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Comment by Asooka | Hacker News Reader

A service and a pricing problem. All cases of piracy I have observed stem from one of 3 reasons

1. Too expensive. This encompasses several varieties, like the media in question being literally priced more than the person is willing to pay, or the pricing is acceptable, but the person can buy only one of several choices and wants to evaluate all before giving one their money.

2. The product is not offered for sale. This is sometimes literally that the product isn't available for sale in your country, or the product is not available in a useful form, e.g. it doesn't come with subtitles in your language, it won't work on your device, it requires a stable internet connection, which you don't have, etc.

3. For political reasons, to avoid supporting DRM.

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> For political reasons, to avoid supporting DRM.

This is very much a practical reason as well, though this overlaps with "not available in a usable form". DRM is the reason I can't watch movies at the highest bitrates and resolutions on my device from Netflix or Amazon. It's the reason I can't trust that things I purchase will be available to me indefinitely. It's the reason I can't build a collection of media (e.g. with Kodi) that is playable on my TV with one click with a single unifying interface.

> The product is not offered for sale.

This extends to some other cases as well. For instance, where the only available version is a crappy remaster (Terminator 2), and the original is much superior. Or if you want to watch the film with a director's commentary.

There's also, very broadly, a 4th reason - convenience. This encompasses both ease of use (if I know what movie I want to watch, I don't have to search to see where it's streaming), and discoverability (a good torrent site will easily let you see all the movies by a director or actor, and provide recommendations). Or if you're looking for a particular special feature, it's much more convenient to be able to download it than to go looking for a physical media copy and wait for it to be shipped to your door.

With the globalisation, there is actually a 4th reason rising: availability of content in specific regions. I sometimes want/need content with audio and/or subtitle language X, which is not available legally where I live, but the exact same platform does have it available in the region that speaks this language.

pirating is in this case the best solution as I can pick the quality I want, with the audio and subtitle languages I need.

I think this is just the second reason rephrased a bit differently. And it isn't at all new — pretty much all Japanese game and animation studios have refused to acknowledge our region's existence for about as long as these industries have themselves been around.

For example, Nintendo consoles have been unavailable since the 90s — which is why we've been using these clones:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dendy_(console)

and are still unavailable now unless you're willing to buy consoles and games on ebay, overpriced and without warranty (which is what some of my friends have been doing, but I refuse to support publishers that consider my American dollars second class to those coming from actual Americans).

So torrents it is, then. 'Fuck you' can go both ways.

Nintendo consoles and games are available in western europe as well

This is covered in #2.

Exactly. I dropped out of the torrent scene for probably around 5 years when Netflix had a huge back-catalog and it just wasn't worth the hassle to manage torrents and a media server.

Then the Netflix catalog shrunk to originals, there's now 6 different streaming services I have to juggle to watch the usual content my family likes, and we're constantly using third-party services just to figure out what's available where. I hate having to switch from Netflix to Hulu to finish out a show because the last season is only on Hulu. Or things like Warner and Disney cutting shows because they don't want to pay residuals or whatever dumb accounting BS they feel like pulling.

If you make it more convenient to torrent and shove everything into Plex, why would I pay to get a worse experience.

For 2, it can be the silliest things.

Disney holding back the second half of the final season of Amphibia. Released in the US but not here for unexplained reasons. For 6 months piracy was the only way to get a conclusion.

Our Flag Means Death, even though it had a large section of its cast from Britain it wasn't available to watch for far too long here.

I could go on, but you get the point. Any distribution rules are a creation of their own making in the first place.

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