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Comment by dineshp2 | Hacker News Reader

The reason piracy is so popular is because it is free and because it's incredibly convenient, in that order.

The convenience factor is basically, if you want some content (movie, game) it's a simple search and download away (streaming torrents seem to be gaining traction). No legal alternative offers this level of convenience.

I suspect piracy will become harder for the average user due to three letter agencies making life harder for pirates, but it won't stop the determined ones.

Speaking of determined torrenters, Peter Sunde, the founder of TPB had something interesting to say about torrent aggregators being shut down [1]. The idea is that even though downloading torrents itself is p2p, finding the magnet links is still centralized and that is an area that needs to be decentralized.

[1] https://torrentfreak.com/pirate-bay-founder-piracy-scene-nee...

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It's much, much more than that. It's the only way to get an acceptable product.

I have ALSO pirated everything I ever bought until very recently.

DVDs included region forcing, and forced, unskippable adverts and copyright notices. Netflix, .mkvs and .mp4s just have the programme and titles.

Usually someone, somewhere, has put effort into making a good quality rip saving me the time doing so, along with synchronised and corrected subtitles.

For games, the major studios still feel annoying and restrictive copy protection is the way to go. I don't want a £30 game that requires me juggling collections of plastic disks, or an always on net connection to a licensing server they may turn off in a year or two anyway. So the noCD, no licensing server release is a necessary download for me. I tend to mostly buy GOG and independent studios putting out DRM free things these days. EU IV being about the only exception I can think of in the last 2 years.

I'm not a fan of being data mined on how often and how far I read ebooks, listen to audiobooks. So first thing on buying a new ebook from Amazon is rip the protection to read it on my non-amazon reader. First thing to do with an audible book is convert to mp3. If either of those became unfeasible or impossible I would stop buying.

Finally for music, we've had attempts with copy protections and Sony rootkits, but mostly my music collection is complete and they gave up on silly DRM attempts. I only need to rip new stuff that's not available in FLAC.

> I have ALSO pirated everything I ever bought until very recently.

Pirating helps to sell their products, think of it as free advertisement, this is the thing movie studios, music producers and book publishers don't understand. I know folks that for each pirated book they keep buy a physical one, also friends that pirated some movie and by a word of mouth advertise to go and see it in the cinemas, music to buy and go to the concerts etc. If you can't see the product how would you know if it's worth buying? Therefore someone who pirates would never pay anyway and chasing them would make you less money not more!

DVDs included region forcing, and forced, unskippable adverts and copyright notices. Netflix, .mkvs and .mp4s just have the programme and titles.

Succinctly summed up by this rather old image: http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4032/4369403959_fe90464b27_o....

The legal alternatives just don't have the content I'd like to see. The Netflix catalog for example contains maybe one out of ten movies I'm looking for, whereas it is easy to find even obscure movies using torrents. If you like older or less popular movies you're generally out of luck. At best you can find a DVD, but that won't work for movies that weren't even released in your region.

I don't understand why it is so hard for the studios to offer their whole catalog online and let me download a movie for a buck or two. Add the possibility for user-submitted subtitles and you have an excellent competitor to piracy.

Torrent sites have huge advantage over streaming services is that they can distribute all content.

If streaming services had everything, people would pick one based on price and quality of the actual streaming gladly pay more than current prices are. There is no change in hell that customers pay for Netflix, Hulu, HBO, and Amazon at the same time.

There is obvious business solution for this. Content producers should provide their shows and movies for all streaming services for same price. Streaming services would just exist to stream data and distribute payments from customers.

Current business model of streaming is working against "the internet" and torrents are way to get around it.

My understanding is that in US many people are paying quite much for cable. One article says the average monthly bill is $100. http://bgr.com/2015/09/09/cable-tv-bill-price-100/

No idea if that is true or how many people are putting that much money for contents on monthly basis. Compared to the streaming services this is quite much and with that money you could get a monthly subscription to several services.

Convenience is definitely a factor. We pay for cable TV, Netflix, HBO, and Amazon Prime (with video). I recently bought a nice big TV for my basement den and while it has Netflix and Amazon apps built-in, Comcast blocks you from authorizing the AndroidTV HBOGo app so I need to cast from my phone to watch that. And for cable shows, I'd need to rent another shitty cable box that doesn't work worth a damn anyway.

So instead if it's not on Netflix or Amazon (god their TV app just got even worse) I often just fire up the VPN and stream a torrent. I've paid for the shows but I just don't want to rent another cable box or deal with casting from mobile. Programs like Popcorn Time are great in that you can bookmark your favorite shows, see which episodes you've already watched, search for new shows from a Netflix-type interface, and watch in 720 or 1080 on demand.

