Comment by uo21tp5hoyg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by uo21tp5hoyg | Hacker News Reader

I don't pirate music, I don't pirate games, I don't pirate software, I don't pirate anything but TV and movies and the reason is simple: piracy is a service problem for me. I know where to get music/games/software, I have no idea where to get the movies and TV I want to watch, they're spread over 20 different services, 90% of which are not available in my country and the ones that are don't have that specific content available in my country, I've even ran into issues where a streaming service say they for sure have some content and I just need to sign up to start watching, great! but after signing up and paying boop nope that content isn't available in your country anymore. And even in the cases I find the content available I am treated like a pirate, use a browser without DRM support? nope go away, use a VPN even when connected to the country your payment details come from? nope go away, oh and by the way we removed that content you were watching but we still have season 1 and 2 if you want anything after that it's on this other streaming platform and no it's not in your country. Even when everything goes right I get a highly compressed stream with all sorts of ugly artifacting. Piracy fixes every single one of those issues for me so I will continue to do it without feeling bad about it. I am very willing to pay for these services by why would I if paying is an inherently worse experience? And I didn't even list all the issues I've faced with these services.

If companies don't make content available in your country, they don't have a reasonable case for complaining about piracy. You were never a customer to begin with, so no profit is being lost.

Yes, they might complain that they were going to make that content available in your country after they have extracted as much profit as possible through geofencing, which further erodes their case because then they already made more profit than they would without geofencing.

I pirate because I don't want to be tracked. I don't want Amazon, AppleTV, Netflix, building a profile on me based on my viewing history.

I feel the opposite, actually. I'm a pretty staunch privacy advocate, but the biggest thing I feel when, say, "obtaining" "through unspecified means" the latest season of Star Trek Discovery is: the studios who made this have no idea I'm watching this, and if enough people did that, it'd look like no one was watching it, so they're less likely to make a season 4.

The secondary argument is, they use that viewing history to influence the production of new shows ("people like shows set in space, lets make more space shows"). I also don't feel this is unreasonable. Ultimately this isn't tracking journalists' movements in an authoritarian regime; its entertainment. If my viewing history leads to the production of more shows I enjoy, who is losing?

Not all tracking is bad. Pragmatically, its not an open-and-shut thing, for me.

If that's what's actually happening on the back end, they're doing a pretty bad job with my recommendations. What I suspect is really happening, though, is that the data collection and analytics are being used to optimize revenue, whether it be from advertising, minimizing production costs or ascertaining just how much bullshit users will put up with, and not to build or release higher quality products. That, or the data is sold.

The same way Mozilla is removing features based on metrics? No, thanks.

> piracy is a service problem for me. I know where to get music/games/software, I have no idea where to get the movies and TV I want to watch, they're spread over 20 different services, 90% of which are not available in my country and the ones that are don't have that specific content available in my country, I've even ran into issues where a streaming service say they for sure have some content and I just need to sign up to start watching, great! but after signing up and paying boop nope that content isn't available in your country anymore.

Just as an observational aside...

I remember back in the Digg days where people were complaining about how expensive cable TV was and that they would rather pay less for access to only the specific shows/channels that they actually watched.

No judgement, I just find it interesting how things are coming full circle

It's not full circle at all.

At no point has the status quo been:

> Here is service which provides any show you want for a reasonable one-time fee for watching that show.

Instead its:

> $200/mo for all cable channels. The show you want to watch is not playing tonight.

Or:

> Here are 7 different monthly subscriptions, each costs $15/mo. One of these services will have the program you want to watch, but good luck figuring out which one. Also 10% of what you want is not available on this "$105/mo multi-subscription", because it's an international cartoon.

What people want is what Netflix had before every Tom, Dick, and Harry decided to set up their own competing company (using their own IP as "exclusives"):

> Here's a $15/mo subscription, everything you could want to watch is here.

Netflix provided exactly that for long enough that people just stopped torrenting entirely. These days people would still settle for:

> Pay $1 for every TV show or Movie you want to watch. Paying the $1 lets you rewatch that episode infinite times until forever. This service contains every show you could possibly want to watch. There is a 4K HDR, lossless-compression mode for $1 extra...you should set aside some time before watching for that to download fully so that it doesn't buffer.

