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Comment by matheusmoreira | Hacker News Reader

Copyright holders will never be able to compete with piracy. It's impossible. Imagine what it'd take for them to actually offer a service that can even begin to compare with what copyright infringement makes possible. They'd have to pool all their intellectual property into a single holding and offer access to all of it at once.

Piracy offers us all the works of humanity, everything ever created. These copyright holders can barely manage to display episodes in the correct order in their little streaming service user interfaces.

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> They'd have to pool all their intellectual property into a single holding and offer access to all of it at once.

Reading this triggered a (for me) very interesting observation - my feelings about video streaming services are not triggered by the price, but to the scamminess of it:

I've been paying for both Apple Music and Spotify for months - and I know it - and I don't care.

Contrary I did not sign up for HBO Max even at their low offer of around $5/month for life, and it annoys me that I have two video streaming sites already.

I think it is because both Spotify and Apple Music are OK: they contain almost everything I want from commercial music, while the video streaming sites feels like an elaborate scam: pay just as much as I pay for Spotify to an increasing number of services where none of them are good.

I want creators to get paid, but I don't want to support scams, so being somewhat principled I only watch whatever I have on DVD + what is available on the services I subscribe to (and I'm planning to get rid of one) and the few that I bought from Apple.

I can clearly see why people pirate though and if I worked in law enforcement I'd probably do my best to work with something important and useful, not to support large scale scams.

What's this "scam" you keep mentioning?

You pay for netflix yet you can't watch stuff you want. You search for a film and it shows up on the search autocomplete and yet it's not there. Why? Copyright bullshit nobody cares about.

Films that used to be in your list mysteriously disappear. You swear it was there but it's not. It's like netflix is gaslighting you. Sometimes you try to watch something only to be greeted by an ominous "last day to watch on netflix" notice. You thought you were paying for a subscription but it was really a long term rental that you have no idea when it expires. They simply take stuff away. Whenever something new shows up instead of being excited you now wonder how long it will take for them to take it away too. Cowboy Bebop? I wonder how long that's gonna last.

Whatever scraps and leftovers you do get is ruined by quality issues: extremely compressed encodes, shitty video player software, cropping, changes, sometimes they can't even get the episodes in the correct order which means I'd be watching it backwards. You now wonder if what you're watching on netflix is the best version. You now wonder if the netflix version is censored or altered in any way. I find myself searching for reddit discussions on a series to see if netflix screwed it up.

You entertain the notion of paying for other services as well but you discover their apps are even shittier and they still don't have what you want to watch. You remember facts such as amazon's non-existent customer service and the industry's tendency to profile you based on what you watch. You realize that paying money to these people is a lot like being in an abusive relationship.

"This shop doesn't sell everything I want" is hardly a scam.

The scam is that it started out with Netflix being like Spotify, only even though I paid full price I couldn't see all content because I was in Norway.

Then more and more got pulled out and now if I want a full Spotify experience for video I need to subscribe to Netflix, Disney+, HBO Max, Warner, AppleTV and maybe a few more.

Not in OP's shoes but maybe they used to enjoy the convenience of being able to just watch Friends on Netflix. Or maybe they login to their Netflix on an "un-approved" device such as an Ubuntu PC and Netflix deems this bad so they get capped to 480p video streaming. Or just maybe, whatever price is deemed appropriate for a NF subscription is no match for the volumes of content available on the other side of the high seas for free.

There is a way to make piracy obsolete which almost happened in France: the Licence Globale. https://fr.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Licence_globale (content in French).

The concept is to allow the exchange of copyrighted cultural goods and collect a fee at the ISP level to finance those back.

Thank you for this. What a world we could have had if this law had passed!

I co-founded a company in 2006 which intended to do something very similar to this. We ran out of money when the economy collapsed in 2008. I’m still passionate about the idea, but it’s high-risk for a private corporation in the US to pull off.

> Imagine what it'd take for them to actually offer a service that can even begin to compare with what copyright infringement makes possible

Netflix was kinda of that for a few years (2012-2015) before the rise of streaming services. Piracy was way down (P2P not indicative of the whole picture, but good enough), during that period. Then everyone decided to make their own platforms and started taking pieces of the pie from Netflix and here we are today, where you need at least 4-5 services to get access to half a dozen show you want to watch per year, as well as requiring a VPN service if you don't want to have less than 20% of the US library in a lot of countries.

> in the correct order in their little streaming service user interfaces.

And in the correct format [1]. Made me just want to pirate Seinfeld so that I could watch it under the proper conditions, but I'm too lazy for that as Netflix is just a few clicks away.

[1] https://twitter.com/Thatoneguy64/status/1443961536079450117?

Every version of Mission Hill except the pirated one has the wrong goddamned music!

How embarrassing.

> Copyright holders will never be able to compete with piracy. It's impossible.

