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Comment by awicz | Hacker News Reader

Serious question about torrents: How is this not stealing? I'm not trying to be judgemental. I certainly don't have any room to do so as I used Napster and the likes back in the day. Now with the advent of Amazon Prime, Hulu, Netflix, etc, I'm genuinely curious to know the moral argument for using services and platforms that utilize torrents to distribute media other creators are actually trying to sell?

Edit: Apparently this question has upset a good number of people. It was a genuine inquiry. It would have been nice to see your thoughts in written form instead of the downvotes.

To those that did answer--thanks! Really incredible how complicated the licensing arrangements are across the world.

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We were fine for a while. Netflix killed film/series piracy for me - for a while it literally made no sense.

Then, every copyright owner realized they want a slice of the streaming cake - (HBO, Disney+, all the cable networks...) and started making their content exclusive on their platforms. Now, instead of a single Netflix (or anyone else, really) subscription I would have to pay for a dozen, that I would rarely use for more than one series/film. Or I can't even get it at all, because it's not available in my country. Or only available with subtitles in a language I don't understand. Or I can't watch it on the hardware I want to.

The music industry got their shit together and even the most copyright-paranoid artists are on Spotify, or on Bandcamp (which is subscription-free). When the film industry does the same I'll gladly start paying them money again.

In that case, what is the maximum amount of subscription fee that you are willing to shell out before resorting to piracy?

You already know that answer is going to be different for everyone, so I don't know why you bother asking it.

A better question is when are film studios going to stop profiteering with their license fees and allow their works to be available on any platform (instead of meticulously negotiating with one platform and moving around every couple months).

The question opens up other questions exactly like you mentioned. For eg: If it was never about the price point, and more about it being available on a single platform, would you be fine with paying a very high subscription fee for a platform which holds all the catalogues?

Let me be clear, I torrent things too, but I've never really had an answer to the piracy question. I wouldnt just want to blame it on all the studios seperating out the catalogues into their own service.

I'd at least like to see what a more fair & open content market would look like. So far it's just anti-competitive, anti-consumer bullshit for TV & Movies. I haven't pirated a game after Steam got big. I haven't pirated any music after Spotify came around. Clearly the model works.

Literally Youtube. If google actually seriously got into the media business by buying up some smaller film catalogs worldwide(i'm sure AMC/criterion/some other country specific catalog collections will be easily purchasable for them as a starter), we could see streaming services go under overnight.

I think anti-trust litigation from old lawmakers is the only thing stopping them

Kind of an interesting angle. YouTube is limited in how it can compete against the film monopoly/oligopoly due to broader anti-trust concerns at Google

Personally, I think it should be tiered. I'm willing to pay ~$2 for older films (that's what my grocery store charged when I was a kid), ~$5 for new releases, and I expect a discount for paying month to month vs ala carte. So, if I watch one movie/week, $10/month seems fair since I'll probably watch 1-2 new releases and likely won't watch a movie every week. If I watch 2x that, then $15-20 seems fair. If I watch a movie every day, $50/month seems fair. Maybe pay extra for higher quality.

I currently pay for Netflix and Amazon prime, mostly so my kids can watch cartoons (we don't have c cable or satellite TV) and because my wife likes fast shipping (we watch way more Netflix than Amazon Prime though). I don't expect to pay more than either service to have access to a better selection of movies.

i already pay for: netlix, hulu, hbo, amazon prime and youtube premium.

so i already shell out a LOT of money to media companies, so i'm ok with pirating if a specific movie/series is not in any of those services because the owner of the movie/series i'm pirating is probably getting my money through any of those services.

Relevant Reddit comic: https://www.reddit.com/r/comics/comments/bcdlbf/hello_old_fr...

Never were fine in Australia. Half of the Dr. Who were absent because of "legal reasons". I can't recall now (I don't have subscription for almost 3 years) but there were bunch of TV shows I wanted to binge and they were unavailable or partially available. Big Bang Theory never were on Netflix IIRC, I had to pay for one of the seasons. I don't think anything from HBO is there and so on.

