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Comment by ohduran | Hacker News Reader

I can't agree more. People here often think in terms of open source software, Red Hat, and so on and so forth without realising that Netflix, HBO and the likes have built empires on top of intellectual property...of the content they have. Whining because you don't have access to your favourite series unless you pay a fee doesn't justify having stuff for free.

That the copyright laws are outdated given the current technological landscape is something we can agree on. That its replacement should be the law of the jungle, well, count me out from that.

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Content companies have repeatedly demonstrated that they do not care about cultural preservation.

Just as one example, the original versions of Star Wars shown in theaters are essentially lost now. Lucas re-cut them for home release and added horrible color grading, CGI, and even plot points. There isn't a franchise much more culturally important than Star Wars, and they can't even preserve that.

It took the (copyright-infringing) work of individual fans to try to re-create them as best as they can, and they've done a very good job. But those original prints are sitting in a warehouse somewhere, rotting away, never to be scanned in the quality available today.

99.99% of pirates don’t give a shit about “preserving culture” and just want to do the mental gymnastics necessary to rip off content creators

I just can't sympathize with the giant content monopolies until they stop with the bullshit. A lot of content is region locked, so you can't even stream it at all without a VPN or good old-fashioned piracy. They regularly pull content from one streaming service once the contract expires, and it gets moved to yet another streaming service.

I think making moral arguments about piracy is a mistake. If these companies really cared about it, they would make it more convenient to stream than to pirate. And it was going in a good direction with Netflix up until everyone decided they needed their own streaming service with exclusive content.

Bingo - every argument about a company's right to money falls through when companies simply don't care about consumers being able to consume their content in a reasonable manner.

For eg - instead of making a website available directly to people overseas they instead license to a local monopoly that puts it on inferior systems that are mega overpriced simply because the content is not "local"

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