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I agree completely.

I also always laugh at those suckers standing in line at the grocery store. The customer experience of just picking out my Mountain Dew and ice cream sandwich and just walking straight out of the store without paying -- it's cheap, it's easy. You don't have to deal with pesky middle-men trying to take their cut. Astonishing.

Such comfort.

Sigh.

I was hoping you were going for an analogy with self-checkout. That would have neatly and effectively pointed at the missing piece of the puzzle. Instead you went for the cheap moralizing, which can make you feel good but doesn't get anyone any closer to solving the problem.

> which can make you feel good but doesn't get anyone any closer to solving the problem

That does a better job of describing piracy.

It's not just that people have to stand in line. They also have to go between a bunch of different stores since Milk producers have an exclusive contract with Walmart and Bread producers have an exclusive contract with 7-Eleven.

Furthermore, after you grab your Milk, the terms and services of the Milk states you have to sit and watch an advertisement on their projector before you are allowed to leave the store.

I already cannot get certain brands of milk at my local grocery store due to distribution agreements that in some ways resemble the distribution agreements that surround digital media.

I actually have had to visit 3 different major grocery stores to get the ingredients for one meal.

As for the advertisement? Well there are the ones on my receipt, the "coupon" that pops out, and possibly ads plastered on the side of the product I just purchased.

> I actually have had to visit 3 different major grocery stores to get the ingredients for one meal.

I'm sorry, I seriously doubt that.

Or you could just stop buying the milk.

Then the milk producers would start complaining about the thieves taking all their profits, without considering that maybe their business model is turning people off from buying milk.

Let them complain, it doesn't change the fact their stupid business model is costing them money. I say let the stupid complain as they go out of business.

Here's the problem: I would like to get these videos, and they would like to sell them to me. They're just doing such a bad job that we are both unhappy. I'd love for them to be doing a better job.

I'm not disagreeing. I'm just saying one easy way to fix the problem is to let them lose money. They either fix the problem or go out of business.

Granted, you don't have the item you desire but I think in most cases an alternative can be obtained.

Oh please ... spare us. You're comparing physical goods that have to be physically transport, stored, distributed, etc. Goods where some (admittedly minimal in your Mt. Dew example) scarcity is involved.

The parent is talking about goods where there is effectively no (or again, minimal) cost for transport, storage, or distribution. And absolutely no scarcity.

Nobody is saying we refuse to pay for digital content. We just want to pay a reasonable price. But most most important, we don't want ANY _artificial_ restrictions on transport, storage, distribution, and ESPECIALLY consumption.

Netflix doesn't have bandwidth costs?

In your example, the grocery store will do inventory and discovery they are short 1 ice cream sandwich and 1 mountain dew. They write the cost of those goods off as shrinkage/stolen goods.

What exactly is warner bros missing at the end of the month when they do inventory? What item comes up 1 short when they go to grab it, because 1 person downloaded a copy? What do they write off on the balance sheet as shrinkage?

The answer is nothing, because copyright infringement is not theft. They may have commonalities, but they are separate and distinct. If they were the same there would be no legal definition for copyright infringement, because it would be already covered under existing theft laws.

I wish people would retire this ridiculous argument. There are legitimate arguments to be made against piracy without having to misrepresent the issue.

> They may have commonalities, but they are separate and distinct.

Yeah, that's how comparisons work. Read my comment again in light of the commonalities, not the differences.

seer: "It's so much easier if you break the law."

chasing: "Everything's so much easier if you break the law!"

I was commenting on seer's statement by extending what I considered to be flawed logic into a situation that would expose the flaw. I could've chosen a completely unrelated crime:

"I feel so sad for people forced to not drug women to sleep with them - it must be such a chore to have to get them to consent to sex."

See, I'm not comparing the act of pirating a movie to rape. They're obviously very different. One is heinous and one's a fairly minor transgression, all things considered. I am commenting on the absurdity of comparing the "user experience" of doing something legally instead of breaking the law.

It doesn't strike me as absurd at all. For various reasons, I prefer not to "jay walk," but when the cross walks are miles away, and I judge I can safely cross without them, I'll follow the what seems the most pragmatic approach to get to the other side.

