I’ll admit I don’t understand how people can ethically pirate content. I dislike a lot of business models but I just don’t feel right calling them “silly” and looking for ways to take things I know I don’t have the right to take.
Ok, uh, what's it called now? HBO Go? HBO Now? Oh, HBO Max, ok. I live in Japan now, so I'm region-blocked, great. Time to open the VPN. HBO already seems to know that server #1243 is a VPN, but server #849 works OK for now.
Ok, time to create an account. "Account with that email already exists"? Ok, so let's log in using my old HBO Go credentials. Looks like there's some kind of account migration problem and the account is stuck in the "account verification" phase but I can't get it to send me a new verification email. There's a little pop-up chat window for the support team, let's try it. Three separate support agents and thirty minutes later, I have a working verification email. But my payment information is out of date. OK, let's update it. HTTP 505 error. Wonderful.
Ok, that's enough: Type "West Wing season 1 episode 1" into Google. Thirty seconds later I'm watching in full HD and there's popcorn in the microwave.
People have no problem to pay, but driving into the city to buy a cd then convert it so you can listen to it on your ipod......or eMule?
I love it that they are resistant to learn anything from the past.
I pay for Prime and Netflix but I still often torrent shows from those services because of the stupid widevine drm level restrictions on quality/resolution. I guess you could say that’s not piracy then but I’m sure I’ve got things downloaded that are no longer on their catalogues so it’s hard to know.
When Netflix had 70% of the media content you’d want I was very happy to be a paying customer but now I’m mostly a begrudgingly paying customer as the cost goes up the the library shrinks. Everyone wants their piece of the pie right now and I don’t doubt they’re going to consolidate to some extent after the winners and losers are decided but it sucks ass that the ecosystem has become so fragmented.
Also having the raw files makes it easier for me to sync up watching with my fiancé who is currently abroad. She pays for Netflix in the UK but even when both libraries have the same content the UK version often has different intro credits which makes syncing difficult.
I guess the overall crux of my issue with the business model is that I can pay $15 a month to access X service and get hundreds/thousands of movies and shows or Something like $20 a season for a show which could end up being hundreds of dollars for just one show. The economics really just break down for me since they price owning a digital copy against physical. Ironically physical copies will end up getting discounted at retail because things have to move but the digital copies won’t. Also in many cases even owning a copy digitally doesn’t give you the ability to dictate where you use it/give you a raw file.
I just want things to work the way I need them to, however that manifests and the only way to do that is with the video files themselves and any barrier or artifice between them is a problem.
How do you know if you have a right to take them?
If it's according to the law, then your ethical stance changes with the wind. E.g., you would believe you have a right to derive new music by taking a chord progression from your favorite song, but not by taking the melody. Worse, the rich history in the U.S. of building new songs out of old chord progressions was preferred to taking melodies chiefly because it was illegal to take copyrighted melodies and put new chord changes to them. So your ethical stance would change depending on whether you happen to be reading the notes that are stacked vertically on the page (i.e., a chord), or horizontally across it (a melody). That's ethically incoherent.
If it's according to your own ethical stance, you have to explain what that stance is. E.g., are you ethically opposed to circumventing a company's API to download content in a way they didn't intend? Are you opposed to someone accepting a flash drive from a friend that has their friend's favorite music on it? Someone pasting their big fat head on indy content and reposting as a "reaction video" to steal views? I happen to think these aren't all covered by the same ethical rule, but maybe they are.
If someone says “This is $5.” And if I don’t pay them $5, then I feel like I don’t have a right to it. If it takes paragraphs of text to explain why despite not paying them $5 I have a right to take it, then I feel like I don’t have a right to take it.
Same goes with Movies and shows. I have Netflix and PrimeVideo subscriptions but the overall quality they provide is trash as against 4K ripped HEVC releases with 10bit audio and better subtitles which you can watch in whatever player you want.
Moreover, the current state of copyright gives a few large corporations enormous power to shape our culture. The stories of our time should belong to us well before we're dead, but copyright lasts well past one human lifetime.
And as others have mentioned, sometimes there is no price you can pay to legally watch something, for reasons that are truly "silly" to anyone who isn't profiting from the international balkanization of distributors. Like the Great British Baking Show on Netflix: it's actually Great British Bake Off, and you can't watch the original in the US. Good luck finding anywhere to watch Grand Designs (from any locale) in the US without ads, no matter how much you'd be willing to pay. There are many examples of shows from UK, Australia, and New Zealand that aren't available in the US at all, and probably vice versa, let alone the rest of the world.
If you don't want someone to copy your data without charge then find a better business model.
1. Stream 2. Purchase 3. Rent 4. Catch on tv 5. Subscribe to an american streaming service using a vpn (requires an american credit card, and while there are services that allow to get a pseudo prepaid card the costs of it all are huge)
I can however pirate it.