I’d rather not pirate but it doesn’t feel wrong since I’m perfectly willing to pay for no-ads products if they are available.
90% of my entertainment is from YouTube Premium and I love it. The rest is HBO and Hulu with the no-ads package.
I bought Hulu Live for a show, cancelled it immediately when I realized it forced ads.
The last mile device ad interposition is going to keep pushing the boundaries until it's limited by law.
Which would be something like "hardware/software platform companies cannot own ad businesses* and must allow equal+ access to any ad bidder who wants to run an ad"
*Defined as anything more nuanced than bulk sales of ad space
+For some definition of equal
That we ever let platforms own ad businesses is the cause of so many current failures.
Then the EU steps in with another 10 chapter 99 section law “GDPR 2.0” that inflicts another banner notice that causes us to endure a cookie notice to allow cookie notices to allow cookies.
We can all meme about Jack Black together or how Chris Pratt is a weird choice.
Yes, providing only 1 payment option that comes with mandatory psychological manipulation is not a true payment option.
Do you wanna know if a character is not the killer/bad guy? He is not using an iPhone.
Meanwhile HBO lacks english closed captioning for most of its content. They give me subtitles for spanish sometimes even though it's not my native language. Not to mention the obnoxious censorship and inaccurate translations.
> With high quality subtitles and captions missing from the paid services.
I did pay for a League Pass. I still watched the illegal stream instead. The streamer would even play music over ads and put gifs and images over the in-game ads during free throws and the like.
That's freaking awesome. I wonder if one day we'll have some kind of machine learning video adblock software to do this automatically...
Here's my average Netflix experience: I want to watch X. I search X on Neflix, and learn that Netflix doesn't have it because they only have a few thousand movies which is abysmal. I then spend the next two hours aimlessly browsing the Netflix catalogue searching for something kind of similar to X, but nothing is and I have to give up having watched nothing.
Here's my average pirating experience: I want to watch X. I search X on TPB and find exactly what I want with a few seeds. Half an hour later I am watching X.
Here’s my average fraud experience. I send out a few thousand scam emails and money starts pouring into my bank account.
It's a crap analogy, not least because you don't actually have the experience you describe but I do have the experience I described above. You have not lived a life of crime, probably because you don't really believe it would go as well as you suppose in your analogy. Do you really believe that crime would be more profitable for you in the long run? Career criminals work harder and make less. They do this because they can't cope with some aspect of regular employment, like staying off drugs and showing up on time. They get caught eventually and their life becomes a ruin. If you really think you have what it takes to become one of the rare successful robber-barons who can steal your way to luxury, then you're probably mistaken. But I can get the movies I want to watch, but not with Netflix. Netflix doesn't have what I want, so I'm simply not going to pay for it. Throw all the insults you want, none of it will change anything.
Or I can just search on Google and usually find it either on a streaming service I subscribe to or it will give me a list of places I can rent it.
I will gladly pay three bucks not to have to deal with bit torrent
A concrete example: I want to watch Sharpe. Netflix doesn't have it, which isn't surprising because they never have anything I'm looking for. Amazon has it for $4 an episode at SD quality, and I have to watch it in my browser with their shitty webplayer because they're afraid I'm going to save it to my harddrive (lmao.)
So instead I pirated it and got 720p for free. It's now on my hard drive and I can watch it with my proper media player. Pirating being free is really just the icing on the cake, I might have paid $4 an episode if they would give me a DRM-free 720p downloads, but that simply isn't an option. Why isn't it an option? I can and do buy DRM-free albums from Amazon. Albums which are smaller and easier to share than movies or TV shows, yet are still offered DRM free. The TV/movie industry get away with offering inferior crippled products because not enough people know how to pirate movies. But I do, so I'm not their chump.
It had absolutely nothing to do with piracy
https://macdailynews.com/2007/02/06/apple_ceo_steve_jobs_pos...
https://www.quora.com/Is-it-legal-to-leave-ads-in-library-bo...
“Have you ever considered walking?”
Also see: “I haven’t watch TV in 20 years. Do people still watch TV?”
“Have you ever considered walking?”
If the suggested alternative was stealing another Honda Accord, that would be a reasonable question.