I'm not playing those games, I can torrent whatever I want to seen in better quality - with subtitles in variety of languages, HD or SD, some number of audio tracks with different translations if I wish (even though I don't need it after leaving in English speaking country for some time) and so on.

It's just shitty user experience.

Same boat, I haven't torrented a movie in years because Netflix gave me a good way to pay for them.

But now I have two streaming subscriptions and the catalog between them is still too sparse. I think I'd need 4 or 5 separate subscriptions to stop losing the "is this somewhere that I can watch it?" game.

Plus I have a VPN account that my phone and tablet are connected through almost all the time. I don't like having to leave that turned off when I want to watch something, often I'm multitasking and it means whatever else I'm doing is now connecting from my home IP address.

Can you recommend a good VPN for this use case?

I'm using PIA, but they were purchased recently by Kape Technologies so I'm not sure if I'll re-up when my subscription expires. Where I'm at right now is they're probably more trustworthy than Comcast, and less likely to do something like selling my IP address -> personal identity to advertisers.

https://www.hackread.com/private-internet-access-pia-vpn-sol...

They say it doesn't change anything, but with VPN services you really have no way of knowing how trustworthy they are.

https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/the-continually-e...

Still, I figure on balance I'm better off having my internet browsing aggregated with all the other traffic coming out of their endpoints versus coming from my modem's IP address.

i signed up for PIA using paypal (i thought i was just setting up my payment source, but they fully created an account) and they sent me an username + password in plain text via email.

i cannot trust a company that does that.

On the one hand, not great. On the other, what can someone do with access to your PIA account? I don't think that gives them any ability to snoop on your traffic, and there's no user data in the account for them to steal.

They could mooch off your access within the 5 device limit, or sign in online and pay your bill?

Mullvad is better

> The music industry got their shit together and even the most copyright-paranoid artists are on Spotify...

To be fair, unless their play count rivals Taylor Swift, those artists probably still aren't making much money. I have quite a few friends who are professional musicians and this is a common complaint.

Im nit saying spotify isnt a positive thing for consumers (and maybe also artists in the long run) but there's definitely a tradeoff to having one platform to rule them all.

I remember when people complained that cable wasn't à la carte. Now we complain that streaming services are à la carte. Its a fun cycle.

For whatever reason, video content is tightly tethered to copyright based gatekeeping profits. The cycle can be seen in literally every country.

Similar reasons for why Youtuber film-makers aren't treated seriously by Hollywood film-makers ie their portfolios aren't taken seriously. There's a weird snobbishness in the whole industry

Except... it's not. It's still bundled, just differently.

A la carte would be what Amazon Prime Video does with all of the stuff that isn't free--you just pay for the thing you actually watch.

And in the meantime, you're just choosing not to consume their content, right?

I also don't think there's a justification for using it, however it's not stealing, it's copyright infringement.

Additionally, the loss is not one to one. Each pirated video does not equate to a lost sale. The fact that people imply that is ludicrous.

Man, I haven't said that stuff in like 20 years. Takes me back to naptser day. Now someone ask me if I would download a car!

Sometimes as a legal user you are faced with far more obstacles than the illegal user. All kinds of limitations that are made to curb piracy but actually just hurt legitimate users. This applies to every type of protected content, be it music, video, games, ebooks, etc.

This makes paying users less likely to sympathize with the content provider. And then you see those transparent attempts to skew numbers so they can generate some compassion ("This episode of GoT was pirated 30 million times which means we lost 30 million possible subscribers!!11" type thing) and you start having a really bad impression about them whether you pay for the service o not.

I am forced to torrent content that I already legally pay for just to get a proper subtitle or voice over for example, because sometimes I get a different experience for the same content based on the country I'm in.

Also as a legal user you might end up paying for subscription service you don't use. I'm subscribed to netflix and HBO and don't remember the last time when I used them... Now and then try to find something to watch but it is all shit.

