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Comment by Nextgrid | Hacker News Reader

I don't get the business model of a VPN. You're willingly becoming a magnet for scum, crime, piracy and malware, with maybe 1% of legitimate users.

Surely the support costs of dealing with all the constant abuse reports would outweigh the fee they are charging, not to mention the costs of running the infrastructure (if they're used for piracy they'd need quite a bit of bandwidth)?

Even if you are legally in the clear, it doesn't strike me as a business someone wants to get involved in unless there are alternative objectives they don't disclose.

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>with maybe 1% of legitimate users

I'm interested to know where you sourced that number? There are plenty of legitimate use cases for a VPN.

While I agree there is definitely users with subpar intentions, I highly doubt 99% of people subscribing to a VPN are doing it because they are 'scum'.

I mean his comment is the illustrative argument for why VPNs exist. Basically in a world where a Westerner (a historically relatively more liberal bunch) categorizes 99% of everything they don’t agree with as scum, copyright infringement, or worse - that’s all the motivation you need for safe, reliable communication infrastructure.

> Surely the support costs of dealing with all the constant abuse reports would outweigh the fee they are charging

Employing /dev/null to handle abuse reports is usually pretty cheap.

Is piracy not a legitimate usage?

Piracy is something that some powerful entities would prefer you didn't do. Some people may consider it legitimate, some don't, but from a business point of view the problem is that you still have some big guys with big budgets against you.

No, it's not. You have no inherent right to others' work. You can pay the owners' requested price or you can go without. Piracy is neither legally nor morally defensible.

You can definitely make a moral argument in favor of piracy as a form of civil disobedience. Aaron Schwartz [1] and the book Free Culture[2] are the two bigger examples that come to mind.

[1] https://cccc.ncte.org/cccc/committees/ip/ipreports/swartzcas...

[2] https://lessig.org/product/free-culture/

Lessig's point isn't what you're making it out to be. Lessening the length of copyright isn't endorsement of wholesale piracy.

Artists need food, shelter, and comfort just like everyone else. Those things cost money. Even an artist who feels a need to create needs enough funding to survive and get materials. Great works of art require funding. This is particularly true for things like movies and video games - you can have some smaller indie passion projects, but the kind of funding for AAA games or blockbuster movies doesn't just appear out of thin air - it requires a return on investment. If piracy was widespread and universally acceptable, this content would not exist.

Again, AAA games aren't a couple of passionate friends. George on the engine team doesn't want to spend 2 days hunting down an obscure collision detection bug if they're not getting paid.

Civil disobedience means accepting the consequences of your actions to affect public perception and motivate change. Using a VPN is the opposite of that.

Piracy does not even inherently inhibit the creators from getting their monetary compensation.

Nowadays, I pirate games I paid for, so I don't have to run invasive and performance-degrading DRM software that makes assumptions about current computers that might not hold in the future.

It's about convenience and archival, and the creator's compensation.

Philosophically, it's also about protesting about the nature of private property and how in many cases nowadays, a "purchase" is in fact more akin to a lease.

> nor morally defensible.

I don't think this is accurate. There are plenty of legitimate critiques against intellectual property, for example: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/intellectual-property/#Ge...

In my country, we pay a tax on all storage media which goes to content creators. We get to copy any content we legally own at the time of copying, even if borrowed from a friend or library.

So yes, I have an inherent legal and moral right to others' work as I pay for it.

its like that in germany. well not really but it was supposed to be like this but later on it got illegal to circumvent digital protection regardless how trivial it was. the fees are still in place though...

Note that OP said "legitimate", not "legal". These are not the same.

You have an inherent (natural) right to freedom of speech, which includes propagation of information. Intellectual property rights are an artificial construct that is created by society, effectively limiting freedom of speech and granting limited monopolies on distribution of certain information, ostensibly to achieve certain social goals. Both the goals themselves, and to what extent the arrangement is conductive to achieving them, is very much debatable.

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