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Comment by zozbot234 | Hacker News Reader

And nothing of value was lost. If you want ad-free services, you can absolutely afford to chip in some money to the service provider, which keeps things above-board and legit. Don't be a darn cheapskate.

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A bit too judgemental.

Please point us towards an ad-free paying service that doesn't simultaneously track your profile/views/clicks? The problem at the moment is that there is no multimedia host that actually just hosts, they all track unique customer habits chasing that recommendation engine big data gravy train.

Also reminder that most copyright infringement is from non-industrialized nations where people indeed cannot afford to 'chip in some money to the service provider'.

How about no. Find another business model or go bankrupt. This rent seeking has to end.

Another business model, as in "just give sh*t away for free, without even advertisements to pay for it"? That's not going to be very successful.

You can't make a business out of everything. By the same reasoning you could argue for banning breathing because it prevents a potential canned-air market.

Because it costs money to provide services? You could not argue that with the same reasoning, because there is no labor involved for air to exist. However services need to be run by people using hardware created by other people, all of whom need to eat, which is only possible with money.

Why? This service could just as well be provided by the national weather service directly.

Why do we need a dozen companies rehashing and reselling the same public dataset?

I dunno. Make a patreon or something. Do it for love. Don't do it at all.

If you send me ads, I'll delete them. If you send me DRM'd data, I'll get rid of it. These are not acceptable business models.

So why not "Don't do it at all" for accessing the content if you do not want to pay for it? You feel entitled to receive it on your terms, but other people are not allowed to only offer something on their terms?

Sure I do, because I can and I make sure to exercise that power and freedom as much as possible. They're the ones who try to control us, using their copyrights and monopolies and lobbying to restrict our freedom and rob us of our rights. I refuse to accept that.

I don't even object to paying. I spend truly ridiculous amounts of money on stuff like this, despite my belief that copyright should be abolished and my knowledge of the fact I'm getting a worse product compared to the pirate, because at the end of the day I do believe in paying money for the things I like. You just need to have the basic decency to name your price. If you try to steal my attention and auction it off to the highest bidder as if it was your property, I will unconditionally block you with extreme prejudice.

I first had internet access in 1998 as a 12 year old without any money. It became a habit to find anything for free: mp3's on metager's "index of" searches, cracks on astalavista.box.sk, movies on IRC bots, 0 day software and games from scene FTPs, later on the whole P2P stuff like gnutella, DC++, torrent etc. and in the mid 00's the move to shared hosters. The fact that I was 12 and didn't get pocket money made me find all my stuff for free and it sticked to this day, except it's either waaaaaaay more convenient to pay a few bucks, or impossible to get otherwise.

So over the years I stopped with my 500GB MP3/AAC/FLAC music collection and moved to Spotify (Which I still hate, because there's always indie stuff that isn't available PLUS stuff they remove, without informing me!). I also stopped pirating movies for some time because of Netflix, but after the democratization of streaming services and the return to walled off exclusives on multiple platforms, I simply went back to torrent streaming. Software is another thing I ALWAYS pirate, the only exception if I use it professionally or make money in any other form by using it.

I am not proud of this, but saving a few bucks seems to be more important to me when I can. This is probably, because it has been ingrained into my brain for years as a child.

I worked in the Digital Marketing business for 10 years (AdTech and MarTech) especially working in Analytics and Data Collection and I never saw ads. Used modified youtube clients for years, uBLock Origin on Desktop AND mobile. Seeing the unfiltered web on friend's devices makes me wonder how they can even brows the web...

Blocking ads on YouTube doesn't affect anyone's bottom line except Google. Creators on YouTube only receive a small percentage of YouTube ad revinue, and most don't count it as stable income because YouTube loves to demonitize videos for no reason and you have almost no recourse once it does.

That's why every video now has embedded ads, which is something entirely different because it's controlled by and paid to the creator directly.

I don't mind giving creators money, and I'm fortunate enough that I can afford to subscribe to several of them every month. Because they deserve my money, not Google.

The data this company has put behind a paywall is the european weather model, which was developed with tax payer money, is run with tax payer money, and the data of which is almost entirely available for free to anyone that wants to access the data.

Companies like the one that posted this take down notice actually sued (!) the national weather services in a few EU countries to prevent national weather services from publishing weather data to consumers for free, arguing that the weather service should run free APIs, but these companies should be able to build ad and subscription supported apps using these free APIs.

https://www.dwd.de/DE/presse/pressemitteilungen/DE/2020/2020...

All these companies did was build a fence around it and charge a fee. How does that even reach the necessary threshold of originality for copyright?

Because they built the app... They aren't copyrighting the data. They're copyrighting their app.

An app that's a thin wrapper around public data.

Apps like this have sued the public weather services in multiple EU countries to take down the official apps, e.g., https://www.dwd.de/DE/presse/pressemitteilungen/DE/2020/2020...

Fuck private weather apps.

> Apps like this have sued the public weather services in multiple EU countries to take down the official apps, e.g., https://www.dwd.de/DE/presse/pressemitteilungen/DE/2020/2020...

Very important note here. The DWD was found by the highest court in Germany to be acting illegally.

I'm arguing that the law itself is wrong here.

I don't see any value in dozens of different, bad, private apps rehashing the same weather report data.

That the law values the rights of those companies to rent-seek higher than the right of citizens to be informed is extremely dangerous. The same reasoning could be applied to news, laws, or even firefighting.

Some services should just be provided by the state and not by private companies.

Or I can continue to not pay for them to track every single microscopic interaction I ever have with any of their systems :)

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