. It’s not whether the good can still be sold, it’s about whether the business can continue to get money.

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?

The difference is obvious. If they steal a Mercedes it's gone, the car dealer does not have it anymore.

@Stunting your perspective in this thread is very valuable, and the best thing that streaming has done, much better than old-school bundling and certainly better than piracy, is encourage a boom in interesting content, and I'm very glad you and the other workers in entertainment are getting paid.

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.

Or we could all just admit that it's theft.

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.

Virtually every dictionary clarifies that theft requires intent to deprive the original owner from using the stolen item, which is incompatible with the act of making a copy.

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.

when you pirate a show, no longer get the contractually based income related to your viewing.

The probability of that income is quite hypothetical. Most of the time, the person would never have payed for it.

Do you believe that if there was no piracy people who pirate wouldn’t watch paid entertainment?

and yet they consume it. Consuming goods and services without providing money for that is...wait for it....

stealing.

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

If you steal a physical object, you deprive someone else of having it. Nothing of the sort happens when you copy a media file.

when you steal a viewing of a show, the income related to your consumption is directly stolen from me.

It's not though. You could argue it is indirectly stolen from you by impacting your potential for future earnings, but please explain how the "direct" part of your statement works. Are funds withdrawn from your bank account when someone pirates a movie?

The workforce's income is contractually tied to the amount of post box office profit the film makes. When you steal a show you get the entertainment value without cost of your money. That is directly reflected in my income.

That's fair enough and I did not know that, and will certainly take into account when making future purchasing decisions, thank you.

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 it's so easy to steal why should I pay for it."

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

But what if I don't like Hollywood movies, consider them cheap crap, and don't care if more of them get made? I just want to watch them to see what everyone else is talking about.

Then you are a thief who steals products that you don't enjoy.

But what if someone is not pirating instead of purchasing, they're just pirating instead of doing something else?

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.

> But what if someone is not pirating instead of purchasing, they're just pirating instead of doing something else?

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...)

you are making assumptions about the prerequisites. Talking about "income" implies that the person is viewing a show inside a form of commercial contract like going to a place where the show is displayed or buying a dvd or paying a streaming plateform etc…

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"

Say A makes a film. Situation 1 : B do not watch the film a do something else. Situation 2 : B downloads the film from P2P network and watch it. What is the difference for A ?

They lost a potential sale because someone didn’t have to pay for something.

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.

I don't know; it seems there is a clear learned aversion to the word "stealing" but doesn't change the unethical nature of the crime is equivalent to stealing royalties deserved for the consumed work. I pirate some times sure but I do so with the understanding that what I am doing is unethical and try to avoid it.

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.

Yes, obviously. I really don’t see how one could possibly sympathize with this argument. Say I go to a bakery and I only “sort of” want a cookie. I’m not hungry enough to pay for it, so I just take it, and claim “I’m not actually stealing because I wasn’t going to pay for it anyway“.

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.

What if most of my enjoyment of a cookie is looking at all of the pretty designs and crafty details on the cookies, and I don’t actually care that much to eat them. Is it stealing to go into a bakery and look at the cookies, then leave? I’ve gotten all of my enjoyment for free, after all!

You might be satisfied, but you only consumed a component of the work that the creator explicitly offers for free while refraining from consuming the component that requires payment. Just like browsing an art gallery: I'm satisfied seeing a painting in the gallery location, which is a freebie, and I don't care about also seeing it in the location of my choice, which has a price tag.

>Is it really stealing if they wouldn’t have ever paid for it in the first place?

>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.

This reminds me of the squatter issue and the claim that it's not wrong if the owner wasn't using it. This is only true if you have a vastly different idea of property (real and intellectual) rights that much of the country/economy is founded upon.

Such is the state of ethics is the world. Some people can justify anything.

I don't pirate (out of principle), but I also basically don't stream because I'm a Linux user and your streaming platforms suck big fat ones.

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.

This is a valid complaint. I would tell you that on the many streaming services available for free like youtube, vimeo, etc. There is probably a small filmmaker who is making the type of show you enjoy. Finding them, providing value by first clicks and shares and eventually with income as they grow will encourage more filmmakers to make things you like.

Add:

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

Whatever chief executive that decided to create their own streaming platform for a price that's too high is stealing your money. They are the ones that made it more convenient to pirate.

Ah, now that is a point. I don't expect consumers to take on my personal union politics. That is the duty of the workforce and their union..

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.

How you worded that sounds reminiscent of mafia "protection". I assume that wasn't your intention, but that's how it read for me.

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.

