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Comment by Aurornis | Hacker News Reader

> Assuming that "piracy is a service problem, not a pricing problem" is still the prevailing wisdom

I don't have experience with broadcast media (in Spain, especially) but I a little experience on the software side: I could not believe the lengths some people would go to in order to avoid paying even $5-10 for useful software. Hours of work, sketchy cracks, downloading things from websites likely to compromise their system. Some of them would become irate when the software was updated and broke their cracks, spending time complaining loudly on forums and social media or even trying to threaten developers. The strangest part is when they start posting from social media where you can see things like their $3,000 gaming PC build, but if they see a chance to avoid paying $10-20 for something they will take it.

It becomes culturally embedded in some bubbles: If it's possible to find a way to avoid paying and there are no consequences for trying, some people will go for it.

I don't even buy the "it's a service problem" argument either. I have a friend who loves to watch sports games but refused to pay for any services. He will spend 30 minutes jumping from one website to the next enduring crazy amounts of ads, pop-ups, and attempts to get him to install things on his computer until finally getting to a blocky stream that drops out every few minutes. He can easily afford to pay, but getting things without paying is basically a little game he likes to play.

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It's a service problem. Every new service is a colossal headache to set up payment, remember to cancel payment if you only wanted to see the single event and have no need for the service the rest of the year, find what's playing on what when, deal with their bullshit when they add ads onto an ad-free plan that you bought only because it was ad-free, yadda yadda yadda. The suits could have had 10x as much money out of me if I could just pay one-time prices. "Sure, fork over $10 and you can have a temporary account to watch the US Open this year." I will do that. In a single month I'll pay twice the cost of a monthly NYT subscription to read online articles, maybe $0.50/pop.

But they don't offer that, they offer difficult-to-cancel ad-laden plans that don't even get you access to the content you want to see reliably (edit: and as another commenters, signs you up to in some cases multiple mailing lists--thanks, The Athletic, for having a separate mailing list for every one of your terrible sub-orgs, I deeply regret paying you a dime). I'll be sailing the seven seas as long as it's viable.

> Every new service is a colossal headache to set up payment, remember to cancel payment if you only wanted to see the single event and have no need for the service the rest of the year, find what's playing on what when

I just don't find these arguments convincing after watching my friend spend cumulative hours upon hours jumping between pirate streaming services trying to find a stable feed for every game.

This feels too much like a post-hoc rationalization. I know I'll never win this argument on Hacker News because every piracy conversation turns into an infinite game of moving goalposts, where there's always a new rationalization at every turn.

I don't think it's worth discussing until we can be honest and admit that a lot of people pirate because they want free stuff. Every HN piracy conversation has a lot of words written to try to avoid admitting that "free stuff" is a big motivator for a lot of people

> I don't think it's worth discussing until we can be honest and admit that a lot of people pirate because they want free stuff. Every HN piracy conversation has a lot of words written to try to avoid admitting that "free stuff" is a big motivator for a lot of people

Well, see, the thing is you're right, but the "service problem" quote actually addressed that. There's a percentage of people who will never pay, it's true - and by never pay, it means never pay. You can't get them to pay by blocking or adding DRM or whatever.

But of the actually relevant group, people who are willing to pay for stuff, then some percentage of them will stop paying if it isn't convenient enough. Now it's a service problem. The trick is getting the full market potential and preventing them from jumping ship. But the service bit only ever applied to potential customers - the other group don't enter the discussion in the first place because they're hopeless.

But yeah usually this argument is at least in part misrepresented.

However however, no amount of blocking will stop that free stuff group, no amount of hoops will be too much, there is simply no way to extract blood from a stone the way that some media companies keep telling themselves is possible. So all the original blocking and shutting down of half the internet is completely counterproductive regardless.

To the contrary, there is evidence that DRM increased sales. Researchers analyzed data on sales before and after cracks for video games shows up to 20% lost sales of a game is cracked quickly: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2024/10/the-true-cost-of-game...

It seems hard to take that interpretation at face value (20% seems to be an effect of a week 1 crack post-release with total revenue lost estimated at 25%; week 3 crack has estimated total losses at ~12%, and week 7 crack at less than 5% of total revenue loss..., ~0% for week 12+ cracks).

This is also based on extrapolation on top of extrapolation covering only 86 games with "majority" surviving without cracks into week 12 — how significant is the effect if there are only a few games with cracks in early weeks (if it's 43 games across the first 12 weeks, it's less than 4 games per week on average)? How big are their revenues and copies sold in absolute numbers? (I do not have access to the full paper, perhaps it's answered there)

But to be precise, even if all of the above is covered, this is not proof that DRM increases sales, but that crack availability for Denuvo-protected games decreases sales depending on the timing — it is a subtle distinction, but perhaps publicity of a crack availability motivates more people to take that route?

Finally, let's not forget that game companies care about the profit (and revenue is only a proxy): looking at lost sales does not show how much a studio can save by not investing in DRM protection and thus having a higher gross margin or cheaper price to entice more customers.

Most games are cracked within days. The number that survive for over a month without a crack is small, largely limited to Denuvo protected games.

> But to be precise, even if all of the above is covered, this is not proof that DRM increases sales, but that crack availability for Denuvo-protected games decreases sales depending on the timing — it is a subtle distinction, but perhaps publicity of a crack availability motivates more people to take that route?

