> Everything else, I will pirate without guilt.
Are you unwilling or unable to pay for the remaining content you plan to consume?
I’ve never understood how flippant HN is about piracy. The entire tech industry is built on intellectual property.
Are you unwilling or unable to pay for the remaining content you plan to consume?
I’ve never understood how flippant HN is about piracy. The entire tech industry is built on intellectual property.
Declining streaming revenue means the expensive, good shows will get cancelled and replaced by shitty, cheap to make reality TV. And then people will moan about how all the good TV they used to pirate got cancelled.
It would be interesting if in the age of “interactive” audiences who freely choose content, if streaming services could try to mix up the relationship. Somehow charge die-hard fans a commitment to a show by serving them ads, perhaps. Something like the ransom model:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_pledge_system
In any case, streamers looking at short-term numbers cause them to axe promising shows and cult classics before they have a chance to prove themselves. Which is something network TV has always done, see FOX in the 2000s, but you’d think with interactive technology and evolving formats they would experiment with new ways of going about it. There’s more to running a network than a simple cost-benefit formula.
* Purchasing a show on Google grants me a license to stream it from their servers using their clients. If they ever lose the license, I lose access to my content. For some reason I can't just download an mkv file with the movie I purchased.
* If I stream Netflix, I am limited to 720p on linux (drm)
* Netflix only works at 1080p on my 4k TV because it doesn't support the latest form of DRM
In all of these cases I am being given a sub-par experience despite trying to legally acquire the content, and for what gain? The content is still getting pirated..
However, I am not a pawn to be jerked around. Content comes to me, I don't go to it. I'm not going to search a dozen streaming sites for the thing I want. I'm not going to follow you to another streaming site because you wanted to segregate New Star Trek and old Star Trek into different platforms.
I have paid accounts with streaming sites. If your content isn't on it, that's on you for opting out of being paid.
I can’t think of any industry that works like that. I can’t buy a new Toyota at a Chevrolet dealership. If my local Target doesn’t carry something, I have to go to another store. Even Amazon, as expansive as their selection is, doesn’t carry everything.
If I subscribe to National Geographic, it doesn’t mean I can grab this weeks copy of Newsweek from the local news stand gratis.
(One wonders if the the first sale doctrine which allows public libraries to check out e-books can also be applied to streaming media- perhaps Apple or Amazon can cut a deal with libraries for them to buy up episodes of shows which then can be borrowed by cardholders!)
That's absolute bullshit.
Companies used to provide detailed schematics. Source code was shared freely by manufacturers. Micro-soft (when they had the hyphen) was one of the first to push for this change and responsible for making things "closed", writing letters to people asking them to stop making unlicensed copies of their Basic compiler.
Also, like it not, companies like Microsoft drove the tech industry forward during the eighties and nineties because of them creating an industry where software has its own monetary value independent of the hardware it ships with.
Even open source as we know it would not exist without intellectual property laws. The GPL and similar licenses are only enforceable because of copyright.
Much like Big Tech, I would be happy to see the complete obliteration of Hollywood.
What is the “false scarcity”?
In the music world, basically all music is available on all platforms. I can listen to basically anything on Spotify.
In the Netflix model, it's all exclusives. Everything is spread all over the place.
However, when it comes to movies a TV, that’s not the case. There are many studios around the world and they want to have a direct-to-consumer relationship (for various reasons), vs having no consumer relationship.
Put differently, it isn’t that there’s scarcity of output (in fact, many people complain there’s too much so it is hard to find something great to watch), it is that you (and others) want to have a one stop shop to satisfy all your TV and movie watching needs. But how would that work? Force all content producers to not be able to distribute their work or to have direct to consumer relationships? And then have 1 (several?) companies limited to distribution (and they aren’t allowed to also be studios, must it be country specific or must it be global and what regulatory body would govern that)? Etc.
Instead of complaining about piracy, put your content on all platforms. There's a clear correlation between the return of exclusives and increased piracy. Drop prices/make it more available and you'll displace piracy (there'll be a structural level of piracy always, they can't change that but this is beside the point).
I have a <Microsoft 365> subscription, if you want a cut of that subscription, by all means show your <software> on <Microsoft 365> and I'll <use> it there. Add it to <Google workspace> or whatever too, but I'm not maintaining ten subscriptions.
The content industry’s intellectual property is primarily enshrined in copyright, whose exclusive lifetime greatly outstrips most human lifespans.
It’s not contradictory to be for the first and against the second.
I find it more palatable to be for copyright than for software patents.
The position I describe above is consistent, though. And widely held.
In your own profession, are the customers entitled to the fruits of your labor free of charge if they don’t feel like paying you for it?
The entire tech industry is built on free proyects, open source and collaboration. Modern tech is all about walled gardens and patent rent seeking because most modern tech leaders are awful.
See the always relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2347/