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Comment by caskance | Hacker News Reader

Speak for yourself. I'll use whatever service is better. The money itself is not enough to really notice for things like this, but services you don't have to pay for consequently don't require any account management, so it's a tough advantage to overcome.

And of course there are many people for whom the money does matter, which makes the gap even wider.

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Then again, there are people who prefer a legal solution when it's available and offers sufficient quality and ease of access.

I am subscribed to several services, but often, usually for the newest and coolest, it is simply not possible for me to stream a movie legally. If they would only focus on solving that instead of raging against their customers, they could maybe _then_ start to complain about piracy.

As you yourself agree, the laws here are asinine. So unless you're actually going to get into legal trouble over it (spoiler alert: you're not) why does it matter whether your preferred solution follows them?

Because I'm an adult, now. With morals and a conscience.

Seriously, I would like to support the creation of the content I like to consume. If nobody supports it, nothing will be made.

I, too, understand that we're still far from such a situation, but I would rather not get there before someone make changes to this idiocy.

If people stopped paying for broken services, they'd be forced to reevaluate and adapt.

Paying customers, not pirates, are the problem.

Morals and laws are totally separate issues, and supporting content creation does not require supporting broken distribution methods.

So then, when you torrent movies, do you send money to the content creators? Otherwise your distinction, while true, isn't very relevant.

I don't torrent movies. So I guess the answer is vacuously yes.

>> "If nobody supports it, nothing will be made."

This is often mentioned, but it's just not true. Humans produced creative work long before there was copyright or even money, and they will continue doing so long after our civilization has crumbled. People are hard-wired to create. The social status associated with creative output is the main incentive - money is just icing on the cake.

You might argue that if we don't pay theater admission for bad Tom Cruise thrillers and fifth-installment summer blockbuster sequels, then those specific genres might not be produced, and would be replaced by lower-budget plot/character driven cinema. But that's at least arguably a feature, not a bug.

Sure, you might argue that, but some people don't want to take the risk.

It could also be argued that bad Tom Cruise thrillers and fifth-installment summer blockbuster sequels are necessary for the industry to have enough money, experience, talent and infrastructure to be able to produce the occasional good movie.

Some creation will happen, but how much? How much stuff would never get created because there was no way to pay for it?

Isn't there already more than enough media to consume for several lifetimes?

Most of us haven't even read the world's top 100 books or watched the top 100 movies. If production were to completely cease, how long would we have until we run out of high quality media?

"If nobody supports it, nothing will be made."

Did you miss the whole open source software movement? Music other content was made well before copyright was invented.

Yet support takes many forms, not only monetary, and not only from the audience (propaganda comes to mind...).

But I'm willing to moderate my statement to "no AAA blockbusters will be made" or "no really high budget movies will be made", or something like that. It will have an impact on the budget of movies. Some may argue that is a good thing, but I enjoy my Matrix, LoTR, Hobbit, Cloud Atlas, Marvels, etc. and don't really want that to go away.

Is account management really a burden, or an excuse? For many typical usages, it's a one time setup on a dedicated device or two. For people who bounce devices a lot, there are password managers.

I understand many people prefer to torrent, but a lot of the rationalization doesn't make much sense to me.

Password managers work well for one person using one account. When multiple people are in the picture, everyone has different sets of passwords that are sometimes appropriate to share and sometimes not. Account information for a netflix-like (for lack of a better descriptor) service is something you would want to share. It is consequently a huge nightmare that non-account-tied systems like popcorn time completely bypasses.

Sorry, but I don't see the huge nightmare here. I share my Netflix account with multiple people. We all know the password, and you only have to type it once into every device you own. If someone forgets or gets a new computer, they could message me and have the password immediately. Netflix even has features to support multiple people using the same account.

Sure, if you don't care about security you can do all kinds of things. You could even make the password your name or give everyone keys to your house so they can look at the piece of paper with the password written on it. I don't want to do any of those, and I shouldn't have to.

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