The fact that crack availability leads people to pirate instead of buy is exactly the point. I guess it's more correct to say that DRM prevents lost sales rather than increasing sales, but that's effectively the same thing.

It is not the same until you test the effect of illegal copies of games not having any DRM protection at all (easy to copy/use illegally) on sales.

Specifically, the conditions this was tested under were always-DRM, always-Denuvo, crack-becomes-available, and conclusions cannot easily be extrapolated to other scenarios if we are trying to be really scientific.

If most games are cracked within days, that sounds like a much better sample set to draw conclusions from?

By definition, illegal copies of games don't have DRM protection. I'm not sure what you mean by this.

The analysis studies pre-crack and post-crack sales, and specifically observed the dip in sales after the crack. The dip was larger, the closer to release the game was cracked. A theoretical day 1 crack caused a 20% drop in sales.

I'm also not sure what you mean by games that are cracked almost immediately are a better sample. You can't measure sales before and after the crack was released because you only have the latter. Sure, if we could somehow measure how the game would have sold in an alternate universe where it wasn't cracked that would be a more robust finding. But obviously that's not possible.

The study focused on denuvo protected games because those are essentially the only games that go for extended periods of time without being cracked. They're the only games that actually offer any insight into how games sell without a crack available.

> By definition, illegal copies of games don't have DRM protection. I'm not sure what you mean by this.

Games released without DRM are less of an inconvenience to legitimate purchasers. They don't get negative sentiment from past customers complaining about the DRM causing problems for people who actually paid for it and thereby deter others from buying it.

This can even cause the effect you're seeing: The game comes out with onerous DRM, people buy it initially having not realized this yet. The DRM being more onerous to legitimate purchasers makes it both more likely to be cracked (people spend more effort to crack it so they can play the game without the DRM causing problems) and more likely to have sales decline as DRM problems for legitimate purchasers become known and sour customers on buying it, so you get a correlation between how fast the game gets cracked and how fast sales fall off.

In general it assumes there is no existing correlation between how quickly a game gets cracked and the rate at which would sales decline regardless, e.g. it assumes that more anticipated games don't both get cracked sooner and have more front-loaded sales, but relationships like that are pretty plausible.

In addition to that, once the crack is available, you're stuck with DRM if you pay but not if you use the cracked version, so then the cracked version is better. It outcompetes paying not just on price but also on utility, whereas if the paying got you no DRM to begin with then the cracked version would have only one advantage instead of two.

You also unconditionally lose 100% of the sales to people who simply never buy games with DRM.

Losing X% of sales to pissing off customers with DRM in order to avoid losing Y% of sales to pirates is only worth it if X is less than Y, but they're only even attempting to measure Y, and probably overestimating it.

> Losing X% of sales to pissing off customers with DRM in order to avoid losing Y% of sales to pirates is only worth it if X is less than Y, but they're only even attempting to measure Y, and probably overestimating it.

But releasing a game without DRM means it's impossible to measure the value of Y, since a crack is immediately available. This is why this is sort of a nonsensical complaint.

> In addition to that, once the crack is available, you're stuck with DRM if you pay but not if you use the cracked version, so then the cracked version is better. It outcompetes paying not just on price but also on utility, whereas if the paying got you no DRM to begin with then the cracked version would have only one advantage instead of two.

Many (most?) publishers release versions of games without DRM ounces cracks are available. What you describe here is not necessarily the case.

If there really were a pool of buyers who would purchase legal versions of games absent DRM, the we should see a bump in sales once DRM-free versions are released. But no such bump in sales materializes. If there is such a population of would-be buyers that are turned off by DRM, they are evidently smaller than the pool of buyers who would have chosen to pirate if given the opportunity.

Is it really that hard to believe that if given the choice to pay or receive a product for free more people choose the latter than if there is no free option?

> But releasing a game without DRM means it's impossible to measure the value of Y, since a crack is immediately available. This is why this is sort of a nonsensical complaint.

If you're trying to determine Z, which is X - Y, and then you get some indication that Y might be 20 under a specific set of assumptions, you still don't know anything about Z because X could still be 0 or 20 or 40. Measuring Y by itself is useless. It's looking for your keys under the streetlamp because that's where the light is even though you know that's not where you lost them.

> If there really were a pool of buyers who would purchase legal versions of games absent DRM, the we should see a bump in sales once DRM-free versions are released. But no such bump in sales materializes.

That's assuming the removal of the DRM is well-publicized like the initial release. Otherwise people hear about the initial release, don't buy it because it has DRM and then most of them forget the game even exists. And negative reviews from when the game had bad DRM are still there even after it's removed.

It could still be net positive to remove the DRM after it's cracked but the benefit is naturally going to be a lot smaller than if it had no DRM when people were paying more attention to it.

Also, has anyone actually studied that? Most of the resources to do studies on these things are from DRM purveyors who want to make their product look better than it is. They don't have the incentive to find results that make them look bad.

> Is it really that hard to believe that if given the choice to pay or receive a product for free more people choose the latter than if there is no free option?

You're still focused on measuring only Y.

To be clear, what is measured is the proportional change in sales following the release of a crack, relative to other released games that went uncracked for longer. I don't know what percentage of games removed DRM after the crack was released, but let's assume they do.

