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Comment by doctorpangloss | Hacker News Reader

It did. YouTube has paid the piper here and continues to do so. It pays a lot of money to record labels right now. TV networks choose to run their own streaming, and YouTube enforces what networks ask for.

Consider what things look like when you can't pirate. Many services now, like Claude, do not let you create password accounts, to make it less practicable to share a subscription. Apple News and Apple Arcade is totally impracticable to pirate.

Enforcing copyright violations is as much about how you feel about IP as it is about, whom do we permit to make money? It's a big part of why Apple is so fucking rich. Should only Apple be permitted to make real money? I don't think so.

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> It's a big part of why Apple is so fucking rich. Should only Apple be permitted to make real money? I don't think so.

Apple is rich because they've optimized the hell out of their supply chain and through some clever marketing have convinced (rightly or wrongly) people that it's somehow reasonable to charge $200 for 64GB flash storage upgrades on their devices that only cost them ~$20. They are probably the only company in the world that have consistently run 20%+ profit margins on selling hardware ALONE. Their services revenue from streaming and arcade are puny in comparison. Even throw in the cut they take from app store sales, compared to hardware it's relatively small.

I don't think anyone, even the diehardest fans of Apple, thinks that Apple's RAM upgrade prices are reasonable. But we pay it for the same reason that people pay Porsche an extra $10k for a trim package — because you accept the high-margin upgrade as the cost of the item itself.

You pay because they started glueing them in...

Back in 2012 you could upgrade the RAM yourself. Now there's no real alternative.

This is what I am talking about. "There's no [practicable] alternative" is possible with the level of lock in and vertical integration that Apple has. Whereas PC manufacturers cannot really charge so much for storage and RAM, because you can upgrade.

> Enforcing copyright violations is as much about how you feel about IP as it is about, whom do we permit to make money? It's a big part of why Apple is so fucking rich. Should only Apple be permitted to make real money? I don't think so.

I read this and din't quite understand the argument, but realized (if I understood) this is saying that if you are a content host, then you need a lot of resources to deal with copyright violations, so it's hard to compete against these hosts.

Safe harbor in the DMCA isn't perfect, but a world without safe harbor would be a world with a lot less freemium products, that's for sure.

> Claude, do not let you create password accounts, to make it less practicable to share a subscription.

How does that prevent sharing, you can just setup email forwarding with someone else you want to share the account.

>> […] less practicable […]

not impossible. Having to forward login emails creates more friction than sharing a password once.

> Having to forward login emails creates more friction than sharing a password once.

You can set up automated email forwarding, its a one time process just like sharing passwords.

Isn't Apple losing money on their streaming service though?

isn't costco losing money on hotdogs?

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