The trouble is that currently there is no reasonable amount of money you can give to receive such a nice and user friendly experience as what you get with torrent sites (even more so with the popcorn app).

Usually when one deals with black markets you get much worse user experience, where there is no guarantee of quality, no economy of scale effects, no standardisation. Everything is less pleasant, but you get to have your stuff cheaper than buying it officially.

The paradox here is you get a bad user experience AND you pay for it. That's what I find appalling. Almost nobody who holds the contracts for these movies comes from "what value can we bring to the customer" point of view (well maybe with the exception of Netflix). Everybody does the "how much we can fleece the poor stupid people" approach, and it shows.

Pirate solutions tend to compete on user experience ONLY, and there you can get a real honest competition.

Actually I find you get a better user experience now using the paid services. Fire up your Amazon Fire tv and pick a movie, starts streaming. Compared with bittorrent, go find a torrent. Download it. Unpack it. Make sure it's the right format, language, subtitles etc. If not go get it again.

Granted there are tools to automate it but from a purely UX pov the paid services do have a better experience.

Just point me to the 'pirate solution' that can sustainably produce and deliver original content.

By definition, that's not piracy, that's content production.

The real answer to your real question is probably Patreon. Usually you can't "pirate" the results of Patreon because they're freely released anyhow. Kickstarter to a lesser extent, but that site seems less focused on "content" production and more on "thing" production. (Yes, there is a lot of "content" being done there, but I'm yet to see even a single such thing go really viral and big.)

Want something more than a year old or a little less than mainstream? Good luck finding an active torrent. Maybe you'll find one with incredible bandwidth where the CD or TV show from a year or two back you seek can download at all instead of sitting stalled at some random percentage.

You seem to be describing the picture of 4 or 5 years back rather than now

So what you're saying is to use Amazon Prime and Netflix for the older content but torrent the newer stuff? ;-)

> and full catalog of most of human produced media, one click away.

There's a bunch of stuff that just isn't available on torrents. If it's American there's a much hetter chance of it being seeded, but anything foreign over a few yews old tends to drop off.

Oh, yeah. It's not like there aren't half a dozen programs that will grab schedules and listings for you and even program a pcdvr.

I tried http://www.canistream.it/ but it's pretty unreliable. Do you have a better suggestion?

It will take me a day or so to find it.

Or not. This will give you something to begin invesitgating.

PVR software (there are more): http://www.team-mediaportal.com/ http://www.chris-tv.com/index.html

Schedules Direct has a list of packages that work with their service:

http://www.schedulesdirect.org/approvedsoftware

Piracy fails the "what if everyone was doing it?" test. So you shouldn't feel sad for people using legal channels, you should thank them for subsidizing your consumption.

You're welcome!

>Piracy fails the "what if everyone was doing it?" test.

Yup, which is why TV didn't exist before pay TV, because if everyone viewed content for free over the air then it would be massively unprofitable. Oh, wait...

Profitable OTA TV was (and is) not free, the content creators are paid by the content deliverers out of money the content deliverers get paid to provide advertising.

With piracy, even if the deliverers are getting paid by advertising (which is certainly true in some cases), the content creators aren't getting paid (because if they were, it be legal delivery, not piracy.)

I feel so sad for people who are completely pwned to save a few bucks. The convenience and value of a Netflix account is what is astonishing.

That is the entire point of the article. The convenience and value of Netflix was astonishing. But with half the content going away is it still?

Especially with Netflix saying the solution is to repurchase what you just got rid of (cable) in order to get that newly missing content back.

It will depend on the specifics and the users taste. For me I don't have enough time to watch what is in my queue already. People who have lots of time and little money can futz around with being a pirate.

Also people who have lots of time, money and don't live in the usa.

Standardized licensing across Europe seems to be a very thorny problem. Between the different languages and regulatory bodies I do not see much hope.

I still hold out the hope that they will be able to look at Steam and realize that what they're doing is beneficial. Steam seems to be at the forefront regarding these things both in terms of technology and legal matters.