If there's Y amount of people who buy if there's no crack available and pirate if there is, and X amount of people and who refuse to buy the game with DRM but do purchase it after DRM is removed. The net shift in sales is the difference in sales is X-Y.

We're not measuring Y, we're measuring Z. And since Z is negative, we can conclude that the group of people who just want free games is larger than the group of people who buy after DRM is removed. We know that Y is larger than X.

> If there's Y amount of people who buy if there's no crack available and pirate if there is, and X amount of people and who refuse to buy the game with DRM but do purchase it after DRM is removed. The net shift in sales is the difference in sales is X-Y.

Now you're assuming that all games immediately remove DRM after they're cracked, which is definitely false. In a statistical study it would need to be all of them or any that don't would be skewing the average.

And again, removing the DRM doesn't fully undo the hit from having it to begin with. Existing negative reviews or forum posts panning the game don't disappear the instant you address the thing they were complaining about. The network effect and word of mouth in subcultures that don't buy games with DRM is already reduced.

So if a game launches with DRM it's forever tainted and that group of people who supposedly would have bought the game absent DRM won't buy it - even if the DRM is subsequently removed. But on the flip side, if a game doesn't launch with DRM then it's pirated immediately and there's no way to measure the sales in the period pre and post-crack, because there effectively is no pre-crack period.

You've constructed an unfalsifiable claim here.

By definition, illegal copies of games don't have DRM protection. I'm not sure what you mean by this.

A game can have DRM restrictions or not when published. I am referring to games that never had DRM restrictions but which you obtained illegally (eg. you copied it from a friend or downloaded it from internet).

Games that never had DRM restrictions to begin with are also pirated on day 1. There's no way to measure the sales before and after a crack is released, because the former period is basically zero.

Those goalposts way over there are looking very tiny.

What "to the contrary"? The statements "some people will not pay no matter what" and "DRM increases sales" are mutually compatible.

> There's a percentage of people who will never pay, it's true - and by never pay, it means never pay. You can't get them to pay by blocking or adding DRM or whatever.

The point is DRM can get people to pay who would have otherwise not paid.

Yes, and those people are not part of the group who will not pay no matter what.

Jumping in with one persons anecdotal evidence but I loved when I can pay $10 a month for Netflix when it had everything or almost everything I could watch and I quit pirating. When the content from other networks got pulled and the prices starting getting jacked up I went back to the seven seas. A good service with good quality at a decent price is awesome but 10 different services all trying to gouge me for $15-$20 a month with no guarantee the content I like won’t be removed in a few months is ludicrous and led me right back to not paying anything.

I'm almost in the same boat, except I never stopped pirating. By the time I decided to consider Netflix to see if the added convenience was worth it, the enshittification had already begun, so I just continued as I was. I'm definitely not in the "won't pay no matter what" camp, but I am pretty price-sensitive and I have a fairly high bar of satisfaction, which Steam and GOG meet but music and video streaming do not. I definitely think Gaben is mistaken, and that for most people it's both service and price. Steam would not have been as successful in reducing piracy in the PC market without all the discounts, all else being equal.

How is that to the contrary at all? 20% and not 100% with a ton of people just not playing the game at all, presumably

For counter-evidence, GOG exists after all, the platform would not be viable if everyone just wanted free stuff.

The real question is whether GOG would sell more if they one day flipped on the DRM switch. I think that's too complicated a question to predict though - GOG has a lot of smaller games, while Denuvos data is skewed by the high-profile releases that had a ton of attention before release (and thus people wanting to pirate them)

Just to put some context into what _never_ means here:

If a website offers me the choice between "accept cookies" and "more options", I'll manually edit the DOM to remove the popup from the offending website. Some sites disable scrolling while such a "We value your privacy" popup is shown, so I wrote a js bookmarklet to work around most common means of scroll hijacking.

Google is currently waging a war against adblockers, especially on youtube. I currently have a way around that too but should they start baking ads in the video bytes, I'll stop using youtube altogether (though I am willing to look the other way for content creators shouting out their curated sponsors).

There is simply no universe in which I pay for certain types of digital content, and while I can't stop the data collection that ultimately pays for it, I can at least make damn sure that it's unlawful.

With respect to Spain and sports, stadiums are littered with ads, players wear ads, the commentator stream itself has ads baked in and people buy tickets and tapas to watch the game live. If that's not enough, go fuck yourselves!

> I just don't find these arguments convincing after watching my friend spend cumulative hours upon hours jumping between pirate streaming services trying to find a stable feed for every game.

Then you haven't been through enough cycles of subscribing to a service, using it for a while, then wanting to cancel and realising that the only way to do so is through some baroque direct interaction with someone whose job it is to stop you from doing so, instead of it just being a single "cancel" button. I still pay for things, but I 100% understand why some are unwilling to have to both pay, and then put in the same amount of effort they'd put otherwise, just to stop paying.

Not to mention the bundling. For example, if I only want to watch climbing competitions in the UK, the only legal way is through a £34 per month subscription to a service that offers every sport under the sun. Even though climbing-wise you might have 4 events that month (sometimes fewer). So yeah, f whoever devised the model :)

In my experience, people's reasons for piracy are a pretty even mix of all these issues (service problems, principles, and cost)

I'd certainly pirate less if I could afford it, but even if I could, I'd still pirate a lot of stuff because I don't want to worry about what streaming service it's on this week, or because I don't want to contribute to monopolization of some industry. And sure, I'd still pirate some things because I find they're overpriced.

