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Comment by grishka | Hacker News Reader

Best thing about piracy is that not only is there no ads, it's that you don't have to even think which streaming service has the particular show/movie you want. You also get to watch it on any device of your choice, in any player of your choice, completely offline. And you get to take screenshots. And it's free. I simply see no reason to ever pay for movies and tv shows — you pay money AND get a worse experience.

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It's fiddly, though. You need to pay for a VPN (and try to pick one you can trust, which if you're even a bit paranoid is none of them) or your ISP will shut off your service (happened to me), if you require subtitles there's additional hassle & they're not even always available, quality is sometimes an issue and fake or mislabeled torrents exist.

I got tired of screwing around with it and decided 50 cents or less a day per service was worth not having to. As a side bonus, I get exposed to a lot of things I otherwise wouldn't know existed.

Usenet is worth the price. Sure, you can still VPN if you're super paranoid, and sure, things get DMCA'd (slowly and inconsistently), but with the fairly easy OSS automation out there (radarr, et al, and sabnzbd in my case) everything runs very smoothly (and way faster; I can saturate my gigabit connection for nearly anything regardless of popularity).

The funny thing about subtitles is that there are many, many cases where you can find bootlegged subtitles for content that don’t even exist on the paid streaming service that provides that content. The streaming services seem to be getting better about this, especially for new content, but there is still a vast library of content on e.g. HBO in the U.S. that doesn’t even have Spanish subtitles.

We're probably a couple years away from some AI service that actually translates with character's voices. Heck probably even adjust the mouth visual too.

I'll support A.I. that translates those characters' voices with different mouth visuals per language. That would be convenient for people who get distracted by subtitles and characters' mouths not matching words to different languages.

I'm pretty sure I've found bootlegged subtitles that are just machine translations of official subtitles in the original language. And YouTube's speech-to-text automated captioning is actually pretty good with single speakers in English with good audio production, enough so that I often use them to follow along with videos.

Yes. It's enormously frustrating that I can not pay Netflix, Google, Hulu to deliver me content in a language other than English. Google's own support pages seem to indicate that if I did do a locale switch to, say, France, that this was a fiddly process and that I would lose all my purchases if I switched it back.

Physical media on Netflix DVD, however, still work just fine and tend to have English and French and often Spanish.

Also, a much larger catalog that hasn't been diced up by license holders.

I have an IPTorrents account (private tracker) that I have heavily used for over 10 years without any VPN. Haven't gotten a single DMCA.

> You need to pay for a VPN

Not where I live. We instead use VPNs to access websites blocked by the government.

None of this is true with private trackers.

Well, there are plenty of benefits for all kinds of criminal activity, they just share one common drawback.

I liked Pirates of the Caribean I, II and III !

Having to remember to use a VPN? Hardly a drawback.

Well, there are really two drawbacks. Personal risk (which, as you say, can be well-mitigated) and the externality of other people being less well-off. Yes they could choose to make things that aren't copyable instead of things that are, but most jurisdictions have structures telling them that free copying of the thing they're making won't be tolerated.

I was talking from a purely mechanical perspective.

Myself and several friends have several vpns and as we can mostly use up to 5 devices we share the logins, as required.

Pirating is not a criminal activity in my country.

It likely isn't a criminal activity in your country either.

Considering that HN slants heavily in the direction of the US, I'm not sure the latter statement is that accurate.

It's civil, not criminal in the US. Nobody's going to jail for copyright infringement.

You just might get a crippling fine.

Copyright infringement may or may not be criminal. While it may technically be for the operators of the streaming services, it is a civil matter from a user standpoint.

In this case the drawback is the off chance you get a strongly worded letter from your isp you can throw away

Yes now all I have to do is trudge the internet for content, make sure my Plex server is running, wait for content to be available, hope it’s popular enough that it is being seeded. Then have to worry about the quality.

Or I can just pay a few bucks and watch what I want on any of my devices.

But quality varies, subtitles are an issue, and sometimes the movie isn't complete and sometimes it doesn't match the title at all.

I still prefer reasonable paid alternatives

Yes it’s a better experience but so is getting money by robbing someone over working 40 hour weeks. I’m not saying the two are the same because piracy is effectively victimless (at least in the short term).

You're not robbing someone because you're not depriving them of anything.

You can make a case for the idea that if art is not paid for then you’re eventually stealing from content creators.

It's one of those weird things where if everyone chose the superior experience it would cease to exist.

That hasn't always been the case, though - for many years, I put away my parrot and eyepatch and rented or bought content because it offered the best experience, even though it cost a little money. Only recently has piracy again become the least unpleasant way to consume content, and it's not because piracy has become any easier.

Only for certain modes of that experience:

there is already far more content than I will ever be able to consume in 50 lifetimes.

My distaste for a lot of contemporary cultural products aside (I'm okay if they never make another episode of Cheers or MASH, but I can see how that would happen if the creators weren't being paid for that), it feels likely to me that if commercial media ceased production I still wouldn't run out of stuff to watch even if I lived longer than I expect.

I am perfectly fine with that outcome as it would mean a reset on how IP is delivered and owned.

When there are convenient options which respect users, piracy goes down. It’s as simple as that.

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