Legal music streaming is good enough for me. Seems a much more convenient and less fragmented ecosystem; I wish movie streaming was like that.

The only problem is "license expire" between the labels and the streamers.

My absolute favorite song suffered from this. One morning I opened Spotify, and all the songs in that album was greyed out.

It returned a couple of months later, but it's an enough of a warning.

I would love to see compulsory licensing schemes for audio and video streaming like they have for radio broadcasts. Maybe allow 1 or 2 years of exclusivity, but anything else is fair game to stream by anyone as long as they pay the license fee.

We don't need compulsory licensing; we already have piracy. Everything is already available, forever, for free, without DRM.

Some people would love to compensate the original creator. And some people would be willing to pay to be able to easily consume content legally.

The problem is that the current state of affairs is fragmented and not set up in a way that ensures that I as a consumer can be sure that I can consume said content again tomorrow.

I pay for access but am not ensured that the content I like is going to be available.

That makes piracy an option for some.

The best thing is iTunes store IMHO.

I start to listen an album via Spotify. I buy it via iTunes if I continue to listen it. If I really like that album that much, I find a lossless copy.

If I can buy a lossless copy from the original artist, I go that route first. RadioHead's leading the pack on that. I have a 24bit wav album from them.

this would be nice if artists which one can relate to had any correlation to how, and, more importantly when, society affords them their existence.

> Copyright holders will never be able to compete with piracy.

Music has proven that idea wrong. I'm part of a few private music trackers that came after oink and what.cd. They're much smaller today than they used to. Legal music streaming has made them all but obsolete for everyone but enthusiasts. They're maybe serving 200k people worldwide, if you include the language-specific ones from China, Korea etc.

Spotify alone has 172 million premium subscribers.

Movies are similar.

Yeah, if you like popular music which is what the average person consumes. If I look up some less popular artist or even a soundtrack on spotify chances are it won't be there. About a year ago I tried it, found exactly one of the about 30 works I searched for. All the stuff that gets played on the radio is there, of course. It was an immensely disappointing experience. Why pay for this crap since I'll still have to resort to youtube or something to get what I want?

What I meant by competition is they won't be able to offer higher quality and availability. They will never achieve the ideal I proposed: everything humanity has ever created at the highest possible quality. They are of course masters at being just good enough for the average consumer. Honestly that bar is pretty low.

I will never forgive them for shutting what.cd down. I consider that a crime against humanity itself that vastly outweighs whatever little profits they thought they were losing.

> Legal music streaming has made them all but obsolete for everyone but enthusiasts.

Sitting in a cafe Abu Dhabi now, a shop on the opposite side of the street has "$10 for 1000 MP3 Hitz"

I don't know who streams, when you can just download MP3s.

I do (Spotify). It's much, much more convenient, and quality is good enough.

Of course, I'm a bit concerned with the tracks "unavailable in my region" or "no longer available at all", but convenience trumps it.

As others have said, when I really like an album or something, I'll usually buy it, ideally lossless download, but a CD will do in a pinch.

It's mostly three things according to my friends who use streaming services:

1) discovery: Spotify is great at giving you more of what you like, without you needing to manage your library

2) ease of access: No need to carry around a hard drive to have everything available

3) giant catalogue: to buy MP3s at that price and have a similar breadth and depth as Spotify (or rather: what you'd use of Spotify), you'd pay a lot more.

If you just want some tunes and are happy with what's very popular, you could also stream for free from Youtube.

> They'd have to pool all their intellectual property into a single holding and offer access to all of it at once.

They could federate and rely on open protocols, but that might be less profitable.

Doesn't the success of Netflix, Spotify and the rest say otherwise?

I pirate significantly less content than before because its just easier to watch on Netflix or buy the season from iTunes or whatever.

Games and music seem to have managed to defeat piracy. And when it was just Netflix before the fragmentation and greed of the movie/tv content holders no one I knew downloaded.

They have, then came Epic Games store and we're back to exclusives.

If you want a really good example of where video games got it wrong in recent years: Metro Exodus was sold as a "pre-purchase" on Steam before it released for some time (at least a few months, could be a year). A few days before release it went exclusive on Epic Game store IIRC and you couldn't buy _or download_ it on steam anymore. After some well deserved outrage, people who pre-purchased on steam could play on steam, but you couldn't purchase it for about another year.

Metro: Exodus was the only title I pirated in the last 10 years because they took away the ability to purchase it (and I like the series and have the first two titles on steam, and I bought and read the books because of the first game).

> They have, then came Epic Games store and we're back to exclusives.

And that's why I'll never buy anything from them even if it's nice. I feel morally compelled to do my tiny part to let them (and every other steam competitor) go bust, to stave off exactly the fragmentation we see in the video streaming market.

Of course, there's always the possibility of Steam becoming evil and making all of us regret propping them up, but you know what? I'll have to live with it.

> Games and music seem to have managed to defeat piracy.

> Games

Hmm.

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