If thieves are offended at having their behavior identified as stealing, they could stop stealing.

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.

Make "cool things" overly priced, especially in a fucked up inflationary market manipulated by corruption and influence, where for the last several years everything costs more which is tangible and required to survive, (food, shelter, transport, employment)

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 went looking for a la carte options for all the Star Treks. They really want almost $50 per season for DS9, a show that premiered almost 30 years ago. There's just no reasonable way to justify that but greed. I can't believe people like Stunting actually see much of that ~$50, and I think they're here fighting over people not giving them their scraps when there's no guarantee people are making a choice between paying $50, paying $10 to Paramount, or downloading a copy ("pirating" IP is a made up concept no one uses outside the world of RIAA, MPAA, and similar).

I love 90's star trek. I haven't watched anything past Enterprise and the Chris Pine movies because I don't have a CBS account. I could easily afford it, but none of the new content seems worth it to me, in terms of my time let alone my money. I'm not a pirate, and yet I feel like Stunting is upset with folk like me.

A significant proportion of 90s trek fans who have seen the new series would agree its not worth it.

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.

Lower Decks is worth a month of it. I always wondered about the ships sent in after the Enterprise to deal with whatever they left. Now I know.

The Orville isn't officially Star Trek, but I'd argue is the best descendant of 90s Star Trek of the past decade.

I have a very hard time taking Seth MacFarlane seriously as a non-voice actor. I keep hearing all the characters he voices, and that clashes with the attempts to play serious characters.

To you. The service I provide to society is entertainment. Perhaps in the dystopian sand planet of the future that won't hold much value but right now on Today's earth, entertainment is a service that is valued by society.

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.

What if I pay for a movie ticket because I think it might be cool, then the movie is awful and I don't want more like it to be made?

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

There's two (relevant) kinds of consumers here: Those who want access and those who want ownership.

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.

Well then let us pay for shit in a convenient way. Like OP said, if there’s something like steam or Spotify then I’d gladly pay for it. I still rent movies weekly on AppleTV because it’s a convenient experience. Geo gating, shitty compression and making us choose between n apps is not the way.

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.

> Well then let us pay for shit in a convenient way.

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.)

Walking away vs pirating has exactly the same outcomes for the distributor. The only person affected in a nonzero way from the transaction is me, positively. Stealing from a store that only takes American Express would result in the store having less inventory; what I have gained, they have lost. The same is not true of copyright infringement. The only time copyright infringement converts into actual quantifiable loss for the seller is if I turn around and sell pirated copies at a lower price, which is why that's the degree of infringement that turns it from civil to criminal.

you are able to pay for individual film and tv shows right now through Amazon and Apple, i'm sure others.

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.

Every single show or movie I wanted to watch over the last year has been an exclusive to some streaming service or other.

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.

I appreciate you not pirating. You are only being screwed if you think you are entitled to the entertainment. You are not.

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.

Whether people are "entitled" to enrich their lives with art/entertainment or not is an interesting question in this context.

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.

There is an inherent classism to "piracy is stealing" arguments: by gating access to culture, it effectively says "poor people shouldn't be able to participate in culture, because they don't have enough money"

"I'd like to steal things because I morally disagree with the rules to society that I am currently opting to live in. I could choose to move, address the change at a governmental level, or simply find my entertainment elsewhere but no. It is everyone else who is the problem. Therefore I take great offense to being labeled as a thief."

The first sentence is spot on. The rest is the distortion I was talking about. You demand empathy, but are unwilling to be empathetic yourself. In the end, you're the one opting out of discourse here, not the rest of us.

I'm saying when you steal you're a thief. If that ruffles your feathers, stop stealing.

It doesn't ruffle my feathers at all. I've done my share of piracy when I lived in countries where that was the only viable way to get my hands on the information, art, or entertainment that was otherwise unavailable to the vast majority of people living there. And no, I'm not ashamed of it, and it doesn't offend me if you decide to label me a thief or worse.

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.

If you're rich and disconnected enough to just drop everything and move over entertainment choices, I'm not sure you're in touch enough to have any kind of perspective on the people you're trying to convince.

Hard lesson learned from years of trying to "educate" people on things that matter to me: you're going about it all wrong. I've seen your posts all through this thread. All you've done is beat people over the head with your perspective and berate them for not agreeing with you.

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.

> Every time one a show is pirated, there is less incentive to spend more money on an entertainment spectacle.

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.

> Stop stealing our shit.

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.

100 percent agree. Voting with dollars is the fastest and best way to make better products.

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.

> 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.