> I know I'll never win this argument on Hacker News because every piracy conversation turns into an infinite game of moving goalposts, where there's always a new rationalization at every turn.

What argument are you referring to, out of curiosity? That some people pirate things 'cause they're poor and make nice-sounding rationalizations about it? Okay, that definitely happens, you win. But I don't think that really takes away from the other valid arguments for piracy?

> I'd certainly pirate less if I could afford it

What's your point?

Try substituting some other verbs in there to see if it comes to you:

"I'd certainly wrestle less if I could afford it."

"I'd certainly eat less ice cream if I could afford it."

What are these "valid arguments for piracy" you refer to? Content isn't food, shelter, or clothing. It's a "nice to have" in one's life. It's literally entertainment.

They wrote them out.

And digital media is similarly fungible, and media companies owning copyright can produce a single copy at insignificant cost — and illegal copies are usually produced at no cost to them too.

If you would rather not consume content than pay with time and money being asked of you, there is no real loss to anyone if you consume an illegal copy.

> They wrote them out.

Convenience is not a valid reason to violate others' rights.

> there is no real loss to anyone if you consume an illegal copy.

There is a real loss: The owner isn’t getting paid when people consume their product for free and without their permission.

The entire point of copyright is to protect the time investment of and opportunity cost borne by the author when marginal reproduction cost is zero, or close to zero. This is because we as a society value intellectual labor. We want people to invent things and produce entertainment, and we incentivize it via the profit motive.

You can’t write software for a living and not understand this. It’s what puts food on your own table. Don’t try to rationalize it.

I've spent the bulk of my career being paid to write software that was published under open source licenses. I was paid to write exactly the software the business needed to be built, with software being the tool for the business to provide value to their customers and not a money extracting scheme.

I've also worked on complex web applications/systems, where operation of the web site is ultimately the cost that needs to be continuously borne to extract profit from software itself. Yes, someone else can optimize and do operation better than you (eg. see Amazon vs Elastic and numerous other cases of open-source companies being overtaken by their SW being run by well funded teams), but there is low risk of illegal use in this case.

Today I am paid to write software that the business believes will provide them profit that will pay for my services. The software I write is tied to a physical product being sold and is effectively the enabler and mostly useless without the physical product itself.

Other engineers at the company I am at are building software that requires a lot of support to operate as it manages critical infrastructure country-sized systems, and ultimately, even if someone could get this software without paying a license, they'd probably have no idea how to operate it effectively.

Most of the internet infrastructure works on open and free software, where at "worst", copyright protections are turned upside down to make them copyleft if software is not available under more permissive licenses like MIT, BSD or even put into public domain.

Companies that used to pay best SW engineering salaries like Google, Meta and Amazon would likely not face any significant business loss if all of their software (source code included) was publicly leaked: SW is a tool for them to provide an ad platform or cloud infrastructure service.

Well, most software engineers aren't fortunate enough to be insulated from the impact of copyright infringement. The reality is that a lot of us--maybe not you personally, but possibly even your friends and neighbors--put food on the table via our intellectual efforts, and that deserves respect. Try to have some empathy.

> Google, Meta and Amazon would likely not face any significant business loss if all of their software (source code included) was publicly leaked

You don't know that. Granted, there are other barriers to entry in some markets, but stealing others' control and data planes would go a long way towards building viable competitors without having to expend the same level of investment.

You're cherry-picking the relatively small number of companies that support your argument. Besides all the software they've built, each of these companies has filed for and been issued mountains of patents (though not copyright, it's another IP protection scheme) and will enforce them if necessary to protect their business. I bet yours might have some, too.

You missed my argument: sw engineers are largely being paid for the labour we put in, and I am saying that we still would be paid for the same labour even if someone did legally (open source) or illegally have access to the software we build.

My company has a ton of patents (which are public) and cares about copyright deeply, but that does not mean that it would be significantly affected financially (other than potentially in stock price, which is an entirely different social aspect).

To give you another example, Windows source code leaked 10 years ago or so. Did it slow down Windows?

Just like authors (owners of copyright) aren't negatively affected if someone creates a copy they would never have paid for.

> we still would be paid for the same labour even if someone...illegally have access to the software we build.

Where do you think that money comes from? It comes from the licensing of the software. If everyone is pirating the software, there’s no market for it, nobody’s going to buy it, and there will be no money to pay for your salary.

> that does not mean that it would be significantly affected financially (other than potentially in stock price, which is an entirely different social aspect).

Stock prices aren’t a “social aspect.” They are a financial instrument that reflects the expected future earnings of the company. Companies aren’t going to form and employ people if they can’t sell their stock because their product has no value in the marketplace.

> Windows source code leaked 10 years ago or so. Did it slow down Windows?

You’re asking the wrong question. That leak, in and of itself, didn’t impact the market for the software. Nevertheless, massive piracy of any software would harm the economy. The fact that most people respect others’ labor is what keeps the market functioning.

