Welcome to Hacker News where everyone makes $500k/year and nobody pays for content. Or at least it feels that way sometimes. I don't make that much money but I also don't pay for content.
I go to e.g. the South Park website, and I'm greeted by an error message saying they're "working hard to resolve [their] pre-existing contractual obligations," which is the same message they've shown for years. Thanks for trying, I guess, but if I pirated it then I'd just...watch the show, from start to finish, with all seasons and all episodes, no wasteful physical media, no subscription, no data collection, and no ads. That sounds good. I want to be able to pay money, maybe even quite a lot of money, and do that.
Downloadable, ad free, and DRM free. Music has been selling that way for decades. I've spent thousands on that kind of media, I'd have spent 10 times as much if it had been made available that way. Some people purchase a controlled versions to atone for their pirating sins but that just rewards consumer-hostile business models, and most of the money goes to middle-men that only add negative value to the product they're selling.
Most of the time I watch things once, so I rent it if it's not on a platform I subscribe to. Generally then I can watch it on my tv, ps4, phone, computer, whatever.
Consider that money spent on these products are an indication to studios about what people like. Movie studios, production companies, they make stuff they think they can sell for a profit. I suggest that you try renting movies or buying ones you like. If you run into a situation where one of your concerns comes to life, I think it would be very reasonable to pirate something you've made a good faith effort to pay for. This is kind of how I started and now for the most part I rent/buy with some exceptions. Still downloading some trash tv shows.
Most, if not all, things I've downloaded, which isn't much, I've either rented before, seen on TV or in a theater, or have been on one of the streaming services I pay for at some point. Does that cover me ethically? Some people seem to think so. I personally don't care either way and not a single person on this planet is any worse off for my lack of concern.
Actually it's kind of easier than torrenting and copying files around to various devices I want to watch it on.
(That being said, I do have access to cable television, netflix, and amazon prime streaming as well as the piracy setup, so people are getting paid. I'm not going to go buy a bunch of old red-dwarf and dilbert DVDs though, they just take up too much space)
But I'm so jealous of the user experience for people who buy into a $5/mo plex and get better service than I'm paying for. IMO, that's broken.
So much time wasted, figuring out what service to watch something on, dealing with content ads, bad user interfaces... having content vanish and become unavailable, etc.
I don't even watch much video, but it's still way too much of a sink on my time.
My intent is that someone somewhere reads this and decides to let me buy their damn content. It's not a justification, it's an appeal. Put your album on bandcamp. Put your game on itch/gog/your own website/humble bundle, preferable without intrusive DRM. I have no idea where you'd put a movie or TV show, but there's probably some place.
Please.
In my opinion, the most practical solution is to buy things (for the ethics) and then crack the DRM anyway (for usability).
I don't mind throwing down some cash, but I'm not going to throw down cash just to get fucked over.
Back to discussion, I agree that saving money could apply to almost anything. However my first point is that, in my opinion, there's a material difference between digital piracy and stealing a car. If I possess a car, nobody else can own it. However with digital media, I'm making a copy of something that has zero impact on anybody else's ability to own their own copy of that data. The only thing that's lost is my physical storage space that could've stored something else, but that's my call to make.
A second point is that I mainly pirate things I wouldn't have bought otherwise. I still watch movies in theaters because I can't pirate a theater experience (AMC A-list is great if you enjoy watching in the theaters IMO), I still buy modern games because I'm extremely cautious when it comes to running executables.
A third point is that ethically, I consider supporting a mega-corporation like Amazon worse than committing piracy. Mega-corporations commit much more morally heinous actions, and at an enormously greater scale, than an average pirate would ever commit. In my opinion, the moral sin is not that pirates commit piracy, it's that mega-corporations have been given almost free rein to shape and exploit our society as they see fit
Pay $10,000 for a KIA that can only goto McDonalds and Burger King, then buy a $15,000 chevy that's the only car that works on the road to to work, then pay $5,000 for a ford that is the only vehicle that will take you to Burger King and the Apple store, but it stops every 5 minutes to show you the same ad repeated 3 times, and the only car that will take you to grandms's house is $30,000 and for some reason it requires 12 cars worth of parking spots. Taco Bell will only be accepting Mazdas starting in August, so you've got to decide what you want to do about that. Also there's no cars you can buy at any price that can go anywhere you want. Nobody sells the lamborgini you can drive anywhere for free.
Anyways, that's why pirating is good.
They may also ship to you internationally.
Just looking at a couple of shows that I watched a year ago, I couldn't actually find any of them on Amazon.de. And actually, only found one on Amazon.com, where it was unavailable. Also, the Chinese version for some reason?