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Comment by theappsecguy | Hacker News Reader

This seems very false to me. Spotify is the prime example. They offer a good product that covers a 100% of my needs at a reasonable price. If that was an option for say UFC or engineering books, you bet I’d be subscribed. But being forced to read through some crappy reader software when I need the book source to take annotations in another software doesn’t work, so here we are. Same with the absurd pay per view business model of UfC.

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For books, if it's a client reader software frustration, then you should still buy the digital version and then you can pirate the PDF book and use as desired within the constraints of copyright law (e.g. don't go sharing the PDF). That way you get the client you want but you still paid the content creator. But to use the argument, "oh, I don't like their client so I'm going to not pay them" is BS.

For UFC, your complaint is you don't like their pricing. The whole point of copyright is to give someone the monopoly to control pricing so they can use that pricing power to incentivize them to create the product in the first place. Similarly to patents. Thus, complain about the format things are delivered in all you want (like the client) but pricing is inherent to copyright or patents for good reason. You are now just arguing that you as a consumer should be able to pirate if you don't agree with pricing. And that's ludicrous.

In that case, just read a news article about the event. Copyright doesn't cover facts, only creative expression. So a news article covering the facts of the UFC fight is able to be published without the consent of the copyright holder. Think of the digital video of the fight almost like buying a ticket to the fight. You're saying you should just be able to sneak into the fight and watch it for free without any justification for you're doing so.

Finally, you can also watch other people's videos of the fight that THEY recorded on social media as other sources of the fight information. But if you want the recording with all the right angles, coverage, etc, it clearly has value to you over written recaps or social media coverage. And you are just arguing over price, which they are the copyright holder have the right to set the price.

The problem with buying by the crappy DRM version is that it provides no incentive to the publisher to change. I have thought about this long and hard, but ultimately the only way Spotify came about was because nobody bought the terrible DRM’d music the labels wanted to foist on us. We need to inflict the same pain for books. Personally, I think it would be preferable to donate the same amount to the Books Trust or your local library.

> The problem with buying by the crappy DRM version is that it provides no incentive to the publisher to change.

Then don't consume it and don't buy it. If you stop paying the abusive publisher, they'll be forced to change their policies.

The fact that you don't want to fund what is admittedly a rather abusive industry does not magically make it right to consume other peoples' work for free. That's theft-adjacent. You're not entitled to any piece of entertainment without paying for it.

This is also along the lines of how I think about things. If you make it convenient enough (compared to the alternative of paywall bypass or piracy) and provide enough overall/general value then I'm happy to subscribe. At the point where the experience degrades, or seems beyond the point of what one person could reasonably subscribe to, I basically just give up.

Spotify hits this sweet spot where one subscription delivers almost all the music you'd want to listen to. Steam hits this for games where a couple clicks can play and launch almost any game with minimal hassle. Netflix mostly used to hit this, but most of the current streaming stuff feels overpriced if you want to get all content (unbundled cable bundle). News kind of feels similar to streaming where its unbundled, and there's a lot of interesting content out there, but there's no way I'm subscribing to 15 different newspapers, especially random local ones for cities I don't live in. If there was a news bundle subscription for a reasonable price I think I would pay for it.

I suppose part of the challenge here is that music and video content holds value much longer. Studios can invest in music and video content and see a return from the catalog over a long period of time as more enduring hits are produced and the duds fall away. But with news, they have to make the money on it now because yesterday’s news isn’t worth much no matter how expertly crafted.

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