Which is why we unsubscribed recently and read more books and play free or donation based games instead.

But that's a straight forward fix: unsubscribe. The problem is when all the legal options are real PITAs.

Not sure why this is getting down voted. Outside of official statements from the content providers, who are happy to bury their heads in the sand and pretend the flagged problems don't exist, general consensus is that most anti-piracy measures ruin the experience for legal users far more than for pirates. Pirates might accept lower standards of service given the all time low price of free. Paying customers of course have much higher expectations.

And the fragmentation of titles across platforms doesn't help one bit. We're basically heading to the same situation with today's cable business.

Personally, living in a country whose language I don't master means many of the titles in my Netflix catalogue are unwatchable. Anime being in Japanese and only dubbed or subed in the local language and nothing else. In English speaking countries the exact same titles have English sub or dubbing.

Good excuse to introduce The IT Crowd to those who may have missed it (:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALZZx1xmAzg

You have to separate morality and legal technicalities to answer this properly.

For the legal part, stealing is for physical objects, eg. the victim doesn't have disposal of this stolen good anymore. This is not true for intellectual «property» since it's a copy. This is why copyright & copyright infringement has been created, whose original purpose was to protect authors from publisher and protect publishers that made advances to authors from other publishers.

For the moral part, you have no clear answer, circulation of free copies obviously reduces revenues of authors, but also it allows access of content to people that wouldn't have paid for it anyways, case where the loss of revenue is shaky.

To extend further, it's related to consumer frustration, while it's no question that being frustrated if you don't own a Ferrai is frivolous, if you can't afford it, you have to steal it from someone, the frustration occurred for copyright content is solely based on publisher/distributor strategy on maximizing revenue. The thing is, total revenue has a, albeit unknown, maximum theoretical possible, hence after a trigger frustration left is purely and solely a strategy to protect revenue. In the end, you get frustrated people just to have copyright holders a better peace of mind and revenue, and nothing else, so there's a moral balance to keep that you can't reduce to a black and white situation.

A genuine inquiry should get a genuine answer. Let me try to provide one.

Copyright law with its duration of 95 years after the authors death is practically universally seen as the result of money being transfer from large companies into the control of politicians that voted in favor of the law. Normally when laws get written as the result of money changing hand we call it corruption, but as the supreme court have show, that is not always so.

Some people have tried to fix the problem from within, but the US political system makes third-party initiatives like that rather hard. Internationally, the result of the corrupt process spread through international trade agreements where nations has to either implement the same laws or risk getting trade sanctions from the US, and thus internationally nations has accepted the same corrupt law in exchange for getting through trade deals.

There is no moral ground for following current copyright law except blind following. Instead what we get is individual moral decisions where for example a person might feel it being acceptable to view 95 minus 1 year after the authors death old video on youtube, but find it wrong to view a recently released cinematic movie. Each person uniquely define when, where and how they feel copyrights exclusive monopoly is morally defensible and when it is not. The result is that you get about as many different moral view on the issue as there is people.

For example, here (in Hungary) we are paying some extra 'contribution' whenever we buy storage (HDDs, SSDs, SD cards, USB sticks) that is intended to compensate artists and distributors for lost revenue because the assumption is that we'll likely store pirated stuff on them.

Therefore downloading is not illegal here (sharing is, which kind of puts torrents into a strange place).

The world is a bit crazy, isn't it.

Wow. That is an interesting model! Do you know how they determine how the funds are distributed?

Yes. Almost no money is given to the artists, most of it is eaten by the organization that claims to be representing them and has good political connections.

Sweden has the same system. You can read more about it here:

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

The collected money is in general handed out by Copyswede [1], but for music it's handled by STIM [2]. STIM also supposedly handles paying money to artists played for customers at the barber, and all these special cases, and music played on TV, and so on.

