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Comment by bilbo0s | Hacker News Reader

>And yet 4K webrips of recent Netflix shows are readily available on torrent sites.

and:

>Piracy can be greatly reduced by distributing the content via Netflix

Aren't you guys saying different things? One is saying people already pirate on netflix, and the other is saying netflix removes the need for piracy.

If you're saying the same thing, I would interpret it to mean that piracy is greatly reduced on netflix, but not entirely eliminated. But if that be the case, would that not be evidence of netflix' anti-piracy measures working?

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Statement 1: Piracy is inevitable in all platforms and at scale every media property will be pirated by someone.

Statement 2: If your content is available on a reasonably priced and performant streaming platform or is otherwise “low friction” the number of people who will choose to consume the pirated content instead of paying drops off dramatically.

The problem for publishers is that there’s so many different knobs that finding what brings in the most revenue is pretty much a crapshoot.

Exactly what I was trying to get at, thanks.

Content piracy has long been about the exorbitant cost of acquiring content.

If you look at the cost of downloading a full, original quality Blu-Ray rip, then burning that to a dual-layer BD-R disc, you're looking at an hour to torrent plus up to $10 for a dual-layer recordable disc. Compare that to a store-bought copy that's $7.88 and comes with both Blu-Ray and DVD copies, and it's no contest.

Make that store-bought copy $49.95 (thanks, Marvel) and it makes piracy attractive. Add terrible DRM on top and you GUARANTEE piracy, because you're being hostile to people that have actually bought your movie.

If DRM had never been invented, piracy would only be about 5% worse, and your paying customers wouldn't be cursing your existence... but the media companies are too stupid to realize that.

> If DRM had never been invented, piracy would only be about 5% worse, and your paying customers wouldn't be cursing your existence... but the media companies are too stupid to realize that.

The media companies do not care whether their paying customers love them or hate them. What they do care about, though, is when there is 5% less of them.

Remember, big corporations do not just want money - they want all the money (and more).

Removing the reasons to infringe copyright is completely different from making it impossible to infringe someone's copyright.

Netflix is a convenient enough service that makes it easy for people to watch what they want to watch. Most people will just pay for it without thinking twice. It's easy enough that most people won't even consider infringing. Netflix's value isn't just in the content it serves, it's also in the fact it frees people from the non-trivial effort required to "pirate". Private torrent trackers have an economy of their own.

Making it impossible to infringe is extremely difficult. Movies and music are really just information. Extremely big numbers. It's trivial to make copies of this stuff and send those copies over the network. In previous centuries, you needed to be a major industry player and own big machines like printing presses in order to infringe on someone's copyright at scale. In the 21st century it's as easy as copy paste or forgetting to close the torrent client. People might not even realize they are doing it.

This is why a fragmented streaming market will push people towards copyright infringement. Instead of pooling their intellectual property and creating one single perfect streaming service with all the content, they are making it difficult and expensive for the consumer by competing with each other. At some point, people are going to wonder if there's a better way. That's when they'll find "piracy".

My interpretation of the quotes is that if a show is on Netflix, its pirating rates go down drastically, but some shows on Netflix are still pirated. That’s because there is a significant population who pirates only when it is easier than streaming, and Netflix makes streaming really painless, in comparison with other streaming sites like Hulu or CBS All Access. However, some people still won’t pay for Netflix (or for any other streaming service), and they’re the ones that the first quote is talking about.

> But if that be the case, would that not be evidence of netflix' anti-piracy measures working?

No. It's evidence that just having the content available on Netflix will reduce piracy. It is a bit less effective than it could be because Netflix doesn't run on literally everything, mostly because of anti-piracy protections, but it does run on nearly everything, so it's effective.

Those two sides aren't mutually exclusive. Demand for content creates both.

DRM doesn't inconvenience pirates, but piracy inconveniences consumers.

It's inconvenient to free up 50 GB of hard disk space to torrent of a 4k netflix rip you found off some shady torrent site. It's much more convenient to just give netflix a few bucks a month. That inconvenience comes from law enforcement action against pirate sites and many users having trouble managing their hard drive space. Not from DRM.

