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Comment by yangez | Hacker News Reader

Wow. His simple tone belies the brilliance in his writing here. I seriously doubt he just spent 5 minutes scribbling this out as an afterthought. He gets a few key ideas across:

- he doesn't understand torrenting and so is helpless against it

- he cares about his viewers more than taking advice about DRM

- the video is owned solely by him and not some soulless corporation, and you're directly hurting him by torrenting

- you'll destroy his faith in mankind if you torrent

- five dollars is nothing compared to all that!

All of which combines to make you feel like a huge asshole for even considering pirate bay - in the nicest possible way. This type of thing makes a lot more sense than DRM in his case, and I bet it's a lot more effective too.

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This is especially seen in the alert you get after clicking the 'What is this?' button.

"It's nothing, I just wanted to say hi! Hope everything is going well for you!"

I like this self-referential bit on the Terms and Conditions page (in the Disclaimers section):

https://buy.louisck.net/terms-and-conditions

"WE DO NO PROMISE THAT THE SITE OR ANY CONTENT, SERVICE OR FEATURE OF THE SITE WILL BE ERROR-FREE"

Indeed. But I am curious what would happen if a lot more people did this. Would such an appeal lose effectiveness?

Definitely. The only reason I bought it was to support DRM free content, not because I was actually particularly interested in it. If this was standard practice I would not just be buying for the novelty. That said, I definitely think it is possible to build a scalable system that works, it just needs some innovation.

The answer to that is complex, but worth considering what happens without it. A perfect example would be the Bill Hicks guest appearance on David Letterman that was not allowed to air because the material was considered too sensitive.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkptz2YfZik

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vf340K_Ed0o&feature=relat...

I fullheartedly support comedy as a form of free speech that should not be influenced by sponsorship.

Remember: Nothing is free. If something is "free", that's because it's you that's being sold.

I agree, he obviously understands the entire issue much much better than most artists.

Damn, I would've bought it if not for requiring PayPal. I don't have an account or want one.

You don't need an account, you can just use PayPal as a CC processor.

You appear to be right. My mistake.

You haven't needed a PayPal account to pay through PayPal since at least 2005. Unless the merchant disables "Account Optional", it's just a run-of-the-mill credit card payment form with an option to log in to the side.

But PayPal makes it as inconvenient as possible for non-members. The form is extremely long and if I recall correctly, doesn't work with Safaris Auto-Fill feature.

First world problems, huh?

Holy shit. Typing in your address is hard work. Fuck that guy, who does he think he is, asking me to use PayPal to buy his shit? What an asshole.

"Extremely long"?

- Credit card number/expiration/code

- Billing address

- Name, e-mail and phone

That's all it asks. That's exactly what everyone else asks for. The merchant can even pre-fill all these fields but the card info before sending the buyer to PayPal if they filled them out on the merchant's website already.

It's especially weak to make such a complaint based on your "recollection" while you're two pages away from the actual payment form for Louis' show.

From the link: "And just to be clear, you don't have to join PayPal to do this. You can do it as a one-time thing."

Why is he down-voted?

He didn't want to join paypal, fair enough.

He didn't know he could pay with paypal without joining it, now he knows it.

Other HN-ers might see this post, realize they don't need paypal, and go back to buy the video.

IMO this shouldn't be down-voted.

p.s. I know I could have just upvoted it instead of writing this useless post (Which I'd understand if you downvote me by the way), but I thought my point would be clearer with a message rather than a battle of upvote/downvote.

It's not worth complaining about a couple of karma points when I have thousands. And to be fair they downvoted me before I realized my mistake.

I'm not familiar with this artist, but I wanted to see it out of simple curiosity because he seems to be an artist who puts fans ahead of profits. People like that usually produce high-quality work.

Oh, it's not about the karma. Downvoting is more a message saying to everyone: "This is not a good post".

Because about 50 words after "pay with paypal" is a separate two-sentence paragraph dedicated to saying "you don't have to make a paypal account".

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