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Comment by _fat_santa | Hacker News Reader

The solution to piracy is not taking measures to prevent it, but rather offering a product so pirating would seem like a terrible alternative. Take Spotify as a prime example.

When I was a kid I pirated music like it was no ones business. I didn't really stop until Spotify came to the US and signed up. For the price of $10/month, I could listen to all the music I ever wanted. Even though at that point I had a good system for pirating music, I pretty much gave up pirating music because Spotify was just so damn good.

Spotify in my eyes, rather than trying to stop music piracy, just started to compete with it.

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I felt the same way about Netflix when it first started. Now, there are dozens of competitors with different catalogues, making piracy enticing for people once again.

Speaking as a consumer, that in itself doesn't make it enticing. If there was very little worthwhile content on 1-2 platforms, maybe, but since I'm not the "binging" type who absolutely needs to see every hyped show right now, I can't be arsed and find there's already enough to see.

Between Netflix and Prime, you're not spending that much and you sure as hell don't need a dozen subscriptions to watch every good show.

I think there are still enough people who remember 2010-era Starz on Netflix (and with the massive DVD catalogue for the rest). Everything, on every single service, has been downhill since then.

I'm the same as you. I subscribe to Netflix so long as there's something I'm watching, then stop. Then I might subscribe to something else. People that complain about having to pay for all services are just power users, and I think it's fair that I don't pay as much as them.

Whether a product can compete with piracy is also context-dependent.

$10 is a paltry sum in the US. But it is really high in third world countries.

$10 can give you one healthy meal each day for half a month in suburban Indian subcontinent. The price in rural areas is lesser.

Some companies get purchase power parity and can reflect it in their pricing, and some companies either can't or don't want to do this. Some companies don't even get it.

I know of Spotify Premium modded APKs being super famous in Eastern Europe, LatAm, and South Asia. I have no hard data, but people are so annoyed with Spotify ads, and as the price is too high for them, many choose to pirate the app instead.

Spotify is 2.99 in a lot of countries.

Still much for developing countries, but services can't discount too much.

You didn’t stop solely because of Spotify. You stopped because you had $10/month as an adult. If you were a kid today and didn’t have $10/month do you think you’d be pirating like nobody’s business?

Today a ton of kids use the Spotify free tier or YouTube, letting advertisers pay that $10/month.

Also consider that this is riskier than it used to be in the 90s: plenty of kids would pirate but they know their parents’ ISP would cut them off.

Today? Likely not. Probably I'd use YT with adblock or stream on bandcamp. Add to the fact, a kid could still use Spotify with ads.

Is adblock meaningfully different from piracy? I'm familiar with the defenses of adblocking and think they have some merit, but they seem trivially extensible to piracy as well.

The more salient comparison is between piracy and spotify (with or without ads)

Adblock is not much different than getting up from the couch to make a sandwich or whatever when a commercial comes on TV. Some commercials still get through to you because you don't really need to get up and do something on every commercial break (or you can still hear them in the background). With Adblock, some ads still get through, plus in-stream product placements.

BTW, I never really bothered with adblockers until I started getting random malware infections from ads (I'd google search for some info, land on a random discussion forum, and a couple times a month my computer would immediately get infected from ads that had 0-day javascript sandbox escape exploits -- hasn't happened since I started using an adblocker) Oh, and a couple times that I left my web browser open on a page, and sometime in the middle of the night a video ad would start up blasting through the speakers. Yeah, that there drove me to using an ad blocker too.

> Adblock is not much different than getting up from the couch to make a sandwich or whatever when a commercial comes on TV.

Sure, but this type of argument-by-example is an easy way to hide both t holes in one's argument[1] and the similarities to piracy. It's also trivially extensible: "Piracy is not much different from streaming a show at a friend's house", in that somebody who had access to the media is sharing it with you.

To be clear, I've heard the principled theoretical argument for adblocking being ethical, and think it has at least some merit. I just don't understand the claim that piracy is meaningfully different. The assumptions required to consider adblocking ethical provide the same shield to piracy.

Piracy is illegal not because it is unethical, but because at some point in history some creators got rich enough to attempt to protect their profits through legislation. The action itself, the copying of information, is morally neutral. It's only illegal because, in theory, it precludes someone from making money from that copying. But that's nonsense, because by that standard it should also be illegal to not pirate and not purchase the copy.

> Piracy is illegal not because it is unethica

I'm not making this claim.

I'm saying that in the context of this thread, saying "I wouldn't be pirating in that case, I'd be using YT with adblock" isn't very meaningful because using YT with adblock is equivalent to piracy from multiple relevant perspectives, including ethically[1] and economically. The legal perspective is not an especially relevant one to this thread, since the baseline was already being comfortable enough with the level of legal threat to pirate regularly.

[1] including the belief that both are ethically acceptable. Just clarifying again, because people seem to be reading a lot of implicit claims/value judgments into my comments that are not in there

Piracy, whether torrenting or finding some other site to download files and then manage them, are a lot more hassle than simply streaming from YouTube.

There’s also plenty of YouTube videos that are basically entire albums in one. One can listen to that copyright infringing content too without even bothering to enable AdBlock. Really for all of your considerations on the legal implications, UX is king and the really the only major factor after the economic, for the end-user.

