Ask HN: Why pay for things instead of pirating?
What are your reasons for paying for music/books/etc instead of simply pirating it?
I've also come to the realisation that sometimes time is more valuable than money. How many people here know the experience of hitting a torrent site (or sites) to - let's say - find a song. Finding a good quality bitrate, how many seeds does it have? It's not a dodgy file? OK, yep cool. I used to have more time than I knew what to do with in my younger years. Those days are well behind me and now, more and more I'm finding that my time is the most important resource I have.
The reason I don’t pirate much (more on that later) is because I value my time and the time other creators put into their work. Even if said work may be shitty, that doesn’t give me the right to steal it. A creator stealing the work of others—especially one that have the means of paying for it—is sleazy IMHO.
That being said, I still sometimes obtain music immorally if I cannot find a copy online that I can pay for. It’s such a pain in the ass. Usually a good torrent will still be far from having the quality of a legal release: the cover art might be low res, the track names might have the track numbers in them, there will be a torrent scene slogan in the comments section of each track (or even the genre) and such. All these have to be remedied before an album fits in with my library. Even if I don’t torrent many albums, it will all add up eventually and I’d much rather have iTunes, CDBaby or whoever take care of these matters for me.
Very easy to browse and get an idea for what's what, and they explain things like what I might like if I liked a related album. I also get to know the tastes of a few posters, and how they relate to mine. Meanwhile, actually buying the CDs often involves mail-order from other countries, overpaying for out-of-print vinyl on eBay (which doesn't go to the musician anyway), and the official sources are terribly organized/presented: rarely any streaming samples, poor descriptions of what the album actually sounds like, etc. Even when I do buy CDs, I would never have found out they existed if it weren't for the much more convenient mp3-blog/forum scene that actually brought them to my attention, reviewed them, and presented them in an attractive format.
I do try to give money to bands I like in one way or another, but I see it as more like donating to thank them for producing stuff I like, and encouraging them / supporting them to produce more in the future. Sometimes I literally donate, if they have a PayPal or something like that; other times I'll buy a CD, a vinyl record, or a shirt or something.
Before I was making money it was more convenient to pirate. Time was plentiful, money was scarce. Lots of free time on your hands means you can afford to sift through garbage quality files, convert to different formats, etc.
Now that I have income and little spare time it's far more convenient for me to pay for something I know will be of great quality.
That said, I think there are valid reasons to 'pirate' something. For example, when you can't get something from where you're living.
A good example of this are US TV shows. A lot of people in Europe watch them and wouldn't mind paying for them, but there are simply no options other then importing a DVD box 6mo-12mo after release or waiting until a broadcaster licenses the show. You could probably get Hulu or Netflix up and running over a VPN, but this is not something non tech people can really do and it's illegal by EU law as well I believe.
These days I'm way more discerning. I'm engaged in many rewarding activities, from my day job to my startup, from my social to my romantic life. So I tend to consume less digital entertainment.But what I do consume, I pay for.
That way I'm supporting the authors and encouraging them to keep up their good work, so that in the future I may benefit from more quality entertainment. Prices are usually very reasonable anyway.
One could argue that piracy in the above instance causes no economic loss to the producer. If you had to pay for it, you would not have purchased it anyway, therefore the producer is in the same situation in either case.
At the same time companies can hugely benefit from this kind of piracy. In the case of Microsoft, pirated versions of Windows allow them to maintain their dominant position in the market. If the Windows was really piracy proof then the people who could not afford to pay $100(ish) for it would probably switch to an alternative like Linux. That in turn would weaken MS's position since a strong userbase of an alternative OS would develop thus undermining their 'platform' strategy.
I have purchased all the Futurama movies. A new season of the TV series was then released.
OTOH, the government should not protect flawed business models for 95 years at a time.
Before I left, I was all about piracy. I thought it was awesome, and I hoped kazaa, audiogalaxy, and others would be around in the mean time.
After getting back, piracy seemed so trivial and pointless--most things I was interested in pirating before leaving was media of some sort, and this media no longer interested me. BitTorrent was relatively new, and so I never really used it for pirating (just to get Linux iso's).
In regard to the OP, I guess I do neither?