Nobody lets me pay for content. They're all tying themselves in contractual knots trying to find the most lucrative deal, and meanwhile it's impossible to just buy a movie or a TV show without shipping a physical disc.

I go to e.g. the South Park website, and I'm greeted by an error message saying they're "working hard to resolve [their] pre-existing contractual obligations," which is the same message they've shown for years. Thanks for trying, I guess, but if I pirated it then I'd just...watch the show, from start to finish, with all seasons and all episodes, no wasteful physical media, no subscription, no data collection, and no ads. That sounds good. I want to be able to pay money, maybe even quite a lot of money, and do that.

Uh, you can actually buy south park from any number of providers. Amazon and iTunes both list Season 1 for $25. You don't need to only watch things on monthly streaming platforms.

Can you play the media without going through Amazon or Apple to do it? Is the quality guaranteed to be good when I choose to watch it? What kind of ads am I going to get when I click play? Even if there are no ads now, is that guaranteed to be the case forever?

Downloadable, ad free, and DRM free. Music has been selling that way for decades. I've spent thousands on that kind of media, I'd have spent 10 times as much if it had been made available that way. Some people purchase a controlled versions to atone for their pirating sins but that just rewards consumer-hostile business models, and most of the money goes to middle-men that only add negative value to the product they're selling.

It sounds like you have a lot of concerns about this that all kind of conveniently put you in a place to pirate whatever you want.

Most of the time I watch things once, so I rent it if it's not on a platform I subscribe to. Generally then I can watch it on my tv, ps4, phone, computer, whatever.

Consider that money spent on these products are an indication to studios about what people like. Movie studios, production companies, they make stuff they think they can sell for a profit. I suggest that you try renting movies or buying ones you like. If you run into a situation where one of your concerns comes to life, I think it would be very reasonable to pirate something you've made a good faith effort to pay for. This is kind of how I started and now for the most part I rent/buy with some exceptions. Still downloading some trash tv shows.

I don't need any excuses to download whatever I want. It doesn't cost anyone anything, and no suffering of any kind is introduced into the world for anyone.

Most, if not all, things I've downloaded, which isn't much, I've either rented before, seen on TV or in a theater, or have been on one of the streaming services I pay for at some point. Does that cover me ethically? Some people seem to think so. I personally don't care either way and not a single person on this planet is any worse off for my lack of concern.

Yeah sure, it doesn't really matter. But no need to pretend like it's a service issue at this point. My experience with renting/buying content has been that they're pretty convenient and there aren't many service issues I've run into.

Actually it's kind of easier than torrenting and copying files around to various devices I want to watch it on.

Do both. Pay for it to give the creators their cut and send a market signal. Then go pirate it rather than fighting with DRM crippled interfaces.

Can buy them or can you only "buy" them aka rent them for a fixed fee for an indefinite but inevitably finite periord with restrictions on how and where you can watch them?

Sure, unfortunately if you buy something on iTunes, it isn't available on amazon and vice versa. I guess you just have to look at your devices and pick a platform based on that. Most of the time I just rent a movie and watch and it expires so it's not really a problem I deal with a lot. I just rent the movie right before I watch it. It's pretty convenient.

When I see all the justifications I wonder who are they for? If you feel the need to justify it to semi-anonymous people on the internet, then you're probably trying to justify it to yourself which means you think what you're doing is wrong.

It's not a justification, just an explanation of what needs to change if people want me to pay for that content. Like I say I pretty much never pirate things if they're on steam, I've probably paid tens of thousands out to steam over the years.

(That being said, I do have access to cable television, netflix, and amazon prime streaming as well as the piracy setup, so people are getting paid. I'm not going to go buy a bunch of old red-dwarf and dilbert DVDs though, they just take up too much space)

You started the post with "I have a confession". I felt that guilt was implied.

Ahh, fair enough. I meant it more as just a turn of phrase, implying that it's a sordid affair. A little bit implying that I was going again church heterodoxy, that there were pressures to feel guilty. More "gay in the 70's" than "burn down an orphanage".

* against church orthodoxy

Man-- I don't steal content, because I've made a lot of money from IP and I think other people deserve for their work to be rewarded.

But I'm so jealous of the user experience for people who buy into a $5/mo plex and get better service than I'm paying for. IMO, that's broken.

So much time wasted, figuring out what service to watch something on, dealing with content ads, bad user interfaces... having content vanish and become unavailable, etc.

I don't even watch much video, but it's still way too much of a sink on my time.

I don't have to justify myself to you and do not intend to. I don't actually pirate anything, regardless.

My intent is that someone somewhere reads this and decides to let me buy their damn content. It's not a justification, it's an appeal. Put your album on bandcamp. Put your game on itch/gog/your own website/humble bundle, preferable without intrusive DRM. I have no idea where you'd put a movie or TV show, but there's probably some place.

Please.

Is it really so hard to watch something else?

I buy all my stuff on iTunes. But that alone won't allow me to put a 4K HDR movie on a USB stick to watch it offline on my TV.