If there was a legit option like this from Comcast (heh, that'll be the day) I'd gladly pay double what you pay to rent a cable box. It's really just that simple and it works much better than any Comcast gear despite being a hacky program with several forks and questionable approach.

I don't hold any illusions about my entitled attitude. I understand that my convenience and preferences don't get to dictate the business policies of content creators and distributors and I know that just because I pay for stuff doesn't mean it's legal to violate copyright in this manner...

...but I don't feel that what I'm doing is particularly immoral even if not particularly legal. At some point I just take stock of how I do things and keep an eye out for better ways to do them. If I can find a way to improve my spare time and how I spend it, I don't mind finding my own ways to do so.

I'd say the opposite with regards to convenience, but maybe I've been away from the scene for a few years now

Nowadays it seems more of a hassle to pirate content, especially here in the UK with torrent sites getting blocked by ISPs (necessitating a need for VPNs or proxy services) along with having to constantly find new sources for torrents as authorities crack down on sites like KickAssTorrents.

I find it easier to just subscribe to Netflix and Spotify, but maybe I have more disposable income now that it doesn't bother me.

I used to have a Spotify subscription. Then I moved out of Sweden and lost half my playlists. Never subscribed again.

I never had a Netflix subscription because I don't have a good enough connection to stream high quality videos - Additionally, I rewatch some series a lot. It's simply more convenient to have them on my hard drive.

The US gov is running around the internet policing copyright for very specific companies, acting like they're doing the world a favour. Calling everybody thieves. Threatening people with fines and prison. "You can just pay for a Netflix/Spotify subscription"... well, no, not everywhere and it's certainly not as convenient for everyone.

Sidenote: Spotify's content bootstrapping was a dump of music from TPB. If it weren't for piracy, we wouldn't have spotify. The system is broken.

Sidenote2: Hollywood got started because of a move from NYC to get around having to pay licenses to Edison. Hollywood exists because they wanted to infringe the protections without paying.

MPAA would prefer we didn't remember that.

Do you think Edison was not a rent-seeker?

Hmm ...this is really interesting, I didn't know about 'Hollywood built on piracy' story at all. I did some research and found this interesting comment in one of the articles, which does seem to make sense.

"The proponents of this myth seem to want to suggest an analogy: Hollywood was built by “outlaws”; now Hollywood has become the incumbent, seeking to stop the next generation of “outlaws”. But this is a false equivalence. The Pirate Bay (or Megaupload, etc.) isn’t producing its own movies. Recognizing exclusive rights to a creative work doesn’t prohibit anyone from creating their own works. Stopping someone from offering copies, especially complete, verbatim copies, of a work is not anti-competitive."

from : http://www.copyhype.com/2012/05/was-hollywood-built-on-pirac...

That's some impressive variation from how I remember reading it, though you'll note I said licensing not piracy. If memory serves it was equipment licensing that was the issue - rental of cameras, projectors and such.

I don't know enough of the period to know who's right, but looking at the about page tells me all I need to know about the independence of view: "... representing creators across the spectrum of copyright disciplines. He represents the Copyright Alliance in all copyright and related policy issues in a variety of forums". So choose your preferred flavour of spin?

It's well known Edison was an evil bastard for instance. You've only to read a little, especially on Tesla, to realise that. So there's little doubt that moving to Hollywood and escaping Edison's thugs was a good thing. The fact remains he had the movie industry of the time tied up with patents. I think it was actually Edison who pirated a movie, and ended up putting someone out of business in the process.

Do you have a source for that bootstrapping comment? I'd love to hear more if it's documented anywhere.

I don't know if it's documented anywhere but everyone who works at spotify knows about it. It's not exactly a secret.

I am not aware of any write-up, but I was an early beta user and can confirm that you could enter names of release groups into the search field and get hits back then.

Initially I believed in streaming my music, but when they went public I lost half my playlists and has gone back to "files on disk" ever since. It is remarkable how difficult it is to pay for music, I wish we would see more sites like Bandcamp.

You would think music, film, and games would be comparable, but I find that these fall into distinct categories for me.

I am totally okay with paying a monthly flat fee for films and series (mostly watch once and be done with it).

I am also okay with paying once for a game and not keeping the downloaded files around after I finish it. Rather, I let Steam or the HumbleStore handle that, and if these go belly-up one day, I don't feel like I've lost much; the value I get in hours of entertainment is in balance with what I spend there, and I am okay with the limited risk of losing access to some games.

