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Comment by criley2 | Hacker News Reader

The entitlement people feel to steal is always surprising. Especially on this board. I understand a lot of reddit is younger and irresponsible so piracy-as-the-norm is a popular trope, but among the engineers whose livelihoods depend on subscription models, we still promote service theft without so much as a hint of shame?

If the economics of a service don't make sense to you, then do not subscribe. But to turn around and steal from the engineers and artists who work to create these experiences is just indefensible. You are not entitled to television shows.

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> The entitlement people feel to steal is always surprising.

It's not stealing when you already paid in full.

Sharing my Netflix password with my wife and/or child is not stealing, I paid in full for that account, and have now for many many years.

My Plex server is full of DVDs and BluRays I paid full retail price for (that's $20 to $30 USD each), it's not stealing to use it, and it's not stealing to let some friends occasionally borrow films from it.

The entitlement companies feel to micromanage the lives of their paid-in-full customers is ridiculous. If you don't want people to have your product, stop selling them the product. And if you sell someone a product, don't act all surprised that they now have the product and are free to use it accordingly.

Wife and child is one thing. But the problem the problem is that people are sharing with people who aren't relatives. Old college roommates from 15 years ago who live on the other side of the country. Coworkers. People they meet in bars. None of these are legitimate.

I get the attraction of getting content for free. I used to pirate software when I was young and broke. But I'm an adult now and I do adult things, meaning I pay for what I consume.

Amazingly, people can survive without consuming other people's content. You don't have to watch a streaming service. There are other things in life to do.

Much like I think people who don't vote forfeit the right to complain about politicians, I think people who steal content don't get to complain about the quality of the available content.

I have a premium plan with Netflix which allows me to watch content on 4 screens concurrently, on "laptop, TV, phone and tablet" [0]. It is shared with family members and each one is probably logged into several devices used wherever we may be in the world. Everything is completely within the rules [1]. That's what we pay for and that's how we want to use it.

Any limitation like annoying password resets, strict geofencing, or any move a company makes to tell me how to use the service I pay for and use entirely legally inconvenience me, the paying customer. It will not inconvenience Pirate Joe. Of course none of these inconveniences and limitations would ever come attached to a hefty price drop to make it worth the effort for me.

The entitlement companies feel to inconvenience paying customers for profit is never surprising. Also those "lost revenue" calculations are so massively and intentionally misleading by presuming that every non-paying viewer would turn to a paying one. If your point is based on misdirection it's not much of a point.

[0] https://www.netflix.com/signup/planform

[1] https://help.netflix.com/legal/termsofuse

>Old college roommates from 15 years ago who live on the other side of the country. Coworkers. People they meet in bars. None of these are legitimate.

But you can lend those people a Blu-Ray, which only deprives you of watching it while they have it.

Which is perfectly fine. Just as it's perfectly fine for you to purchase a Netflix subscription for someone else.

Wouldn't the analogy be that you lend them your service credentials and don't use it until they are done with it?

Rehosting and serving that file is costing the streaming company electricity, bandwidth, cpu etc. Your agreement with them is that you can press pay an unlimited number of times in a month, but they didnt agree to serve that file to other people in other households. It's not quite the same as lending someone a disc, because in this case you agreed to terms of service that specifically address sharing.

Going by that logic, if I watch a movie twice or more, I should be charged more? What is the difference, “electricity” and “bandwidth” wise if I watch twice, or me and my coworker watch once?

You signed an agreement for your own use, not to allow your friends to use their servers. Its about the agreement you made.

But that's moving the goalpost. You said that sharing an account has a cost. I ask you, if I watch once and my wife watches another time, how is that different from me watching once and my coworker watching at another time?

> Sharing my Netflix password with my wife and/or child is not stealing

You're right, it's not. And Netflix is fine with this. However, should you be able to share your Netflix username and password with everyone on the block?

>However, should you be able to share your Netflix username and password with everyone on the block?

Presumably, your Netflix subscription has limitations on how many people can simultaneously watch it. So, yes, you should be able to share it with everyone on the block. Why not? By doing so, you're potentially preventing yourself from using it during that time, for instance if it has a maximum of 4 simultaneous streams. Why should you not be able to use the maximum number? It's no different than having 4 copies of a book or Blu-Ray and lending them out to your neighbors: if they haven't all borrowed them, you still have at least one to view, but if they're all borrowed, you're unable to view them.

The terms of service someone posted above says you "may not share with individuals beyond your household". Your neighbor is not within your household.

Interesting. My mother in law is on our family account with T-mobile. She doesn't live with us. T-mobile offers a Netflix Family Plan as part of our package. Does that mean my MIL shouldn't have access to our Netflix account?