I don't know for sure, but I think that the money is divided based on official sales data, so the artists who sell most also gets most of the "cassette tax" as it is known, because it was introduced as an added tax on cassettes back in the 80s.

It is not popular with consumers, since you have to pay extra for blank CDs, DVDs, USB sticks, and hard drives even if you don't use them to copy music. The tax is not to cover loss of income due to piracy, I just learned from the Wikipedia page, but to enable private copying of music without having to buy extra copies from the producer. As I said, since you have to pay even if you use the CD as a Linux boot disc, it's not very popular with the public, but a lot of people don't even know about it.

[1] https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyswede (in Swedish)

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STIM (in English)

What happened to "innocent until proven guilty"? That's just a fine where they assume you'd pirate stuff in the future!

It can be even more stupid than that. In France, where we have same sort of law, you have to pay it also if you are a business...

You can get the tax back, but you have to jump through a lot of hoop holes, and so not a lot of business do it.

It’s purely racket.

Same in Russia. But they tax not only storage but basically everything that can play music and/or video including desktops, laptops, tablets and phones.

Recently I torrented this nice little piece of art: https://www.discogs.com/Django-Reinhardt-Djangologie-1928-19.... Now, good luck finding where to buy it =). (I did try)

Spotify doesn't have even half of my collection of Johnny Horton (which I torrented as well).

Also, I'm afraid of censorship. Some of the early 20th century county singers we throwing n-words left right and center and you won't find them on Spotify. Same for Apple Music. With Apple Music it even worse. Music disappears from the library _suddenly_. Just because same shady firm has it's license expired in Australia. Internet is full of stories of people who were unable to re-download movies or music form iTunes because the right owner has deleted it from the store. No, no money back.

So the only place where I pay for music is Bandcamp, which lets you download the stuff you paid for, right here, right now in variety of formats including lossless.

The argument for piracy is always a mix between those who aren’t willing to pay for the media, and those who aren’t willing to put up with the limitations and restrictions of DRM.

Sometimes you can compromise with one side if the other is really good. Spotify is a good example, where it really is more convenient to pay $10 for every song you could ever think of.

On the other hand, there’s no similar buffet-style movie service that has more than 10% of the movies I want to watch.

It’s hard for someone to justify paying $60/month on the four streaming services (since the market is so fragmented) and still not able to watch Iron Man 2 (though 1 and 3 are there)

I don't pirate, nowadays mostly because I already have a couple of subscriptions and not enough time to consume all the content I already can.

But for me the answer is fairly obvious: availability. If video content was as convenient to consume as music, then pirating wouldn't be making a comeback. You can subscribe to all major streaming services and it's likely you won't find a given niche tv series or cult movie, unlike with music that with a single spotify sub you can listen to basically any formally published album (Ok, I know it's not strictly true, but it's closer to this state than with video)

I don't use torrents etc but to give you a customer perspective: Because of the proliferation of services and the lock-in each one of them is trying to promote, if you want to follow your favourite shows you would have to subscribe to all of them and it becomes expensive very quickly. As an European there is always the problem that some great shows that are available in the US might not be available in your country. To make mattter worse, if you're in switzerland like me you might have the option to watch a show only in German (which I don't speak) and they don't even give you access to the original english soundtrack. Faced with all these annoyances, I canceled them all. If they don't care about the customer experience I don't care about them. I use a (legal) service which allows me to watch on demand any TV show broadcast from most of European TVs in the last 7 days. It works well, it's cheap and most shows have they original english soundtrack. Some other people use torrents or dodgey streaming websites.

Which service do you use?

"Stealing" is taking something from someone. This is not stealing because you are not taking anything from anyone.

You could called it "unlicensed copying" if you want, that's legally sound.

To me, stealing implies depriving someone of something.

If I take your car, you don't have a car anymore.

If I make a copy of your movie, you still have that movie.

Arguably, you're being deprived of the money from the sale of the movie, but there are already other terms that can be used (piracy, copyright infringement).

