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Comment by zeruch | Hacker News Reader

I already torrent some Netflix content for fear of them removing it after some set date arbitrarily (e.g. Gloria, Umbrella Academy)

Netflix as far as I'm concerned, is just the newest member of "Big Content" with essentially the same behaviors except they are 'streaming first'...beyond that, no different.

Like Google, they will eventually forget everything that made them appealing in the first place and be trash, with the commensurate backlash to go with it.

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Those dates are almost always not arbitrary. They're usually due to licensing and distribution agreements. Not trying to dissuade your from torrenting, but it's disingenuous to call those dates arbitrary. They're the simple reality of being in the content business, even originals aren't always fully vertically integrated, but that's certain the direction the industry is moving.

Is there transparency of these dates to the Netflix clients? If not, it is from that perspective pretty arbitrary.

I'm not being disingenuous, and "the reality of the content business" is mostly arbitrary in many ways (I worked in anti-piracy for years in an irony to trump all ironies, and the industry is on a good day, a bad sub-plot from an episode of Entourage).

Those licensing and distribution agreements are often opaque to the public, and the industry has helped to create a consumer fickleness that perpetuates the bad habits all around.

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