It may be inconvenient to free up some disk space (citation needed, anyone on HN has probably got terabytes of free space somewhere), but the inconvenience of certain streaming platforms, or even the total hostility to watching anything ad-free (even paid users) will knock people into the piracy camp. There is no source where I can watch AAA movies that I buy on my laptop legally in 4K as it is illegal to break Blu-ray encryption (and I run Linux). I buy or rent movies I want to watch on my Apple TV in 4K, but what am I supposed to do if I want to watch something on a plane for instance?

Anything that is on Netflix I watch. I can’t watch amazon prime on my Apple TV because their region system is broken (yes, if an amazon employee is reading this, please fix having prime in multiple countries) so battlestar galactica and other shows in their catalogue aren’t available come from other sources.

I'm talking about the typical consumer, not a HN user. Most people aren't running linux, have legal streaming options available to them, don't have terabytes available to them at any particular moment (maybe they have a few terabytes of portable harddrive in a closet somewhere, but not mounted and ready to roll.)

Are there scenarios where typical consumers turn to piracy? Sure, aboslutely. They generally do that when a convenient legal way isn't an option (e.g. region locks screwing them over.)

You’re probably right, but I know plenty of people who are happy to use putlocker etc who aren’t technically competent at all (and yeah, they sure get malware...)

> Most people aren't running linux, have legal streaming options available to them... Are there scenarios where typical consumers turn to piracy? Sure, aboslutely

my wife - a non-tech person, really - falls in to this camp. she's turned to torrenting things because the experience of streaming is just... slow. and bad. and stuttery. oh, and we still get ads on things (hulu, for one). She figured out how to find free streams for soccer matches - when we paid for "real" streams, they still had ads taking up 20% of the screen. And still somewhat jittery/stuttery (but - those 2 minute car ads at the start of the stream were never jittery).

yeah, the 'free' stuff experience isn't always great, but when the paid experiences are still kinda crappy, what's the point of paying?

It's not illegal to break copy protection for a work you purchased. There was an ammendment to the DMCA for it -- likely if this had not happened more of the DMCA would have been challenged and struck.

The caveat to that amendment being that you are only allowed to do so using tools you created yourself and you may not afterword share your tools, your methods, nor the decrypted material with anyone else.

I don't see that in there anywhere. More like you can't transfer the material, even to another rights holder, but I still question that. They can't make the sharing of the tools and methods illegal as it'd be against the first amendment.

"Piracy" is inconvenient. It takes knowledge, effort, time and money as well as computing power, storage and network bandwidth to participate in the ratio economies of private torrent trackers. It gets to the point it looks like an enthusiast operation run by people who want the best possible version of everything.

What's truly sad is how so many people find this preferable to paying for the official services. It speaks volumes to the quality of their streaming services. A huge number of people don't even have the choice to pay for the content to begin with: many of the of companies that complain about copyright infringement don't even offer their services outside of the United States. They ignore entire markets and complain when people find a way via unofficial means. It's really hard to feel any sympathy for the copyright industry.

There are some users, such as myself, who find the legal streaming sites intolerable for technical reasons if not ethical reasons. But I think the vast majority of users prefer the legal options when they're available, which is the part the media industry keeps on fucking up.

If they were better at their jobs, better at delivering to consumers what consumers want, they wouldn't have to worry about DRM, piracy, control of consumer behavior or any of this nonsense.

Completely agree with you. If their services were good enough, I doubt they would even need copyright protection to make money. The fact they can't match the quality of a bunch of underground sites despite being a multi-billion dollar industry is a sign the industry is relying on artificial scarcity to have any chance of competing in the marketplace.

> What's truly sad is how so many people find this preferable to paying for the official services. It speaks volumes to the quality of their streaming services.

I was even pirating shows I had access for free on Amazon prime... that just tells you how bad the platforms are, it's not about money.

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