If your mother in law is on the account and everyone on your account gets the family plan, it would make sense that each household has access.

Netflix's terms of use support sharing within the same household. It even has profiles for separate users within the same household.

I don't even know what 'paid in full' means here. It's a specific service with specific terms of use that include not sharing passwords outside one's household. You are free to reject the terms of use and not subscribe to the service. It doesn't make sense to justify breaking some terms just because you don't like them but keep the rest of the service because it's convenient. Would you sign a contract and then break specific clauses just because you didn't like those clauses? The contract is the contract. You choose to give your word to abide.

You're ignoring the history.

Disney for years resisted selling films on videos because they had no way of controlling how many people would be in the room watching the content. And they investigated single-use tapes (these had a latch that prevented rewinding, you'd have to send the tape back to the factory to be re-wound) and 24 hour DVDs (these would be sealed in an oxygen free case and would start oxidising on contact with air).

This short time we've had of "owning content" has been an anomaly and it's something they've wanted to stop as soon as possible.

> My Plex server is full of DVDs and BluRays I paid full retail price for (that's $20 to $30 USD each), it's not stealing to use it,

Format-shifting is not legal in all places. It's currently not legal in the UK. And if it requires circumvention of technical measures (which ripping DVDs and BluRays does) it's probably not legal because of DMCA.

If you want to change the law you're going to need a better argument than "I bought it", because you haven't bought it, you've licensed it, and they control the licences.

googling around i cannot find any info on this single-use tape story. do you have a link?

I did find the dvd one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexplay

Cartrivision: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartrivision

> Cassettes of major movies such as The Bridge on the River Kwai, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, Dr. Strangelove, High Noon, It Happened One Night, Divorce Italian Style, The Quiet Man, The Belles of St Trinian's, Two Rode Together and Brother Rat[4] were ordered via the initial 200-movie catalog at a retailer, delivered by parcel mail, and then returned to the retailer after viewing. These rental cassettes were red, approximately 7 inches (180 mm) high by 6.5 inches (170 mm) wide by 1.5 inches (38 mm) deep (however used the same videotape used today) and could not be rewound by a home Cartrivision recorder. Rather, they were rewound by a special machine upon their return to the retailer.[5] Other cassettes on sports, travel, art, and how-to topics were available for purchase. These cassettes were black, and could be rewound on a Cartrivision recorder. An optional monochrome camera manufactured for Cartrivision by Eumig could be bought to make home videos. A color camera was in the works but never materialized before CTI's demise.

> This short time we’ve had of “owning content” has been an anomaly

Have you ever heard of books?

> Sharing my Netflix password with my wife and/or child is not stealing, I paid in full for that account, and have now for many many years.

I am inclined to agree with HBO, Netflix, et al. that this is stealing. You are using their computing resources against the terms you agreed to.

However torrenting is good and not stealing. You are using your own bandwidth.

No, Netflix actually encourages this behavior; this is not stealing.

Netflix specifically allows you to stream to multiple family members. There are no terms being violated.

  4.2. The Netflix service and any content viewed through 
  our service are for your personal and non-commercial use 
  only and may not be shared with individuals beyond your 
  household. During your Netflix membership, we grant you a 
  limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access 
  the Netflix service and view Netflix content through the 
  service. Except for the foregoing, no right, title or 
  interest shall be transferred to you. You agree not to use 
  the service for public performances.

Note it says "household" not "individual".

And frankly this is a good thing. It would be completely ridiculous for Netflix to demand a separate account for my wife and each child. The children aren't even allowed to make accounts, they would be left high and dry.

This is one area where I have a constantly annoyance with Steam. You can create multiple accounts on Steam and share the library, but you can't play more than one game at once, even if it's not the same game. It's horrible. I can understand locking you out of a specific game because someone else is playing, but locking you out of your entire library because someone else is playing is so dumb.

If you're in the US, those DVD rips aren't actually legal. You can only format shift audio recordings. You also had to use a circumvention device to make those rips so they're DMCA violations.

Solution: Get a virtual assistant in a low CoL country without DMCA applicability to purchase, rip and upload Blu Ray movies to your server on demand.

IANAL

"Glib talk of ‘intellectual property rights’, then, concedes polemical ground to the monopoly rent-extractor by granting a certain perceived virtue to those who hold licences and rights. The rest of us are merely greedy and grasping grubbers for someone else’s property. But in so conceiving the domain of ‘intellectual property rights’, the notions of borrowing, reuse, reworking, remixing and constructive enhancement – all of which are needed for culture and science and art to grow – are lost in the semantic mire created by ‘property’. Things that are owned in the exclusionary way that the indiscriminate use of ‘intellectual property’ suggests cannot sustain art and science and culture."

