Poll: Do You Pirate Media? | Hacker News Reader

Poll: Do You Pirate Media?

5 pointssurprisetalk7 comments

I'm currently subscribed to 3 vod platforms. What I've noticed is that pirated sites load faster, require no login, quality is either stable or blocks (it doesn't lower itself), subs in many languages and of course are full of ads, but a good adblocker can handle that.

Edit: Just looked around and I think it's more complex than that. I'm usually either on a laptop or a desktop, so I appreciate sites that focus on pc first, have low friction, are simple with no animations, and give me control (I'll tell you if I want to see a trailer or not).

As a teenager/young adult, I was almost 100% “piracy”.

As time went on it evolved more into “try before I buy” for games (with GOG being my platform of choice) where if I actually have more than 3 play sessions, then I actually enjoyed to game and wasn’t just caught up in addiction behavior. The many thousands of songs I had collected gradually rose to about 20% paid for via CD’s.

These days even the majority of my music has now been bought, thanks to things like bandcamp and also having enough money that I don’t have to evaluate whether I can support an artist or need to support myself. I absolutely won’t do pure streaming, my archive is important, especially since I make modifications.

I’m always going to do what I do, but I’m all for supporting people doing things I like if it’s not a sacrifice.

Hell, there are probably a hundred or two YouTube creators I’d happily throw a dollar at per year if it was easy. And they’d make more money from that than if I sat down and watched thousands of their videos ads and all.

Are you asking: do you earn money putting copyrighted materials you don't own online for others to watch?

Or are you asking: do you watch videos online?

IMO there is a huge legal difference between the two.

Thanks for the clarification.

I'm asking whether people download/watch/listen to copyrighted content without permission.

If someone without permission projects a copyrighted movie onto the side of a building in Times Square - accompanied with speakers blaring the sound - is everyone in Times Square who watches the movie some how engaged in illegal activity?

You're contriving a situation as a gotcha instead of acknowledging the spirit of the question. The legal test of piracy in media consumption, I presume, is intentional action to contravene copyright, not passive consumption of media.

I'm a (retired) trial lawyer. I'm simply using basic legal logic to establish principles (use the extreme case to establish the essential exception and then work increasingly inwards until a demarcation line can be established).

Along those lines, let's see how we can address your statement: "an intentional act to contravene copyright, not a passive consumption of media" by adding to my "contrived example":

Example: We bring chairs with us to sit and watch the displayed video in Times Square at 9:00 every evening, aware that recently released videos are displayed, with sound, every evening at 9.

Are we pirating copyright materials by our intentional presence in Times Square with our chairs every evening? I would suggest to you that the answer, legally, is an affirmative "no".

While I am no expert on copyright law and have made no attempt to research the issue, that merely viewing copyrighted materials online without more (no involvement in placing them online and no monetary involvement) is not a criminally or civilly chargeable offense.

Perhaps some other attorneys who are more knowledgeable about the subject can chime in. I'm actually interested in the answer but too busy on other things to spend the time researching the issue.

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