Refusing to pay and refusing to consume is different morally from stealing.

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.

For one it's piracy, not theft. They are both legally and morally distinct. You're being deprived of a potential future profit rather than having a direct loss.

> 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.

You're responding to a stuntperson who, unfortunately, has no control over the distribution of the product they worked on.

> You're responding to a stuntperson who, unfortunately, has no control over the distribution of the product they worked on.

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.

:) I know you're not yelling, more figure of speech. (did not mean to offend) But this is on HN where we allow pay-wall bypassing for all articles (which is also theft) so you wont get sympathy there. Like I said I agree with your sentiment, its just not the way to fix it. And I dont think it's a difficult problem to solve, especially from an extremely profitable and rich company.

Yet. I do have minor creative input depending on the production. When an audience shows they enjoy something I am able to argue more fiercly to include a similar thing into the next one.

And someday I'll be makign my own productions.

When you work for the devil, don't be surprised to become collateral damage.

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?

Why are you consuming the goods provided by "Satan"?

"I steal from you because I find your parent company morally reprehensible, yet I would still like to enjoy the services provided by that company."

Hell of a position.

Most of the money goes to the top, and if you are going to throw around inaccurate/loaded terms like stealing, two can play at that game. 1%ers take a larger slice of the pie than street thugs but we are misdirected and situation quietly swept under the rug.

Wow I thought 2022 nobody would still be so 90s in this regard.

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.

> Wow I thought 2022 nobody would still be so 90s in this regard.

“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.

I'm super sympathetic that someone is not paying for you for the time you spent making the content (me, also a content creator) But, just a suggestion, you need to find a better way to put your message. As long as you call it theft / stealing you're going to get lots of push back because copying a movie is not the same as stealing/theft so instead of making your point you'll mostly get arguments about definitions.

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

It's literally not the job of consumers to provide for your income. That may be a harsh lesson, but it's true.

This literally how the financial system is set up. Consumers provide money to a workforce that provides good and services that society enjoys. In turn, that workforce consumes goods and services providing income to a different workforce.

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

It's literally the job of consumers to pay for the things they consume.

That's the expectation perhaps, but that's not what "job" means.

It's the definition. Not paying for redefines one to being a thief.

That's a rather extreme definition of what a job is, in my opinion.

I think your real anger should be directed at the studios that aren't fairly structuring your benefits and compensation, as well as the union that is not getting these for you.

My real and passionate anger is directed constructively at those entities. Today I am providing a face and a name to people who think "piracy isn't stealing"

And you are stealing people's attention spans. Which is more criminal?!

:D

Impressive list of movies! And a very good point you make. NB: Your website loads pretty slow for me (I'm in Europe), and the video on the homepage is unavailable, it says.

Thank you, It's long overdue to update. I appreciate the bump

We're on HN, so you probably know your way around websites. But let me know if I can help you with an 'internet friendly' website (quick loading, no third party code, stats without tracking, clear layout, beautiful styles, easy editing, and more).

Yeah - I have to admit, I was impressed with your list of credits... I live under a rock and haven't seen many of them, but I really enjoyed 'The Accountant' and I'm a sucker for anything Spiderman/Marvel

The Acct was heavily provided by now Action Director Sam Hargrave, and you should look through his credits. He's most well known for Extraction on Netflix, but he's been doing it for a while. If you liked Acct, you'll probably like the other stuff he did before he was well known outside of our circle.

oh - Thanks!

| You're going to end up with shows that are AI generated CGI sponsored by Mt. Dew and Chevy trucks.

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

Yes. It will get worse. Support the type of content you want and you'll see more.

Thanks for speaking up about this from a perspective not often seen here on HN. It's really pretty weird that someone needs to explain to so many people that media piracy affects actual working people.

Direct your anger at your employer for not offering a product the market desires -- rather than at consumers who resort to piracy because the legal route is expensive, inconvenient, or nonexistent.

When I lend a physical dvd to my friend is that stealing?

Did you purchase, rent, or legally borrow the physical dvd?

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.

It's not stealing if they wouldn't have paid for it otherwise.

What a coincidence, I finished „no sudden move“ seconds ago.

oh rad. I had an amazing time watching Soderbergh literally operate a camera above my recently deceased body. It was spiritual.

How much money do you make per movie ? Honest question

I don't give out exact income on the internet.

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.

Ugh. Never before have I seen a comment that I've agreed with so much but also wanted to yell at at the same time.

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.

It is literally stealing money out of my pocket. Even if they don't watch it themselves, they will provide it free of charge or even for a personal fee I will never see to someone else.

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.