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Comment by alextgordon | Hacker News Reader

<rant>

So then, what if I am willing to pay for it?

I would very much like to watch US TV shows. Preferably on a computer, since I don't have a TV (but on TV would be a good effort too!) Unfortunately, somebody has decided that I am not allowed to.

If try to buy Hulu Plus, I am greeted with a nice message telling me to fuck off back to where I came from. Same with Netflix. Hell, I can't even watch a 2 minute clip of the Daily Show without resorting to browser gymnastics.

So I pirate US TV shows. Mercilessly. I can't see a downside. If the piracy has no effect on their profit margins, then we continue to get great TV content. If they go bankrupt, then some people who I violently despise lose their jobs. It's win/win!

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Why do you feel entitled to it in the first place? It isn't your god given right to watch community in hd at the drop of a hat. If the old gaurd isn't providing what you want then don't buy their stuff. Use your money to invest in services that ARE paving the way to the future. If the profit margins on the industry are as large as people say, it should be a race to the bottom, just like you see with artists self distributing these days.

I may be wrong, but most of the reasons that I can't watch community in HD At the drop of a hat is because our gov. can't figure out a deal with the US gov. on rights.

I would gladly pay double the price for Netflix Canada if the service was as good as it is in the states. I don't mind paying for something if it provides me a good service, but it doesn't. Netflix canada is a steaming pile.

So, "Use your money to invest in services that ARE paving the way to the future." is impossible because if big companies like Netflix can't even do it, no amount of money is going to help the situation.

EDIT: Turns out it's canada's fault, not the us's when it comes to why we don't get hulu/netflix/etc.

I'm feel the same as you. I pay 30 a month for espnplayer.com to watch NCAA football games for my college. I mean my wife thinks I'm nuts but there is a legal way to watch these games so I pay for it. Now I can't seem to find something like this for a lot of other things I enjoy. My wife has to resort to going around the web to get access to shows she enjoyed in the US. Now I understand that some channels in Canada both the rights to most of those things (As for the NCAA games they don't seem to broadcast them here at all) and are not implementing web streaming services for them which is dumb.

To me this - the market is not meeting the demand - is the single best argument.

If something is available legally and at a reasonable price (by which I mean not only available second hand for £100 as a collectable, rather than "99p for an MP3, that's outrageous" etc...) I either buy it or accept I won't have it.

If it's not available I have no real issue with getting it illegally.

Frankly if the media companies adopted day and date releases worldwide for content and worked to make their back catalogues widely available through convenient means (by which iTunes, Amazon, Netflix and so on count) a lot of the best arguments in favour of piracy dry up.

> If something is available legally and at a reasonable price (by which I mean not only available second hand for £100 as a collectable, rather than "99p for an MP3, that's outrageous" etc...) I either buy it or accept I won't have it.

You are assuming the world is full of honorable people like yourself. Unfortunately, that's not the world we live in. In the words of Scott Adams:

"The least effective system ever invented is something called the honor system. The theory guiding this system is that people are not huge weasels."

I'm not necessarily suggesting that it's workable as a solution for the whole industry, more that for those who wish to "combat piracy", if you strip away the objections that honest people have, you have a better chance of making your case.

Content creators have rights around their content. One of those rights is how it is distributed, and who gets to use it. Pirating a TV show because you feel it should be available in your country is no different from say violating the GPL. Often GPL'ed software is misguided and would serve everyone better under a different license, but it still remains the author's right to choose the GPL.

Why do you seek out and watch the content made by people you violently despise?

I think part of the reason people pirate foreign TV shows is because all their friends are doing it. People are always telling me "OMG, You have to watch this new US TV show".

When I explain that I don't really like piracy I get some very strange looks.

I think people often overestimate how many people are willing to consider ethics at all in purchasing decisions. I know plenty of otherwise nice and decent people who would happily purchase a product that they knew was made by child slavery, hell people even joke about it.

It seems that considering the consequences of your actions isn't hip anymore once consumerism is involved.

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