People want the government to step in because it’s inconvenient for them to pay for the content they want.
Do you think you can still get the TV shows you love if you evade the TV industries monetization mechanisms? Or is the plan that everyone else will continue to pay and so it’ll all be okay? Something else? What’s the end game here?
FWIW I don’t watch TV. Not because I hate the industry or out of principle but because it’s just not very entertaining to me.
There is NO WAY that I'm going back to ad based streaming, or TV for that matter. If I forget to login to YouTube, or have to watch local TV programming with ads I get super angry, it is god damn awful. It's offensive and obnoxious.
One interesting thing I have notice, in regard to YouTube: While some channels are absolute garbage, professional YouTubes have better storylines and better editing that national broadcasters in Denmark. There's one or two good shows, but modern programming on Danish TV is terrible. There's no sense of storytelling, there are jump-cuts everywhere and camera handlings is subpar to be honest. I am amazed what some YouTubers are able to produce, it's well researched, it's filmed beautifully, storytelling right on point and the editing is just beautiful. Not saying that there isn't a lot of low budget and low quality, but when a channel like Bald and Bankrupts was able to outshine a national broadcast on all measures that matter to me, on a weekly basis, there's something wrong.
Me too, if I pay for it. If I don't...toss up.
Tubi has a ton of content and the ads don't bother me much. Short and far between.
Redbox(free) on the other hand can go straight to hell. I don't see how anyone watches that.
document.querySelectorAll('video').forEach(v => v.playbackRate = 1.5)It’s up to content creators to create business models that work for them, but I really don’t care if they pick one that doesn’t work for me.
I also lost interest in their content, but in theory if I still had interest I would think nothing of pirating it.
What I mean when I say private property "fails" is that it is not a useful concept to us as a society in cases like this. The consumption of goods of the aforementioned type are nonrival, meaning my consumption of it does not interfere with your consumption of it. That's why it doesn't really matter.
Should libraries be allowed to purchase content and then ignore DRM? How about watching YouTube videos of video games you haven’t purchased. This stuff doesn’t have some universal answer everyone will agree with.
PS: As for pay for value, people also create value for me by living their life and paying taxes, that doesn’t somehow create an obligation for me to give them money.
Sure debate is fine. Changing laws is fine. Just deciding for yourself that you get to break laws because you want to watch a show is not fine.
> At best you can argue the right to restrict access to content the same way people used to argue in support of slavery.
Not really, because enslaving people doesn’t have the same moral implications as copyright. I don’t even begin to see how you can draw a comparison.
> that doesn’t somehow create an obligation for me to give them money.
Yes it does, through paying your own taxes that creates value for them.
In practice that’s how all laws work. What percentage of people always drive the speed limit? Hell what percentage of laws have you actually read? In practice people just don’t care about most laws.
> enslaving people doesn’t have the same moral implications as copyright.
Having different moral implications changes the debate but doesn’t mean you can skip the debate.
> Yes it does, through paying your own taxes that creates value for them.
That assumes we are in the same country. It’s easy to harm people by paying taxes where they benefit you by paying their own taxes. The world is complex with wars and pollution but also medical research etc.
Imagine if you managed to change the law and the companies decided to do whatever they wanted regardless. I’m sure you would complain about that, yes?
I declare all copyright laws are hereby abolished.
Of course laws are actually imposed on others, which is why they have zero moral weight. Laws are simply an imperfect reflection of society and all it’s issues.
PS: Do you think companies actually follow the all laws as written?
To your PS, I do believe companies break the law, and I complain just as much when they do. IMO anyone pirating content, on some perceived notion that they are acting ethically, lose all standing to complain about lawbreaking by corporations or others who may rationalize breaking the law under their own ethical framework (e.g. it’s ethical to break the law if it means more profit for myself).
That’s a mismatch between how you want the world to work and how the world actually works. If you realize companies are going to ignore the law then getting update about it is no more rational than complaining about gravity.
> In America, laws aren’t imposed, they are implemented via a democratic process
Being the outcome of a democratic process doesn’t somehow prevent them from being imposed. As to voting or running for congress, residents of DC elect a non voting member of congress which has exactly as much power as you might imagine. They then can’t create local laws without approval from the members of congress who can actually vote.
