Comment by reificator | Hacker News Reader

Comment by reificator | Hacker News Reader

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> I don't buy it, the OP's first instinct was to see if they can pirate it. Only when they couldn't, did they pay for it.

I feel like this is intentionally ignoring the previous lifetime of experience which led to the OP's decision to attempt to pirate first.

After Google Play Music was announced to be shutting down a few years ago I've been trying to rebuild a (legal) lossless music collection. It's shocking how difficult it is to find some tracks and artists in a lossless format legally.

Some CDs I used to own years ago are now going for $250 used. Sites like HDTracks have apparently never heard of those bands, there's no Bandcamp site, the band site now redirects to facebook, all I can buy is 160kbps mp3.

Some CDs I used to own are available for $6.99, but it's the George Lucas style remastered content where they changed the lead-in and chorus and everything sounds wrong.

And that's not to mention the disks I still own that are copy protected. Sure I'll just pop this CD into my new car.... Oh wait it doesn't have a CD drive because it's 2020 and why would the manufacturer even consider including one? Is it okay to copy that CD? Why or why not?

So I still can't listen to some of my favorite bands, on whom I've spent $$$ on merchandise and concerts and their original CD releases, because I'm restricting myself to following the law. I cannot begrudge someone for choosing to pirate in the slightest.

I can understand pirating content you've bought and I'm sure there are a bunch of people who only pirate because of this reason, but the OP flat out admits that this is their first ebook they've bought. What possible lifetime of experience could they have had?

personally, i hardly consume movies/tv shows anymore. if i did, i'd likely pirate them nowadays. I did use netflix when it actually had content through vpn. They removed that (as well as almost all content) which made me terminate that sub. I dont really miss these shows that much, but if i did... i most certainly wouldn't subscribe to several portals jumping between just to figure out where is what and how much time i've got to watch it to the end before they're removing the content again.

i think you gotta realize that at least a lot of people dont really pirate to save money. they pirate because they cant be arsed to deal with the shitty other platform that are plain inferior and take way too much effort to figure out.

wrt books/ebooks: i actually do occasionally buy them on amazon, drm be darned. but i dont actually try to create an archive either. thats the big difference - if you actually wanna keep what you read/watch available forever... you just gotta pirate it. there is no other way. a lot of people enjoy building an archive. they're all forced to pirate almost everything.

> a lot of people enjoy building an archive. they're all forced to pirate almost everything.

Not just enjoy, many times you'd have to if you want to keep your citations and annotations. Otherwise it's the same type of fiascos over and over again

from last year: Microsoft's eBook store: When this closes, your books disappear too https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-47810367

Well, the article does describe another way. I’ve been buying ebooks and stripping the DRM for years just so I can have an archive. It sucks, but I feel it’s worth it to support the authors (I recently switched from kindle to kobo, under the impression that this process would be a little improved - but it’s not).

However, for TV and movies, I find the pay site experience to be too poor (last I checked you couldn’t even stream from Amazon video if you run Linux). So I pirate everything.

I think Bandcamp is the perfect site for purchasing music. They’re transparent about what they pay artists and labels, and a purchase nets you unlimited streaming plus DRM-free downloads. This is the model the sellers of these other mediums should be following. I buy a lot of music, all because bandcamp is so great.

It was their first time ever buying an ebook so they didn't have a lifetime of experience in buying an ebook. The first time they buy an ebook legally they become filled with moral outrage about how dreadful DRM and write a blog post about how they'll never buy one again. It's just utter self serving hypocrisy.

Yeah why is this post on here at all? Why does it have so much discussion?

“Imma pirate something. Whoops doesn’t work. Well I’ll pay for it. What?!? DRM?!? In my computer?!?”

>It's just utter self serving hypocrisy.

I would say your post is reality-denial.

His experience was shit, total shit. Knowing his experience, I would avoid the site he chose like the plague. But now, let me ask you this, should I test each and every ebook retailer to try to find one that isn't shit, paying every time?

Should customers start maintaining their own index of which ebook providers are shit? Who pays to have someone go back and check them all once a week to see if they've changed their behavior since the last $7 purchase to check their DRM practices? Should customers pay a monthly subscription to some kind of digital mystery shopper service to find out who's webstores are just the fucking worst?

Your customers have _no_ reasonable path to control over shitty DRM practices. The only person in this entire conversation who has influence is Turukawa, because Turukawa is an author, and gets to choose who sells his books.

Bad news everyone: piracy exists, and provides a pretty great user flow. If authors want people to not pirate ebooks, they need to demand a not shit ebook option that /has a strong brand of being not shit/. Yeah, short term that might be really hard. Maybe authors need to form some kind of union and demand better from their publishers.

Because customers don't care. You can rant and rave about how they're immoral subhumans stealing from the mouths of authors children all you want, but piracy still exists and it's a much easier way of getting high quality ebooks that work on all platforms and devices. It's not the customers fault that zlib has a better reputation than your ebook retail partners, nor is it zlibs.

Publisher offers product inferior to what you can get for free. Confused why nobody buys product, makes product shittier.

https://xkcd.com/488/

Some of the CDs I bought to rebuild came with `.mp3` downloads on Amazon. I thought "Oh sure, I'll download these since some of these disks are taking over a week anyway I can listen to these in the meantime."

I went to download an album and was immediately greeted by a popup saying I could only authorize three devices or something and asking which device I was downloading for. Well... I'm downloading from a laptop but I'm going to mostly be listening from a phone, how do I even authorize either device?

Fifteen minutes of reading later I closed the tab and waited for the disks to arrive in the mail, since I can do whatever I damn well please with my ripped .FLAC files.

Google Play Music is still holding my collection.

I can redownload the files I uploaded as FLAC, but they download as lossy files. I don't think I can get at the originals.

Plus my playlists are full of tracks that were available in Google's subscription service that I didn't upload.

My account isn't ready to transfer to yt music yet, but I'm already dreading it. Yt music streams at a lower bitrate, and you cannot download the highest quality (but you can stream it??)

Also, the thumbs up/thumbs down buttons are switched in the yt music ui vs GPM. Bad ux across different products... Par for Google, I guess.

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