How is it stealing? They don't suddenly not licenses of their software to sell anymore because someone made an unlicensed copy.

It is immoral. The copyright monopoly plus copy sales model was bad enough. Now we live in digital fiefdoms and get sold like cattle to advertisers and other developers.

The only moral model is free software.

Correct. Artificial scarcity is immoral, we need to move to a system where it's not necessary to restrict people from having access to something that has a real cost approaching zero in order to collect rents.

SaaS is a perversion created by a system that cannot separate value from scarcity even though the reality is that software is infinitely replicable.

Yes. It's the 21st century, artificial scarcity no longer makes any sense. Globally networked computers exist and they trivially render any information abundant at negligible costs.

People need new business models. Selling bits doesn't work. Attempting to make it work requires the destruction of free computing as we know it.

> Globally networked computers exist and they trivially render any information abundant at negligible costs

So you'll be okay with me photocopying a printed book you published and giving it away for free, because "trivially" is a relative term, and I can certainly "trivially" reproduce your book a million times (compared to 12th century monks copying holy works by hand)?

> Attempting to make it work requires the destruction of free computing as we know it

And I suppose copyrighted printed books (and poems, and song lyrics) destroyed "free press" as we know it?

> So you'll be okay with me

Yes.

> And I suppose copyrighted printed books (and poems, and song lyrics) destroyed "free press" as we know it?

That's not what I was talking about. The destruction of free computing will come about due to copyright enforcement and the technology necessary for its implementation.

Copying is a fundamental computer operation. If I'm in control of the computer, I can make it copy anything including copyrighted works and there's nothing they can do about it. So how do you prevent people from copying whatever they want? You take control of the computer.

This is our reality today. This is their solution to the "allow them to run all programs except those we don't like" problem. Our computers are already pwned right out of the factory. They have inaccessible memory, secure enclaves, ring -3 operating systems overseeing everything, cryptographic checks to ensure the corporation's system hasn't been "tampered with", the works. Apple computers have cryptography that prevents you from running software not blessed by trillion dollar corporations.

With this technology in place, our computing freedom is gone. We can no longer do what we want, only what they allow. It's gonna get way worse. One day we're going to need government signatures to run software because democratized cryptography undermines their authority and is too subversive to be allowed for the common citizen.

I think computers are among the most important inventions of mankind and far too valuable to sacrifice for the sake of irrelevant business models from centuries ago. One would think other Hacker News users would understand and agree since the copyright industry works every day to undermine and destroy everything that's dear to us.

Derailed discussion. We're talking about what should be legal, not what should be permitted by silicon. I'm not interested in debating this, other, topic.

These are mostly non-sequiturs, with some plausible cases.

For example - I don't think subscription licensing for media is moral, and I think legally it's a rife place for some serious case law.

Simple example - Recording shows for personal consumption (time shifting) is absolutely allowed under current copyright law. If I subscribe to netflix for a month and record every show I want to watch to my personal NAS... I'm not breaking the law at all. I'll then happily stop paying the subscription after a month. Moral? Probably not. Legal? Sure.

But... what if I really do want a moral way to consume netflix content at a later date for a non-recurring, non-changed-at-their-whim cost? Well - sucks to be me because there's literally no way to buy it. I think that's also fairly immoral. I'm literally being held captive to a subscription for eternity, with no way to negotiate the deal, and the real loss of any catalogue item at any time with no recourse. Moral? Fuck no. Legal? Sure.

So... Where is the middle ground? Because I'd really, desperately like to see a better middle ground. Where I don't have to feel like a thief, and also don't feel like I'm getting extorted to watch some shows.

This mostly also holds for many saas companies. It's especially obvious in cases where the product used to be a stand-alone binary that I could install, but is now a packaged saas product, that's arguably worse (adobe photoshop comes to mind - but lots of companies are moving this direction).

I used to be willing to enter a deal where I got a static item in exchange for a fixed cost - but the new deal is... I get ephemeral products that change price/features/capabilities at any moment and with zero recourse.

And companies aren't doing this because it benefits the users - they're doing it because it's LITERAL rent seeking behavior. They know that profits are higher with this strategy.

So again - is stealing it moral? I would say no. But I don't think that in any way invalidates that the subscription model is hands down abusive to customers. Personally I've moved to self-hosted and open source everywhere I can.

> But... what if I really do want a moral way to consume netflix content at a later date for a non-recurring, non-changed-at-their-whim cost? Well - sucks to be me because there's literally no way to buy it. I think that's also fairly immoral. I'm literally being held captive to a subscription for eternity, with no way to negotiate the deal, and the real loss of any catalogue item at any time with no recourse. Moral? Fuck no. Legal? Sure.

> So... Where is the middle ground? Because I'd really, desperately like to see a better middle ground. Where I don't have to feel like a thief, and also don't feel like I'm getting extorted to watch some shows.

Most content can be purchased outside of Netflix at some point, on DVD or another medium.

Sure but buying a DVD isn't great either as it has a real destroying the earth cost for something that can be delivered to me using a negligible amount of energy digitally. I don't think there's a way of getting movies/tv shows reasonably in 2022, though I don't mind paying for, and do pay for subscription services such as Netflix, I just pirate the content anyway because it's a much better user experience.

At least it's still mostly possible to buy a set of *.flac files when you want some music.

> Sure but buying a DVD isn't great either as it has a real destroying the earth cost for something that can be delivered to me using a negligible amount of energy digitally. I

Then buy the streaming version. If it is available by DVD, then you can probably find it available to purchase digitally.

Really? Just as a litmus test, the last movie I pirated was a 10bit 4k rip of "The Matrix" which comes in at about 40gigs. This is about the level of quality I'm looking for in a file I buy, sorry if I was misleading w/ my mention of DVD. Practically speaking this is similar to having a *.flac of a song, as it enables me to transcode to lower quality versions for use on different devices from a high quality master. Is this something I can pay for?

Yes, you can purchase or rent the physical copy.

Please enlighten me where I can buy a streaming movie that can be watch without login, transferred to another service or transferred to another of my devices.

Movies from Sony, Universal, Disney, WB can be watched through multiple services.

https://moviesanywhere.com

> Most content can be purchased outside of Netflix at some point, on DVD or another medium.

You cannot buy Netflix original movies on DVD or blu-ray. They do sell some of their series (although not all of them - mostly just the very popular entries).