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Comment by blackflame7000 | Hacker News Reader

If you think about it, torrent sites are like a modern day robinhood. They take profits from the rich and bring enjoyment to the poor.

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i don't remember robin hood lining his pockets with truckloads of money he made off of the dodgy ads that all these torrent sites serve.

and if its not ads, then it's the donations.

I suspect robin hood would have had the support of the people that he helped, so donations is appropriate.

I'd say where the analog breaks down is the media companies aren't exactly extorting the people, nor price gouging.

>media companies aren't exactly extorting the people, nor price gouging.

In your opinion.

Ok, I'll bite. What makes you feel they are extorting consumers or price gouging?

Because they bundle 200 channels of crap with the 5 channels that you actually want forcing just about everyone to overpay for what they're receiving.

Hence the popularity of HBO Go. Showtime, Discovery, History, BBC are also working on theirs and have launched them in some countries. Sadly, Comcast refuses to make deals with most of them, so we can't e.g. Get a Discovery account because we already pay them through Comcast, AT&T, or Verizon despite a similar deal with nearly every other provider: https://www.discoverygo.com .

At least where I live, we get a choice between AT&T or Comcast, where AT&T is over land line DSL @768k not guaranteed, plus I'd have to pay for a phone line vs Comcast at up to 300mbit. Guess which I went with

Anything that accelerates the downfall of the toxic incumbents in the US is a win in my book.

AT&T, obviously, as Comcast offers connection measured in millibits instead of kilobits per second.

I don't remember Robin Hood being poor in the first place.

Indeed Sir Robin of Locksley had been knighted so he was no mere rogue ...

It's not cheap to supply all the bandwidth and infrastructure required for sites of KAT's magnitude. Also, the owners have got to eat as it's likely their full-time day job.

A very, very small number of the people who work on films, television, and music are rich. Let's at least be honest here: to the extent that they're cutting studio revenues, the people who are going to feel it most are tradesmen making even shittier wages for sporadic project work as it comes even less frequently.

> If you think about it, torrent sites are like a modern day robinhood. They take profits from the rich and bring enjoyment to the poor.

Over 2.1 billion people in the developing world lived on less than US $ 3.10 a day in 2012.

Downloading torrents means you've got a computer, power, internet and most likely food and clean water. You're not 'poor'. You're mingy.

Yes and some people make millions per day and on that scale I'm closer to $3.10. Poor is a relative term if you haven't figured that out. Thanks for lecturing us all on our extreme wealth though, I'm sure everyone feels better about themselves because of your statement.

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