> authors (owners of copyright) aren't negatively affected if someone creates a copy they would never have paid for.

We don’t know who never would have paid for a copy of software at any price. And there is a difference between knowing that infringement exists and making excuses for it. The question isn’t whether some people do it and the market is still healthy; it’s whether or not we should condone it so that nobody should feel compelled to follow the law. Because, following your logic, nobody should pay for software. If that happens, tremendous economic harm will follow.

I guess there's some confusion in that I don't think anybody's saying everyone should pirate everything all the time. That would, indeed, be problematic.

But if companies keep pushing people to piracy... well, I'm not going to blame the people first, that's for sure. Especially when things like TFA happen.

But if you can excuse it for yourself, why shouldn’t the same reasoning hold for everyone else? Do you not see the slippery slope here?

No, I don't really see the slippery slope. If there were such a slope, I would imagine that decades into this piracy thing, we'd be sliding down it. Yet most people don't pirate. Strange?

So you really don't understand that it should be OK for everyone to pirate if it's OK for you? Would you ever tell someone it's not OK? If so, why? And what makes you special and different?

We aren't saying anything you are implying.

You've started with a retort to a point that some who would never pay for some copyrighted work are not a loss to copyright owner if they illegally use their work.

You've since expanded to everyone and SW development, and want to extend it to people who are willing to pay for the value a particular work provides them.

So let's go back to the beginning: can you please quantify how big is a loss to the copyright owner if one watches a movie they would skip if the only option was to pay for it?

No, I'm not going to do that. And here's why: because if you have an excuse, everyone has an excuse. And if everyone has an excuse, the entire system falls apart.

I'll reiterate what I said above: entertainment and software are not life's essentials. Nobody's going to be seriously harmed by being denied access to them.

> Nobody's going to be seriously harmed by being denied access to them.

Nobody's going to be seriously harmed by us pirating them, either.

On the other hand, I bet there have been some pretty serious repercussions due to the sweeping bans like in TFA.

> Nobody's going to be seriously harmed by us pirating them, either.

The logic here is quite simple: if you don't have to pay, nobody else has to pay, either, because you're not special. If nobody pays, then people who make media and software won't get paid, and production will slow to a crawl. You'll have destroyed the very thing you seem to desire enough to steal.

How does this not make sense to you?

Maybe because I'm not so arrogant as to imply everyone has to have the same views and act the same way as me, nor to imply that my view is the only right one.

But nah, you're right. Nobody has to pay. Everybody should pirate.

Now, that's been true for decades, of course. So why hasn't the entire system fallen apart?

> I'm not so arrogant

Believing oneself to be special and above the law such that one feels justified in trampling on others' rights is textbook arrogance.

Not everyone in the world is subject to the same laws.

To say nothing of what all that means when those laws are unjust and themselves serve to trample on individuals' rights.

> Not everyone in the world is subject to the same laws.

Are you?

> To say nothing of what all that means when those laws are unjust and themselves serve to trample on individuals' rights.

What rights are you speaking of, exactly?

They are not: if they never travel to Afghanistan or Ethiopia, they will not be subject to their laws.

Laws change even in the same region, so it is also temporal.

And one can work to change the laws too.

But it does not make sense, you have your pre-defined opinion and you are sticking with it, and we do not buy your argument, so it's best we agree to disagree here.

I'm not sure to understand where is the loss because the pirate would not pay for the product anyway.

1. We don't know that. Perhaps they would pay, at a lower price.

2. If it's OK for one person not to pay, why should anyone pay?

1. A copyright owner can test this easily by offering a discount.

2. Because they are getting significantly bigger value out of it. Because they know ahead of time they want more of this type of content to be produced. Because they have more disposable funds. Because it is available in their country legally. Because their streaming package already includes it. Because their cable package already includes it... Need I continue?

Again, you are conflating is it OK not to pay with any loss of profit: they are not the same even if there is correlation.

Nobody loses any money if you spill profanities at someone, but it's still not OK (even though it might not be illegal either).

Legallity and morality are not always in sync even if we try to keep one reflect the other. I am surprised this is even a discussion point.

> Because they are getting significantly bigger value out of it. Because they know ahead of time they want more of this type of content to be produced. Because they have more disposable funds.

Those are reasons that someone might choose to pay. These are also the same reasons why one might want to donate to charity or to non-profit/public media (PBS, NPR in the USA). In other words, they're a voluntary patron of the arts. And there's nothing wrong with that, when the organizations are non-profit/public or charitable. In fact, I think we'd all encourage it.

However, not every media organization is a non-profit/public operation or a charity. Those who are made a choice to be that. Those who didn't--well, they chose to remain for profit.

The point is that we, as individuals, do not get to override the choice of whether a publisher is for profit or non-profit by taking the law into our own hands--just like I don't get to turn your back yard into a public park when you're not using it. After all, you're not using it, right?

You and others keep saying, "no loss in revenue, no harm done." (Just like, "no loss of use of your back yard, no harm done.") But that's not the point. It's about infringing on others' rights.

> you are conflating is it OK not to pay with any loss of profit: they are not the same even if there is correlation.

This is just silly: Where does the profit come from if nobody pays? Again: if you don't have to pay, it must follow that nobody should have to pay. If you disagree with that, then who gets to choose who pays and who doesn't? You? No; that's for the law to decide. That's how democracy works.