Congratulations, you are a member of the least democratic democracy in the world today. So even by your standards it’s laws have no moral weight.
Trying to dismiss arguments without backing them up just shows how hollow your argument is.
I’m actually in favor of drastically limiting copyright. But when pirates engage in such lawless behavior and rationalizations, it makes the idea almost impossible as a credible political project. Piracy does far more harm to reforming copyright than you apparently can see. You’ll never be able to build a political coalition through insolence. Because I can guarantee you, the insolence doesn’t end even if copyright was successfully reformed to meet your expectations. Pirates would still engage in piracy, because it’s never been about principles; it’s about pirates not wanting to pay money for things they want. They would still rationalize their behavior with self-serving notions like “I’m not hurting anyone”.
I don’t want to reform copyright I want to end it because the harm exists if copyright is for 70 years or 70 days the same incentives exist. Look at divorce rates for an idea of just how harmful copyright is.
As to the law being some meaningful moral guideline read up on civil asset forfeiture or slavery both of which where enshrined by the near democratic institutions you hold up as somehow an arbiter of what is just.
Why? "Fine" vs "not fine" is not 1-to-1 with "legal" vs "illegal", clearly.
There's a bizarre assumption in the wording of this sentence. If I can not pay to watch a specific thing I would like to watch without ads, I am going to pirate it, regardless of what volume of other things there are to watch.
But why? Why does your desire to want to watch something override the creator's right to distribute their content how they see fit? The fact that you have other options means you don't have to be subject to ads if you don't want to. So it seems to me the choice is watch media and not be subject to ads, or watch other media and be subject to ads. You seem to imply there is a third option, that you get to do whatever you want regardless of anyone else's rights or desires. If everyone thought that way, society wouldn't work.
Perhaps the desire exists exactly through ads :)
If the creator planted the idea into your head of watching a show, isn't it your right to consume that show as you see fit?
You conveniently left out the part where the creator effectively shoved the content in my face.
Intellectual property does not have this same set of properties to the same degrees, and it is not useful to equate the two implicitly without attempting to account for this obvious and monumentally large difference.
What is left is the realm of pure money theory, which certainly has real effects and is worth considering/debating. But it has nothing to do with "that's my property", except in the legal context, which is static at any given point in time and can not be argued (i.e. we can't argue whether it is illegal to distribute IP without permission - it's a fact).
(Copyright is after all something we as humans have made up, and thus should be up for discussion)
I offer product "A" with defined conditions attached. It may be as simple as "it's 100% yours for $X", and anything beyond that. If we both agree to the conditions, you get the product. If you disagree with my conditions, then you don't.
That's where piracy falls apart ethically, IMO. Proponents argue "well it's not technically 'stealing' by the definition", "I would buy it if [it were cheaper; it were released sooner; it didn't have DRM; it didn't have X restriction, etc.]", but in the end all those arguments fall apart for the very simple reason stated above. Namely: the creator has the right to sell it with any conditions they see fit, and if anyone disagrees with them, their resource is to not buy/enjoy the product, NOT to take it by other means.
It would be like if people tried to restrict the functionality of Star Trek matter replicators for entertainment purposes. It makes sense economically for those individuals, but it's fallacious in a "common sense" context.
> Imagine if everyone acted this way?
This is basically deontology by Immanuel Kant. Not everyone is a Kantian though, so this is why you see a clash of your personal ethics with those of non-Kantians. I don't think you're going to convince anyone through messages on HN (similarly those who are non-Kantians will not convince you, as you are seeing in your replies), just as I would not be able to convince an anti-abortionist about the opposite views.
These ethical frameworks are so basal to our belief structures that if one disagree with someone else on these grounds, it is basically irreconcilable.
I imagine paid services may improve to compete. Regardless, the actual implication is fallacious. "One should only do what would cause no harm if every human did it" is not only unrealistic, but moot as long as not everybody is actually doing it. There's no intrinsic [im]morality in it.
Family members use my subscriptions far more than I do.
The other nice thing about premium is that you can background play on mobile.
I’d pay 3x for these features. I guess I shouldn’t let YT know that though.