In my opinion, the most practical solution is to buy things (for the ethics) and then crack the DRM anyway (for usability).

Rewarding consumer-hostile business models and middle-men that only add negative value to the products they're selling is, in my opinion, unethical.

While I agree with you, these middlemen at least pay some money to the original content creators. With pure pirating, there's no feedback to the movie company that I liked their offering.

In college I pirated things when I was living off a few hundred bucks a month. But nowadays when I'm making good money I pay for everything. Its frankly absurd to steal content when you're that well paid.

I used to not have any $, so I'd pirate. Then I had $, so I paid for stuff -- and, without fail, everything I paid for ended up giving me bullshit problems because of DRM restrictions. So now I don't pay for anything with DRM, which ends up meaning I mostly pirate.

I don't mind throwing down some cash, but I'm not going to throw down cash just to get fucked over.

There's so much free (as in beer) content on the web that you don't even need to pirate stuff, either.

Paying for things you don't have to pay for is a quick way to lose money, no matter how much you make.

But that excuse justifies much more than digital piracy. You don't "have to pay for" a car if you can steal one.

Before this devolves into an argument about piracy, let me begin by saying the reason I pirate is because I feel fine doing so. I don't care about any arguments for why others might think I shouldn't. I'm simply not bothered by it.

Back to discussion, I agree that saving money could apply to almost anything. However my first point is that, in my opinion, there's a material difference between digital piracy and stealing a car. If I possess a car, nobody else can own it. However with digital media, I'm making a copy of something that has zero impact on anybody else's ability to own their own copy of that data. The only thing that's lost is my physical storage space that could've stored something else, but that's my call to make.

A second point is that I mainly pirate things I wouldn't have bought otherwise. I still watch movies in theaters because I can't pirate a theater experience (AMC A-list is great if you enjoy watching in the theaters IMO), I still buy modern games because I'm extremely cautious when it comes to running executables.

A third point is that ethically, I consider supporting a mega-corporation like Amazon worse than committing piracy. Mega-corporations commit much more morally heinous actions, and at an enormously greater scale, than an average pirate would ever commit. In my opinion, the moral sin is not that pirates commit piracy, it's that mega-corporations have been given almost free rein to shape and exploit our society as they see fit

You'd be denying someone else use of the car. Stealing, especially of physical things, is a far greater moral wrong than copyright infringement.

I understand, but that was not the argument I was replying to. The original comment was far broader.

But imagine if you could ride a single lamborgini for free anywhere you want, or:

Pay $10,000 for a KIA that can only goto McDonalds and Burger King, then buy a $15,000 chevy that's the only car that works on the road to to work, then pay $5,000 for a ford that is the only vehicle that will take you to Burger King and the Apple store, but it stops every 5 minutes to show you the same ad repeated 3 times, and the only car that will take you to grandms's house is $30,000 and for some reason it requires 12 cars worth of parking spots. Taco Bell will only be accepting Mazdas starting in August, so you've got to decide what you want to do about that. Also there's no cars you can buy at any price that can go anywhere you want. Nobody sells the lamborgini you can drive anywhere for free.

Anyways, that's why pirating is good.

The secret ingredient is crime.

We need a public library for cars!

Sometimes you can't even buy (or rent) the content because of georestrictions. At least I often encounter TV shows and movies that are available in some US streaming service, but are not available in our version of the same service, or the entire service is not available.

I mean, you can justify it any way you like - there's no referee, no judge, no one to stop you. I just don't bother with the justifications myself; it is what it is.

There's an easy solution if you want the clear conscience of paying creators but the freedom of actually controlling the content you paid for. Buy, then pirate. Don't even bother with ever accessing your crippled purchase.

You can purchase abroad and ship to your country. Amazon for example has country local stuff. Use the .xy for whichever country you want to search in (.com for US, .de for Germany, etc) and see if they have what you want.

They may also ship to you internationally.

The problem with Amazon is that my nearest Amazon, and the one that actually reliably ships to me, is Amazon.de. And the media on Amazon.de is usually German media, if there is even any media available. And I'm not German.

Just looking at a couple of shows that I watched a year ago, I couldn't actually find any of them on Amazon.de. And actually, only found one on Amazon.com, where it was unavailable. Also, the Chinese version for some reason?

If Amazon.differentcc sells something that Amazon.yourcc doesn't why wouldn't Amazon the global org set you up with an international sale. Surely that would make them lots of €¥$£ more?

I usually get the DVDs in that case, if possible. Some of the newest content isn’t available on DVD but most of the older stuff is.

If you're buying secondhand DVD's, and I don't see how you aren't because who's still producing DVD's (or even, who's producing Blurays for older content), then you're on the same level as people who pirate from the eyes of publishers and media conglomerates. You might feel better about yourself, but it's a quirk of history that they haven't been able to make secondhand sales illegal.

You'd be surprised, lots of content is still available as new on places like Amazon, especially if you broaden to outside the US.

Actually, you're entirely right. I don't know why I thought they stopped printing DVDs for new releases.