(removed)

Fair enough, I take it back.

I'd happily pay for DRM-free content, but it's rarely available in digital form in smaller markets like non-EU European country of Serbia: the only alternative is to look for BR or DVD or CD copies and then rip them myself, which is even more time consuming than finding a decent quality not-so-legal option.

Even for music, I do spend time looking for DRM free options (eg. Apple only offers iTunes streaming in Serbia and I had to resort to options running a much smaller catalog like 7digital). I always try going first party first (eg. band's site for music), but it's increasingly not an option.

And if I want local Serbian/Croatian/... content, no provider has it at all. As an example, one of local publishers recently started releasing "eBooks" readable only in their own mobile app for Android or iOS: none of my Kindle, Remarkable or Kobo can read them. I did let them know about my willingness to jump on their service if they actually made their books work on my eBook devices, but they did not even honour me with a reply :)

For me at least, it is a service problem.

Before Netflix was a thing, I sometimes tried to have conversations with people about "gee, it's a bit annoying that my only options to watch a movie is to buy an expensive dvd that I will watch once, or to pirate it" and the most common response was complete befuddlement, they simply could not comprehend that someone might not want to pirate things if they could, they could not comprehend that besides being illegal it was also just... wrong. Not absolutely evil, for sure, but still something that maybe you might want to avoid doing. Now that you can just pay 10-20 euro for a streaming service, most of them have switched over, so, yeah, service does matter, but a lack of risk or consequences on the one hand and vague notions about actors and directors (and soccer players) already being rich enough as it is, were enough to convince very many people that piracy was a victimless crime.

> my only options to watch a movie is to buy an expensive dvd that I will watch once, or to pirate it"

There were no movie-rental businesses in your country?

> Now that you can just pay 10-20 euro for a streaming service,

The nice thing about piracy is that you can find what you want immediately. You don't have to go to an aggregator site to find out where it's available, and then log on to the streaming platform site to find that the aggregator site is lagging the real availability, or find that certain content isn't available in your country, or that the content is available but only on the special extra++ cost plan instead of the basic plan.

If you want to watch content legally, the workflow looks like this:

Search content -> go to aggregator site -> select streaming site -> enter electronic contact and payment info and physical address (for payment) -> confirm email account -> watch content -> dig around on site to find deliberately hidden unsubscribe workflow -> pass all the "are you sure you want to leave" screens -> monitor your card payment the next month to make sure you actually cancelled

The illegal workflow looks like this:

Search content -> click 1-3 sketchy sites, closing 15 pop up ads -> watch content -> forget about it

I strongly believe the fact that media companies struggle to accept payments worldwide and region-lock their content when you do pay is why their services ultimately suck for customers.

Eg. for my HBO GO subscription provided by my cable operator to continue working, I had to disable load balancing/failover between my other ISP for HBO addresses at home or it'd just stop working when it detects I've been switched to a different network. And then you travel and can't access it anymore either. It is completely bonkers.

As a sibling comment said, Netflix won (at that point) because they made service easy and converted a bunch of customers over.

> Now that you can just pay 10-20 euro for a streaming service

Now that you can just pay 10-20 euros for each of 124293507239841524352 services, one of which _might_ show what you want...

Fixed it for you.

My opinion is the original 99 cent app, then followed free apps and services caused a public devaluation of software costs. Use Youtube as an example. It tickles me hearing people complain about the cost of a YouTube subscription. In my head, I’m well aware of the colossal amount of costs that go into the hardware and software that allows for such a service to exist in the first place. Yet it’s a bloody outrage to spend money on it to remove ads. Maybe someone could tell me what actually is a fair value of tapping into literally every single video uploaded in YouTube’s existence on demand? $16 a month seems reasonable to me.

Yes and no. Storage should cost in the ballpark of $200M/yr or less. Transcoding, networking, and delivery should be similar. Let's round up to $10B/yr just for fun.

YT makes $40B/yr (revenue IIRC) across its 3B customers, or $1.11/mo. $16/mo seems high by comparison. It's very high with reasonable costs of $0.28/mo. Nearly every other industry on the planet is jealous of margins like that.

A normal counter-argument here is that they should be allowed to reap those profits till competition forces them to do otherwise. That's a little at odds with our normal view toward monopolies, especially when the monopoly engages in anti-competitive acts to preserve that edge, but whatever; now you're at least having a real debate about real facts and things you care about.

Another is that YT's expenses in practice are way higher than that because they need to hire a bunch of ML people or whatever to extract even more ad money out of you, and that's a point I disagree with pretty firmly. I'm not sure why my subscription needs to subsidize a company's other predatory tendencies.

I liked it better at 10 a month tbh. If they keep increasing the price like Amazon they need to offer more features to compensate.

your argument is that one person puts up with the annoyance of switching tabs to avoid paying, ignoring the fact that many people these days actually pay for the pirated sports packages to avoid that annoyance, it's a huge business.

sure those who refuse to pay anything will likely always do so but there is a big part of the market who are priced out/fed up with needing multiple sports packages

it's shocking to me that you refuse to see that the "awful experience" your friend has is not better than what they give people who pay. are you a billionaire literally out of touch with reality and the cost of living?

insane response. feign shock, lie, insult, non sequitur

I pay for a ton of sports content across a ton of platforms. I used to pirate a ton of sports across a ton of platforms.