- https://aeon.co/essays/the-idea-of-intellectual-property-is-...

I think the issue here is that culture should on some level be free. This is why libraries are free.

Personally, I want to financially support media creators, but every time I get a forced prereel commercial, or Hulu inserts ads in a service I pay for, I make a mental note to care a little less. Every time I’m region restricted, I make a mental note. Every time my browser widevine plugin breaks and I can’t watch something, I make a mental note.

Essentially every time I witness a dark pattern, I realize this is about control. Not fairness.

Fuck them. If they wanna play games, I’ll play games. And I’ll win, because I’m better at it than they are.

I would be happy to pay some cryptocurrency directly to an artist for the production of media. I could care less about the distributors though.

Be careful of what you wish for. Disney is a creator, and soon many people will be paying them money directly, cutting out existing distribution middlemen, letting a single company control a very large portion of American media.

"Disney" is not the artist. Artists are human beings. Disney is a megacorporation that hires many individual artists.

Now, it's true that it takes many individual artists working together to make a major motion picture of any kind, but that doesn't change the fact that there are so many layers of middlemen between your money and the actual artists that saying that "giving Disney your money" is giving your money to the artists is....at best a gross oversimplification, and at worst outright false.

> I think the issue here is that culture should on some level be free. This is why libraries are free.

Should software be free as well then? It seems to me it should fit the definition of culture, and the economics of e.g. a game seem similar to the economics of making a movie.

Everything should be free but I should still get my salary.

This isn't a bad idea. If the production of the show has already been funded, then theoretically Disney can charge less for the distribution rights.

The problem is they won't do that though, they'll just pocket the extra. Bit of a tangent, but this is one of the major failings of our current economic model IMO - it is perfectly acceptable, even encouraged (because shareholders need profits), for companies to milk consumers for all they can.

I agree with you except for the feedback loop of "make content, sell content, use money from content to buy an extension to copyright law, rinse, repeat."

There is a level of assault ON the public's rights happening. They arent completely innocent content creators being robbed, having done nothing wrong.

It smells less of entitlement, and more of intentional comeuppance.

Are people downloading things that they believe the copyright should have already expired on? (Under the original copyright act it was 14+14. So stuff older than 1991). Or are they downloading the latest Avengers movie?

Nobody downloads anything anymore, this isn’t 2006. They stream it for free using someone else’s pw, or some sketchy site. OR, bob pays for Netflix, Alice pays for Hulu, and they share with eachother. THAT is the actual use case these companies are complaining about, as if Bob and Alice would buy both accounts themselves. Likey not gonna happen, but some executive calculation says they are losing money in this deal.

That's a timely question with the holidays coming up. A lot of people will be wanting to watch movies from the 1940's and 50's. Many of them don't realize those works are still under copyright.

It's not just hypothetical. In our family we subscribe to 3 or 4 streaming services, but last year we still had to pay $5 to watch It's a Wonderful Life (1946), a movie that was literally in the public domain for 20 years. A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965) wasn't available at any price, except with ads that stretched its 25-minute runtime to nearly an hour. We pirated that one. I don't think most people would think there was anything wrong with that.

You think an ordinary person's expectation is that It's A Wonderful Life is public domain? I think the opposite thing is true, and that most Americans generally assume that any major motion picture or television show is copyrighted no matter when it was produced.

> I think the opposite thing is true, and that most Americans generally assume that any major motion picture or television show is copyrighted no matter when it was produced.

You're probably right for everything produced since the second World War, but I doubt people think that e.g. Triumph of the Will is under copyright. I think people have a vague notion of "historical" vs. "contemporary" that starts right around the end of WWII.

Why not? Lots of ordinary people were watching it in 1980's, when it actually was in the public domain. I don't think they realize it gets the same level of legal protection as new releases.

My point is there's plenty of good content people want that's 30-70 years old & they don't feel bad about pirating it. My dad by his principles would never download a new movie; nevertheless he's looking up the songs from his childhood on YouTube. He feels entitled to listen to them whenever and however he wants. I think that's a pretty common attitude toward the older stuff.

As much as corporate America likes to whine, bitch, and moan about piracy I'm willing to bet no engineer has LEGITIMATELY lost their job due to too much of the content on the service they support being pirated. Stop painting this as if people who pirate/account-share are reaching into the "poor" engineer's pockets, it's disingenuous and simply untrue. This is the rich wanting to get richer and trying to create a false dichotomy of either "Steal content" or "Pay for content" is an effective way to do it, too bad it's not based in reality/truth when there is a 3rd option "Don't watch it".

But think of the poor, malnourished engineered! The execs are going to trickle down the money to them only if you pay for merely 10 subscriptions.

