Netflix: Piracy is difficult to compete against and growing rapidly

Re:Netflix: Piracy is difficult to compete against and growi... by lolinder on Sunday February 04, 2024 @06:45PM (#39255722)

This is "Hacker" news for a bunch of independent definitions of "Hacker", and for most of us the definition isn't "breaks into computer systems and leaks stuff on the internet".

For myself, when I think of the hacker ethos I think of Stallman and the GPL, which is explicitly designed around the idea that information can be ethically sold as long as you're actually selling it [0]. It's free as in freedom, not free as in beer, and under that philosophy being able to pay for services that respect your rights as a free human (which most current streaming services don't) is a desirable end state, not something to be condemned.

> Many people believe that the spirit of the GNU Project is that you should not charge money for distributing copies of software, or that you should charge as little as possible—just enough to cover the cost. This is a misunderstanding.

> Actually, we encourage people who redistribute free software to charge as much as they wish or can. If a license does not permit users to make copies and sell them, it is a nonfree license. If this seems surprising to you, please read on.

[0] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.en.html

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Re:Netflix: Piracy is difficult to compete against and growi... by defrost on Sunday February 04, 2024 @06:58PM (#39255803)

This is the ballpit sandbox forum for YCombinator, a club for software startup investment fund managers who can quote from the Tibetian Book of the Dead.

The lesson here is that attrition and shrinkage will always be with us, it's only the rate that varies in market accordance with the enshittification of product.

The 'better' the product, the lower the shrinkage.

As supported by a majority of thread comments "I used to pirate when I was poor, then I didn't - now I do again as the commercial offering sucks".

[attribution] https://thebillionscompanion.net/all/tag/Tibetan+Book+of+the...

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Re:Netflix: Piracy is difficult to compete against and growi... by int_19h on Friday February 16, 2024 @12:59AM (#39393707)

I distinctly recall Stallman himself saying that copyleft wouldn't really be necessary if copyright weren't a thing.

In any case, hacking as a concept predates Stallman and FSF - indeed, they're the product of that mindset, not its originators. And the original hackers didn't care about copyright - just look at the early history of Unix.

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