> Arguably, you're being deprived of the money from the sale of the movie

And that's only wishy washy wish-I-had-money, nothing real. (And even that isn't really the case since sale and piracy are not mutually exclusive)

Better ease of use: I'm in France, I don't know what service has what or for how much time. Most French services will tend to propose dubbed version only, or not let me remove subtitles if I don't need them. With torrents I get access to everything on one application, with the audio and subtitle settings I want. Also I have a shitty connection so if I want good quality streaming is no-no: so I download and watch once it's done and when I want.

Edit: and for the moral part, most Hollywood people preach for communism. So let them show the way.

It isn't stealing. After you torrent something, someone else doesn't have less.

It also isn't treated as stealing by (most countries'?) legal frameworks. It's copyright infringement - and not even commercial infringement (where you are making money by infringing). Non-commercial copyright infringement isn't even criminal - it's a civil matter.

The problem is that shows/movies are spread all over these platforms, or are not even available on them. I'm happy to pay my Netflix subscription each months, but if a show I want to watch is not on it, I will pirate it. I'm not going to pay for multiple video streaming services each months.

It gets really frustrating when one service has seasons 1-3 of a show but I need to subscribe to another service to get seasons 4 and 5. I've even seen the case where season 1 and 3 are on a service but season 2 is somewhere else.

Add in the fact that these deals change all the time so season 3 might be somewhere else by the time I'm caught up and ready to watch it and the whole system is madness.

When you steal from someone, you take something that belongs to them. If someone steals your bike, you don't have a bike anymore. When you torrent, you create a _copy_ of your friends _copy_. your friend still has his copy, but now you have a copy too.

Hope that helps

For me the argument is and has basically always been availability.

I don't live in the United States and if I want to watch say Westworld, even though it's airing on the national broadcaster for free, it only does so in French, which I don't understand. There's nowhere I can legally watch the English version so my only option is piracy.

In other cases it's because the market is fragmented. Were I still living in the US, I'd happily pay $20/mo for a Netflix subscription (and do) but I wouldn't pay $10/m for each of Amazon, Hulu, Netflix, Disney Plus, HBO for American stuff plus another $10/mo for each anime streaming service that has an exclusive.

https://stallman.org/articles/end-war-on-sharing.html

Legally, it is stealing. However, just because something is illegal doesn't make it wrong.

However, you could also think of it like the digital equivalent of sharing. If someone purchases a movie or TV series on physical disks, they could loan it to you without breaking the law. In fact, they could even make a copy of the disk and not break the law. The only way to break the law this way is by having multiple copies in use at the same time. This is just digital sharing without checks in place to make sure multiple copies of the content aren't used simultaneously.

That being said, who is really harmed when I give someone a copy for free? I'm not stealing from the content creator (I paid, after all), and I'm not selling it, and there's no guarantee that the person I gave it to would have purchased it. If the creator hasn't lost anything and I'm not taking credit for it, nobody was harmed. In my eyes, this makes piracy acceptable as long as I don't sell it.

If we didn't have such strong copyright protections, content creators would be forced to compete with piracy by offering convenience, but instead they sue. Netflix has proven to reduce piracy because they offer convenience, but that only works for content they can provide.

> Legally, it is stealing

No it isn't. If I steal your bike you no longer have a bike. You no longer have the benefits of using it for transportation, society is worse off. As you explained copyright is very different from that. So, let's not call these 2 different things the same.

Of course it is. Stealing is taking what is not given. People can play with words and logic all day but that's it. If you take something that was not given to you it's stealing. In case of torrents, the owner of the media obviously didn't sell it nor gave it.

Most likely the most legitimate reason is archiving. Streaming services often offer very poor quality for even 3 year old shows that make them look like they are from 10 years ago. Meanwhile shows from the 80s look much better as long as they are torrented.

Honestly I don't have moral problem with downloading movies that are forgotten/not available by any other means.

You can't find everything on streaming services, actually. Sometimes your only hope is to find a torrent and make a "back-up".

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