It's not stealing because it's not zero-sum. Nothing is exfiltrated from anyone else's possession. It would be another thing if people were abusing a hack on Netflix directly, impersonating strangers' accounts, using customer service, and increasing their CDN bill. No money is being lost with piracy, only potential money. And not all lost potential money is the same. A coffee shop loses potential money if you barricade the entry, but that's very obviously ethically worse than using the coffee shop's recipe at home 2 cities away and maaybe losing them potential money. Someone losing potential money does not always mean theft occurred. Doubly so for potential money from rent-seeking.

A key property of theft and stealing is "permanently depriving" another of something. If someone downloads a binary representation of some information, the downloaded bits have been exactly duplicated many times (barring errors). When one consumes or views that copy of the information no other individual is deprived of anything as a direct result.

I'm actually a fan of the notion of copyright, trademarks and intellectual property in a sense but not to power it currently holds. Infringement on your sole or licensed right to copy is not as significant an issue as permanently depriving someone of something.

You might argue that someone who copies another's information is depriving them of money that would have been paid for that information. This is flawed though as you would need to be able to prove that the infringer of the copyright would have paid for the information in the first place.

Corporate America has been stealing from us for decades, especially Comcast/Charter.

I forgot that two wrongs make a right, my bad.

You don’t care when huge mega corps steal from your people, but you seem outraged that people might do things like share a video with a friend or spouse. What’s wrong with you?

What they’re doing isn’t just a “wrong” it’s horrible. These are the people lobbying Congress to ruin the country for their personal gain. Their business model has always been “you have no choice” because it’s either choose them or AT&T which is equally bad so Americans can’t vote with their wallets to get rid of them. They are the ones paying Ajit Pai to ruin net neutrality. They are not just wrong they are pure evil.

> If the economics of a service don't make sense to you, then do not subscribe.

That’s exactly what I’m doing. What does it matter exactly if I pirate or not? The money would not reach “engineers” and “artists” either way.

If you weren’t pirating, you’d have to find some other way to spend your time. Presumably you find watching pirated content superior to the free, legal alternatives (e.g. DVDs from the library) available or you wouldn’t be doing it.

If piracy wasn’t available , you might find yourself paying for some content even if not everything you pirate.

Not sure why you're been downvoted. But agreed.

> Especially on this board.

you are probably talking about paywalls. my 2 cents is that all that pay-to-read content is somehow going against what the internet stood for: a network where information could be freely shared. this will always find some resistance.

what about having a separate network where they can take all their pay-to-read blogging platforms, newspapers & magazines, etc?

the other thing is that it's impossible to pay for all these digital services. and more and more are being created. something is wrong with that model and it won't last long.

making a copy of something is not the same as stealing

Yes it is. You can pedantically argue the American legal systems definition of stealing means that you have to charge thieves using different laws depending on what was stolen, but this is an unintellectual argument hiding behind legalese to abuse colloquial words.

It still baffles me that people try to justify their objectively immoral theft of someone else's hard work and their right to profit on that work as they see fit with pedantry like this.

How about copying a $100 bill?

By your logic wouldn't you say that the content providers are doing the same thing?

The only people who can copy a $100 bill have "the license" to do so.

The only people who can copy a show to show it to you have "the license" to do so.

When you disregard the license put in play to govern the content, you're stealing from the people who protect their property with licenses.

Even in the open source world, respecting the terms of a license is important.

That's forgery, or fraud. So also not stealing.

There's nothing wrong with copying a $100 bill. It's when you try to exchange it for goods that have value that it becomes an issue.

>Making photocopies of paper currency of the United States violates another section of the code, Title 18, Section 474 of the U.S. Code. Also forbidden under the statute: printed reproductions of checks, bonds, postage stamps, revenue stamps and securities of the United States and foreign governments. Those who violate this law can be fined up to $5,000 and/or be sentenced to 15 years imprisonment.

https://legalbeagle.com/7612138-illegal-copy-currency.html

You're right - it's not stealing, but it's not right either. Do you think there should be no intellectual rights? Are you OK with everyone copying whatever side-project revenue stream you may have without paying you?

That's not the point. The point is that copyright infringement is a very well-defined crime, and the activities we are talking about here are copyright infringement.

It's not theft. It's not fraud. It's not vandalism.

And yet, people in these discussion use those wrong terms to describe the activity. But the only reason they do that, is because they want to attach the greater stigma of those crimes, onto the less stigmatized crime of copyright infringement.

And that's a dishonest argument.

You're right, of course. But this isn't a court of law and so we use terms like piracy and theft when we are talking about copyright infringement and nobody is really confused.

Business is inherently competitive, you can't ask others to be nice, capitalism simply doesn't work that way.

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