Hacker News Reader

Comment by klausjensen | Hacker News Reader

I don't pirate because I don't want to pay for content - I pirate because it is the only way I can get a lot of content.

I wish there was a global way to subscribe to and pay for content in a market/app-independant way.

If you are not in the USA, Canada or UK, your options to pay for the most popular, newest content are very, very limited. And if you are in a very small and/or somewhat impoverished country, forget about it. "Sorry, this content is not available in your region. Please go fuck yourself".

Luckily, Netflix has improved this a lot (which is why I happily pay for it), but for a lot of content, it is still impossible to consume in a legal way.

View on HN

If was to pirate I'd be doing it because I don't want to be tracked. I don't want Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, Google, whoever knowing what I'm watching, when I'm watching, how many times I watched, what parts I reviewed, etc... I don't like the idea that some computer is adding me to categories I have no control over and making judgements I neither want nor can correct nor delete nor prevent and then sharing an selling that data.

I've argued about this numerous times: ISP's need to provide customers with an opt-in p2p license that adds a small fee to their monthly bill. This monthly fee is transferred to a central authority, the ISP does not make any profit from this fee. The license would allow users to torrent whatever content they want. Torrent trackers would be fully legal, their only legal obligation would be keeping track of torrent popularity and reporting this to the central authority every month or so. The central authority that receives the money from the ISP's then forwards the money to the creators of the content being distributed, divided based on the popularity reported by the trackers. A minimum baseline amount is provided to each creator to subsidize indie and struggling creators. And obviously geoblocking should be illegal but as the media companies would be making more money if they didn't geoblock, it gives them incentive to not do that.

M-m-m... "small fee" for "unlimited access to millions of music/movie/software/game/books entities that can cost billions of dollars". How exactly it should work, again?

I think he/she means per title that you watch. Otherwise it wouldn't make sense yeah.

You realise that's exactly the model of libraries, right?

A small fee (taxation) in return for open access to literature, and in most cases music and film too.

Libraries buy the books (and movies, music, etc.).

There is snowflake's chance in hell libraries would be legal if introduced now. The only reason we have them, is they were grandfathered in from times with less corporate power.

In Spain we get the worst version of this. Media organizations (the equivalents to MPAA or RIAA) get a percentage of the price of all storage devices (hard drives, flash memory, anything) that are sold, implying that they might be used for piracy. But it's still illegal to pirate! So we're paying for something we MIGHT do, but we still can't do it.

The same is true in Belgium. But i heard there is a strange benefit: You are allowed to copy anything if the source is legally yours at the time of copying.

So person A lends some music to person B, person B copies it and returns the original to A. This scenario is legal. The nice thing is person A can be a library.

Now if person A makes a copy and gives it to person B, this is illegal, even if the end result is identical. Bits have color.

Same in Germany.

There would be no levies on storage medie. And it would be opt-in. It would only be illegal when you torrent and have not opted in to the p2p fee.

> I've argued about this numerous times: ISP's need to provide customers with an opt-in p2p license that adds a small fee to their monthly bill.

brb downloading Windows Server 2019 Enterprise Datacenter iso torrents to put into production

It worries me because P2P is a powerful censorship prevention mechanism. Requiring a license to use P2P technologies would mean disallowing much more than just torrents by default. Not only that but lots of illegal content distribution takes place on standard HTTP servers which would presumably not be considered P2P. With that said, disallowing any protocol which is currently allowed today seems like it would open the door for large corporate and governmental interests to disassemble what we know as the open internet. Furthermore it sounds like it would be complicated to deal with ownership of derivative work and resolution of disputes.

Are you purposely modeling this on how ASCAP works?

Coming from a very small and somewhat impoverished country, I agree fully with your comment. I enjoy Netflix now, and am warming up a lot to the NBA and NFL's League Pass subscriptions. These three have nailed it for me price-wise and content-wise, so much so that I'm considering switching from European/UEFA football viewing to the NBA and NFL. Outside of this, my only option is piracy - there isn't any other way.

Even in some first world countries sometimes you don't necessarily get much of the content, or so I've heard, and can't pirate either, because illegal.

Anecdotal, but atleast here in my poor country I'm less inconvenienced than when I was in Germany. I do sometimes feel guilty not being able to support the creators that make this content and often wish there was a way to donate, much more than I wish that the distributors covered my country - because they're shit.

The piracy world that torrents/hosts for free, in my experience, seem to do a far better job.

> I wish there was a global way to subscribe to and pay for content in a market/app-independant way.

The socialist party (biggest left wing party at the time, and in power 2012-2016)here in France talked at lengtht about this idea during Sarkozy's implementation of the repressive Hadopi system.

Pay a yearly fee, don't get punished for pirating, money gets redistributed. Similar but also vastly different to how we already have a specific contribution for French state medias, and then one to finance French production (movies, music,...).

It didn't get past the heavy talk part because no matter how you turn it, the abuse / unfair redistribution / increasing need unrealistic compared to usage is unavoidable.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com