For music on the other hand, I absolutely want the files on my hard disk. Music is replayed over and over, and losing access to what is essentially the soundtrack of your life is something I would like to avoid. I'd love a service that allows me to download, say, up to 8 hours of music (any genre, in an open lossless format) a month from a universal catalogue for a reasonable flat fee (like Netflix), but this simply doesn't exist. It is either streaming or paying way more than I find reasonable.

Interestingly, for games the existence of reliable, affordable legal channels for digital delivery means that I have not felt the urge to illegally download any game at all for over a decade, and the same seems to hold true for many colleagues and friends. People are totally fine with downloading films, series, and music for a variety or reasons, but why bother with games? The money you pay, say, Steam or the HumbleStore seems to flow back to the developers in a fairly fair fashion, there are good deals to be had, and it is all very convenient — for games it just seems like a solved problem.

Games are essentially solved as far as consumption goes. There's still some fuckery going on with DRM in some companies, but that's the minority.

However, they aren't solved when it comes to archival. It's getting constantly worse with the rise of online-only games with closed source, undistributed servers. A subject for another day, though.

Fair point. The archival question is complex because of the inherent difficulty in keeping old software running on modern operating systems. At some point it doesn't pay to keep supporting newer operating systems even if you still have sales; only for the really popular titles. Perhaps containers would work?

Yeah, emulation or containerization works nicely for old games. However, newer games have server components which are required to run the game and/or have any content. When the money runs out, the servers get shut down and usually aren't redistributed. This isn't a problem torrents can solve, unfortunately.

> When the money runs out, the servers get shut down and usually aren't redistributed. This isn't a problem torrents can solve, unfortunately.

IIRC, the cracks for the old always-online UPlay DRM basically contained a MVP implementation of their servers.

And of course, you have MMORPG "emulators", but those take a lot of effort, only come out for ridiculously popular and lasting games, and end up rewriting most of the game logic based on speculation. So the end result is more like Minetest vs Minecraft than cracked Assassin's Creed vs legit Assassin's Creed.

> There's still some fuckery going on with DRM in some companies, but that's the minority.

Sadly it seems to be coming back, with all the recent Denuvo garbage.

>Sidenote: Spotify's content bootstrapping was a dump of music from TPB. If it weren't for piracy, we wouldn't have spotify.

This explains why Sailing by Christopher Cross ends with the beginning of Minstrel Gigolo like the rip I downloaded from Napster...

I would actually be willing to pay the Amazon Prime, Netflix, and Spotify price if torrenting became legal.

For me, convenience + technical and quality advantages are a major factor. Much more than having it for free.

It can be free but not that convenient. Pirated content needs to be checked to make sure it's not fake nor malicious, not to mention the technical downsides of the torrent protocol (large bandwidth consumption, insecure, easy to block, slow speed on non port-forwarding routers etc)

It's much easier to buy and download games on Steam or watch movies on Netflix nowadays.

In many places this is still not the case.

The titles available on Netflix(at least in the EU/UK) are laughable. I have both Netflix and Amazon prime(which has pretty much the same content).

For movies you can find on Netflix that's absolutely true. The difference is that effectively anything can be found via torrent or nzb, while the catalog of any single paid provider, even netflix, is relatively limited. You might get reasonable coverage (although still not as complete) by combining a number of subscription services, but the 'ease' advantage quickly disappears.

I would happily pay a significant multiplier on what I pay for Netflix in order to legally stream any reasonably popular movie released within the past few years, plus a decent selection of older ones. IE, roughly what you would find at your average Blockbuster 10 years ago. (A similar selection of TV shows would be nice too.) Things may be improving, but they're definitely not there yet.

In this thread why are the rental options like iTunes not being discussed? Those distribution channels have the convenience of streaming, and a deep catalog. Is it because everyone wants all the movies for $10/mth or less rather than $5 a show?

I'm honestly not that familiar with iTunes' offerings. $5 for a new release movie rental sounds ok if the selection is there.

Yeh, iTunes and similar options have a pretty good selection, in both SD and HD. It doesn't suffer from the same pains that DVDs had (ie. no advertisements before the movie starts). It is more convenient than torrenting.

So, it strikes me as odd that people here only consider pre-pay streaming options and ignore other viable options as they rant about their rationalization for torrents.

I assume you live in the states where this stuff is on tap? Most of the rest of the world is waiting months for DVD releases.

I checked last 10 movies I saw. 2 aren't available on Netfilx at all. Of remaining 6 aren't even available in US. None is available in my country. I think I'll stick to torrents.

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