I don’t seem to have nearly the same difficulty as you. I wanted to watch the Olympics so I reactivated my Peacock account, paid for a month, then immediately canceled it. I’ve never had consistent issues finding where I could watch a particular game. It is aggravating that my MLBTV subscription doesn’t work when my team plays on an Apple TV broadcast but that’s 1-2 times a year.

Maybe I was not good at piracy but it took just about the same effort to find the right links, deal with constant buffering, etc. But I find it pretty phenomenal that I can easily watch just about any sporting event now with little difficulty

> I don’t seem to have nearly the same difficulty as you.

Wait til you hear of this concept called "Dead Zones". The NBA has them.

What's that? It's where you live in the streaming blackout zone and get a nice message saying "watch this on your regional sporting affiliate", but you don't live in the TV zone for that team, so "your regional sporting affiliate" doesn't cover the game. So you get to watch... national games... and you can watch your team's games, on 24 or 72 hour delay.

And the NBA will tell you they can't refund your League Pass subscription because of that - you can watch the game, just not when it's happening. You can watch it after you've almost certainly heard the results. "But you'll get to see it with no breaks because we clip the commercial breaks!" Yayyyyy.

This made me give up on league pass. How hard is it for them to just provide every single game for one price? It's insane. It's honestly a big reason I don't follow NBA any more.

People are willing to tolerate worse service to avoid paying. And people still private even when the legitimate service is extremely convenient.

Take Steam, for instance. You get fast downloads, cloud saves, mod support, etc. Yet games released on steam are still pirated. Because people are willing to forego good service in order to avoid paying.

I'm sure for some people piracy is a service problem. The example Gabe Newell gave when he said that quote is Russian localization. If the only way to get a Russian localization of a game is to pirate it, then sure that lack of service incentivizes piracy.

But there will always people who want to consume media without paying, regardless of the convenience of legitimate options.

I feel your frustration however the charge per episode/song/article etc plans I believe all failed.

Early on Apple sold individual songs and leaned hard into selling individual TV episodes for a $2 (if I remember correctly). It was unpopular and people flocked to the lines of Netflix and Spotify instead.

Bingo. If US/EU wanna regulate tech, these are the things to regulate.

You dont understand that there are other mentalities / mindsets than yours. Well they are, and they can be rotten pretty badly.

What OP describes is still very prevalent in eastern EU/Europe too, people pirate and do stupid stuff just to save few bucks. But then if you earn <1000€ monthly you start looking at prices in very different optics. Mindset comes from the past and doesnt feel the need to change for 2026.

I come from such an environment, partially still affected by it. I would blame it on communism and russian influence but then Spain never had one so there goes my cheap and usual way to push blame.

Currently on vacation in Dominican republic and I can see hints of same mentality here and there... maybe its just 'undeveloped societies', for the lack of better term.

Cumulatively, they are not few bucks. Those few bucks add up to serious portion of the salary for lower paid people.

As Spaniards, we have not gone through communism but we have gone through a dictatorship where we went through a lot of misery. Maybe that mentality will come there.

In any case, in Spain the level of penetration of streaming services seems high. Although you will always find people who pirate (it was very common when Canal+ existed, etc., then it decreased with the arrival of Netflix, HBO, Spotify and Prime) and now with prices continuously rising I hear a lot about IPTV and pirate decoders.

Although I believe that in the specific case of LaLiga, much of the fault lies with the prices imposed. The dominant and more traditional operator (also the most trillero) only offers you the service through convergent Megapacks with attractive prices when hiring and crazy when renewing. The arrival of DAZN has softened it but I don't think it will improve the situation in the medium term. It is very curious that they then reach agreements in emerging markets to offer the price-drawn product (China) and in no case the income is reflected in a more competitive League.

Radically changing area, in the field of software there is the culture of paying the minimum. If it can be zero better, even if it means visiting dubious sites and risking your data and credit cards.

My vision may be biased. In fact it is ;-)

Netflix was ok when it was the only platform. Now that there are 10(?) platforms, and each of them has tiers, it is a service problem

Remember when a directtv subscriber bought the annual sports pack because they wanted to watch their team's matches, and just when the game was about to start the transmission was interrupted showing "not availabe in your area", and they called support to ask and were told for the first time by the rep that someone else has the airing rights, and to read TOS?

It is the same thing you are going towards.

Your friend exists, and he is not alone. But the vast mayority of people just want to watch what they were told they paid for, and not paying 10 different people either.

One of the easiest things to pirate is music. Spotify basically killed mainstream piracy of music by making it cheap and easy to pay for nearly all music.

I used to pirate video games, but Steam basically ended that for me. The sales no longer make it worth it for me to pirate a $60 game, instead, I can buy it for $12 on sale.

For software, I used to pirate Adobe products and Sony Vegas, but there are alternatives for those now.

For something like sports, I think the cost can be hundreds of dollars per season. I watch the NFL and NHL, and to watch every game that I'd like to watch, it would cost me something like $600+ per year. There aren't really viable alternatives. I'd have to get three services to watch all of the NHL games I want to watch, and I don't even know how many services I need for the NFL. Amazon Prime, Sunday Ticket, CBS, Fox? Or cable/YouTubeTV with additional packages?