You're right, but I guess we both made the same mistake in different directions. slothtrop said

>Likely [I wouldn't pirate]. Probably I'd use YT with adblock or stream on bandcamp.

You assumed they wouldn't pirate because it's unethical, and I assumed they wouldn't do it because it's illegal. The actual reason could be entirely different.

> Is adblock meaningfully different from piracy?

It's not illegal to mute or look away when an ad is playing; delegating the task to a machine is the same thing, just more efficient.

Ah I was speaking ethically, not legally. Of course, adblocking isn't illegal and piracy nominally is.

As mentioned in the sibling comment, this argument-by-example is trivially extensible to piracy. "It's not unethical to watch media at a friend's house. Piracy is just using a machine to do this via a digital encoding instead of an analog one"

If I were a kid, I'd ask my parents to switch to a family plan, and negotiate how I can help with home chores in exchange for those extra $6/month. (Of course, very few kids actually think this way.)

I never stopped pirating for the same reason - Spotify doesn't carry the music I listen to. Anything slightly mainstream, sure. Underground?? They don't have anything.

Where do you find "underground" music these days?

Yeah, I feel like it's actually the opposite. You use Spotify/random music service to find the niche music because you couldn't find it on torrent/napster/kazaa/etc.

What about bandcamp and YT?

bandcamp is going to die soon, it just got bought out.

Why do you think Epic would want to close down Bandcamp? They are not in competition. Sure they may well pivot it away from what makes it desirable now, but I can't see them closing it down any time soon.

Large Companies like Epic don't by smaller companies like Bandcamp because they want the revenue stream that comes in from Bandcamp. They want the technology, engineers (acqi-hiring), data, or to kill possible competition. Keeping Bandcamp operating would take away from their main reasons from buying them. My personal guess is they want the technology + engineers for some new feature set they want. They won't want any bad press + they need time for planning/organizing before actually doing anything.

This is my guess of what will happen...

Steam arguably achieved this, and now MSFT is taking it a step further with the subscription model

And the "launcher wars" are finally dying down, with companies capitulating to Steam, preventing the backslide into piracy-as-more-convenient that streaming platforms are having.

Have they? I don't PC game much outside of maybe Fortnite, Halo, and now Overwatch. That's three launchers right there.

I can technically add overwatch as a game in steam but if there's ever an update for overwatch it silently breaks (spins on login) until I realize I have to open battle.net to update the game.

Microsoft (Xbox app) doesn't even allow you to access raw game files and executables without a lot of work and I don't even know a good solution today. You can make a launcher shortcut but it's just to the Xbox app with a parameter selecting the game. This does not work to add a custom game in steam. I do know they just changed functionality in this area so may be different now.

multiplayer, multiplayer, multiplayer

The music industry still makes less money then it did at its peak just before piracy

Yeah, because you bought an entire CD for that one song and the rest was filler

However the artists are still paid badly as before and the middle man still takes a large chunk from them.

But it's not the cut from the middleman that's gone down as a result (in fact there's whole new layers of middlemen), rather the variety of artists making a living wage from industry contracts. "Working musicians" are dying off; you're either a superstar, or you're living on ramen or doing it as a side gig. Overall the result is pretty bad for a society which values professional artists.

"Spotify in my eyes, rather than trying to stop music piracy, just started to compete with it." - I would extrapolate that Spotify (streaming services) went a step further than Piracy, by absolving the consumers of any guilt or wish to buy music directly from the artists. A far better model in every front.. unless you're the artist (not signed to a major label).

Does the fact that you now can afford $10/month matter at all?

Even as a kid, if you can't afford $10 a month, you're doing something wrong.

I remember a young boy, around age 10, who would go around the neighborhood offering to take people's trash to the road on Sunday for disposal on Monday mornings. All he asked was that you open your garage door by 6 p.m. so he could come around and pull your bins to the curb. He charged $5 a month.

Some of you may be thinking, "Wow, you're so lazy you can't even take your own trash to the road?"

Well I could... but for less per day than I spend on Diet Coke, I can get it done for me every month without having to worry about it and all I had to do was program my garage door to open at 6 p.m. on Sunday and close at 9 p.m.

About half the people in our neighborhood took up this lad on his offer, so he had to have been making around $200 a month or so. Not too shabby for a 10 year old boy.

It's not difficult to make money. You just offer a service doing things most people don't want to do.

I think you're overestimating how many people grew up in a neighborhood where that story was reproducible.

It's still a normal thing in high trust societies/neighborhoods. Might be worth figuring out how more trust can be developed if that's not a normal thing.

Mowing grass is a normal thing. That story sounds like it would only happen once outside of an 80s movie.

>Even as a kid, if you can't afford $10 a month, you're doing something wrong.

As a kid I didn't pay for stuff mostly because it didn't have a payment method that I'd be able to use

I used premium SMS (which were something like 3 times more expensive than direct transfer)

and later I used paysafe cards that you could purchase in local shops or I started using "forms" and sending them via post office or bank branches IIRC

Not everyone thinks trading their labor for the ability to engage in commerce is their primary function in life.

Or, hear me out, you could just pirate and not waste your time. Why should we encourage kids to work?

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