You are not entitled to any movies or television shows at any quality at all because it's not your IP. If someone wants to shoot a movie and then lock it in a vault, never to be seen by anyone, Prince-style, that is their right. If they want to change it to remove and permanently memory-hole offensive elements, that is their right. If they want to release it only in certain formats, up to and including theatrical-only releases, that is their right. Because they own the copyright and hence, control over how the work is distributed and exhibited.

So take what they offer you or leave it. Anything else is a violation of the law.

I don't like the idea of running my life within the confines of IP law of another country especially considering that IP law is wholly moulded by giant corporations like Disney and not based on anything that actually makes sense for the modern provider/consumer digital world.

And breaking a law I don't agree with definitely won't keep me up at night, in fact if they catch me and force me to pay for all the content I downloaded it will still end up being a more convenient experience as I am very willing to pay in the first place.

This "violation of the law" is similar to speeding on a deserted highway: the law was broken, but no harm was done to anyone and there is no way to even check if the law was broken.

> Anything else is a violation of the law.

Oh no! Good luck enforcing that, it's worked out stellar so far.

Well I don't like the law. Should we keep it just because it's the law? That'd be committing the is-ought fallacy: https://www.txstate.edu/philosophy/resources/fallacy-definit...

I would guess the general consensus is that you should change the law, but abide by it while it's still the law.

No, the general consensus is that you should break the law when you know you won't be caught anyway.

I disagree with your statement, because IP is a human construct that was created in order to help creators profit from their works so they can create more, and of higher quality works.

It is a very expensive construct, both in public resources (e.g to create, protect, and enforce the law), and towards humanity's progress (i.e free access to books, inventions, etc would benefit the planet).

So for creators to get the benefits of the letter of the IP law, they should respect the spirit of the law, which is to give gated access to everyone.

Sorry, it's hard for me to feel sorry for an industry that moved to California to avoid patent claims.

I'm entitled to whatever I can get my hands on.

> You are not entitled to any movies or television shows at any quality at all because it's not your IP.

That's not true: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_science_and_culture and https://cultureactioneurope.org/files/2015/02/2015UNESCO--Co...

Some examples from the PDF:

> Disability advocates have long expressed concern that copyright law can impede the adaptation of works into formats functional for people with disabilities when copyright holders fail to publish works in accessible formats, such as Braille, or allow others to do so. To resolve that problem, many countries have adopted copyright exceptions and limitations allowing authorized not-for-profit organizations to produce and distribute accessible works to persons with disabilities.

> Problems of translation and linguistic barriers likewise are of concern for speakers of non-dominant languages. Copyright regimes are formally neutral regarding the language of a work. In practice, however, the results are widely disparate, as copyright protection offers little financial incentive to write and publish in most of the world’s languages. People able to speak English, French or Spanish can select reading material from millions of books; however, those unable to speak a globally used language may enjoy access to very few. The vastly unequal distribution of published literary works across languages poses a significant barrier to the right to take part in cultural life for linguistic communities not offering a major publishing market. The issue is not limited to reading for pleasure; that also impacts the ability to pursue education and knowledge, take part in debates on social and political issues and earn a livelihood as a writer.

Fair use says you're often entitled to parts of IP-protected works for the purposes of education, exposition, parody, reverse engineering, the historical record, etc.

A journalist's right to fair use of IP is often hampered by the platforms the IP is distributed under. If Google had their way, journalists wouldn't be able to use yt-dlp, or other clients, to include clips from content published on YouTube in their reporting.

> So take what they offer you or leave it. Anything else is a violation of the law.

Just because it's legal for companies to screw you over doesn't make it right or desirable. If they force us to work outside of the law to protect ourselves and our right to access and make use of our own history and culture that's what we'll do.

We are arguing if the law should work that way, not if it already does or not.

And personally, I don't think it should. The purpose of copyright law is to make it economically viable to publish creative works. Ashcanning your own work very much goes against the copyright bargain, but we don't have any legal provision to counteract it yet.

Who cares? IP is a racket. It's criminal that copyrights we're ever extended beyond the original 14 years they were supposed to last.

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