I'd happily pay $100 or $200 per year to watch all games in a league for a year if it was through a single service. Or a lump sum for all sports. But in the same amount of time to enter my payment information, create an account, etc. I could have easily found a stream and have it on any TV in my house.

I am part of this crowd. I have never paid a cent for software. I have spent many hours with Ida pro and Ghidra.

That time was well spent for the knowledge I gained, even if it wasn't worth it to save a few bucks.

But see you're making up reasons that are separate rationalizations. Which just proves the guys point, that even you don't think what you're doing is reasonable without some superfluous reason

> see things like their $3,000 gaming PC build, but if they see a chance to avoid paying $10-20 for something they will take it.

A common phrase used to be "I pirate the software so I can afford the hardware". There's a tangibility to hardware that's not present for software and media, which means many people simply don't feel it's worth what is being charged, especially media intended to be consumed once and forgotten about (e.g. a sports match). Computer hardware is a durable good.

That said, I pretty much stopped pirating things when Steam got decently good and I was working a normal professional job. Prior to that, I really did have to choose what I was willing to pay for, and I really did get a better experience using pirated software vs buying the legit thing. At this point though, I get a better than average experience through Steam on Linux (I just avoid any games with Denuvo or other kernel-level bullshit), and I can easily afford both the hardware and the software, so the convenience and quality of experience + my better purchasing power makes it pointless to even engage in piracy anymore.

I'd like to think I'm a rational actor, sort of, and so are a lot of other people. Paying 79-115 EUR/mo to watch a few matches, in a country where the average monthly take-home pay is around 1700 EUR, you're talking about asking for nearly 7% of the average take-home pay /just/ to watch soccer. To put this into context, the common wisdom is to spend 30% on housing, so La Liga is saying its reasonable to ask a Spaniard to spend 1/4th what they do on housing on just the ability to watch soccer matches. No wonder people would rather find pirated streams.

Sometimes it's not just $5. It's $5, creating an account, handing over personal info, getting on a mailing list, agreeing to who knows what in a TOS, etc. Specifically, gamers look for cracks to allow them to play single player games offline. I don't doubt that some people are cheap, but there are lots of reasons aside from the price.

> It becomes culturally embedded in some bubbles

The question is, how does this happen? Which brings us back to the "it's a service problem" thing.

If your company is using intrusive DRM, lobbying for draconian laws, violating antitrust, filing menacing lawsuits against individuals or smaller companies etc. then it's not hard to see how a lot of people could conclude they have a moral obligation to never pay you a cent. And the same sentiment can affect the whole industry when companies in a position to don't push back against other companies doing those things, since the stink spreads to anyone using the same laundromat.

Some people are just like that. They'll spend several times as much effort as just earning the money honestly would take. The thrill of petty crime I guess.

It’s probably more the challenge and the puzzle. I “played” PokémonGo until they shut down the apis. I had an absolute blast making a bot for that game, letting it run all night, making sure I wouldn’t get caught.

As soon as they shut the api down I uninstalled the app. The fun bit was the challenge.

It's absolutely a service problem. I can pay for the local sports rebroadcast packages.. but oh wait, you just don't feel like this week, playing the Raptors game, because there's a local thing you think people will watch? Fair enough, subscribe to DAZN, and pay there.. oh sorry, we've opted to stop carrying <insert all leagues>.

Sigh, fine, I'll pay for NBA Leaguepass. I don't live in your country... great, random blackouts. Fine, I'll try and use a VPN (hell, I literally used tailscale to a friend's house for a bit).. but then those games are blacked out too, at random?

I'm literally paying you for the service. So yeah, giving some insanely sketchy crypto website $5/month for unlimited whatever that just always works, is worth it. 10/10 will definitely do again. I'm sick and tired of fighting with the NBA, the CFL, or G-D only knows what just to try to watch the things I'm paying for.

> Sigh, fine, I'll pay for NBA Leaguepass. I don't live in your country... great, random blackouts. Fine, I'll try and use a VPN (hell, I literally used tailscale to a friend's house for a bit).. but then those games are blacked out too, at random?

I live in an NBA "dead zone". I'm in the streaming blackout zone. But not in the TV zone (even if I did pay for TV, which I'd almost consider).[1] And then I VPNed to Canada for international LP, but that wasn't much better. Then Mexico. And then ...

Then I found a site that had an actual Roku app (at least) that took payment in Crypto or Amazon GC but was absolutely uninfested, no ads, no garbage, probably at times more reliable than even the NBA's app. But they got shut down.

Not to mention LP refused to refund me though my subscription was effectively useless because I "could still watch the games, and without commercial or timeout breaks, even!" - yeah, 24 to 72 hours after it was played. Yay. Lucky me.

Maybe he does not think he deserves it? The logic is as follows. If he has to pay $10 for 90 minutes of watching football then he must think he deserves that. But if he can get it for free then he does not need to think he deserves it. Similar to how fat people may feel less guilty about eating candy when it is given to them than when they have to buy it.

Most software piracy is more convenient then what you describe.The warez takes pride in making the best cracks available.

So obvious solution is for sports streamers offer free stream too, but riddled with ads just enough that it is slightly better than illegal ones?

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