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Comment by locao | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious what would take for regular people (i.e. people off HN) to realize what is pointed in the article is a real problem.

In my experience, every time I mention this I'm labeled as: nostalgic old guy, Don Quixote wannabe, tinfoil hat supporter, pirate nerd who doesn't understand people just want convenience. I've seen people bit by losing access to purchased content shrug and say "yeah, that's bad isn't it? at least I was able to watch it before they removed it".

Sometimes I feel that's a lost battle. People were put to boil just like the frog in the anecdote and keep swearing it's a hot bath.

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The battle is alive and well, pirating has never been easier and of this high quality.

Support the creators however you want but go foster an environment around your friends and family that there are alternatives to paying evil companies who will remove your access to content willy nilly.

The problem today it's hard to convince even myself to pay the storage premium, but I 100% agree with you.

Premium? Sure things are more expensive but you can get 1TB hdd for 25-30 eur. You don't need an ssd and I'm sure you can find second hand drives even cheaper (or larger).

Starting a subscription is money down the drain.

A 1TB HDD doesn't store that many high bit-rate 4K movies.

You actually have to support the creators however THEY want if you want access, not however YOU want. I suspect you're not actually supporting all the creators of the things you watch via piracy!

Creators are often happy that their art is being watched regardless of the source and whether they are making money from it.

https://www.screendaily.com/news/piracy-is-the-most-successf...

Its the money behind them that cares about restricting access to bleed every penny they can out of it.

That’s an excuse, not universally applicable, and not even well supported by your own link.

> Herzog continued. “I don’t like it because I would like to earn some money with my films. But if someone like you steals my films through the internet or whatever, fine, you have my blessing.

He’d rather you didn’t. And I bet you’re not checking every artist. Just be honest and say you don’t want to pay, don’t act like you’re Robin Hood.

Not sure why you are directing this at me personly, I dont pirate anything. However I have had experience with many people in the industry who would rather their media reached a wider audience, regardless of how much money it makes.

If you dont like my link, you can always google your own. Or here, have a few more from a quick google:

https://www.irishtimes.com/business/technology/hollywood-dir...

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jul/10/hollywood...

https://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/22/technology/22iht-godard.h...

Doesn't change my point, you're generalizing from a tiny number of people to justify not paying everyone.

This perspective has been beaten down to death but, just so you know, whenever you went to see a movie at friend's house, you also didn't contribute and were in fact pirating the content.

Nah. That’s already accounted for in home vs public performance rules.

> You actually have to support the creators however THEY want if you want access, not however YOU want.

No, I don't.

> I suspect you're not actually supporting all the creators of the things you watch via piracy!

I don't actually want to support most of them. The few I care about get donations.

You do if you want to be seen as a good person. You can be a bad person if you want to be.

I don't care about being seen as a good person. I do care about being a good person (at least to the extent I am able).

I don't see how copyright relates to my (or anyone's) character. You can be a good or bad person who copies files, and you can also be a good or bad person who doesn't.

I think part of it is also that young people are just not as attached to specific media units, so to speak. It's more like everything on tap, on a stream, curated by algorithms. Things are ephemeral in this way. Years ago, an album by a band was a major thing and you had a limited number of those, you looked at the cover art in detail, read the booklet attentively etc. Owning it was a personal attachment like this. People nowadays don't really want to hoard it this way. Having convenient access on any device is more important than a stash at home.

Also at the end of the day, it's all super first world problems. Oh no, you can no longer play some video game or watch some Hollywood movie... I don't think people will get angry enough about this to care because at the end of the day it's just some entertainment.

It's not a battle that's important to me personally. I think to some extent it's a personality trait, since I feel like I see echoes of this conversation where my Mom wants to hold onto things endlessly "in case" we'll need it whereas I would rather get rid of it. Or my mother in law who takes far more photos than she'd ever be able to look at and worries about how store them all and back them up and so on.

Basically, I don't have much attachment to things so the prospect of losing something isn't such a big deal. Physical things can break down or be lost or stolen after all. Not much different from that to my mind.

Seems fair to pay $/mo for whatever service. There's no deceit. People are ok with movies and stuff offered like that because it's not like a personal photo library, it's temporary like Blockbuster rentals or theater movies.

The services can also just be annoying, and in some cases generate enough pushback that the publisher changes. Happened with Xbox. It's their right to publish however they want, but I'm not going to pay for annoyances, which nowadays is basically all video games.

There probably is something about how you come across. It's a hard sell when any principles you hold around intellectual property or commerce sound like post rationalizations for a grudge or a hoarding hobby or that you think people who stream are stupid--I experience one or more of these in typical IRL conversations about this. I'm not saying you're wrong, but there's a sensible-sounding rhetorical style that's more effective. And you do kind of have to start with understanding that, for most people, these purchases or subscriptions don't mean much.

People rarely change their habits due to logical arguments, or ideological stances. Real change for normies happens when the current system becomes more painful than the alternative. Even with the potential to lose access to your media, there’s not enough friction yet. More fragmentation and more enshittification will eventually reach a threshold where normies start to find it inconvenient enough to consider an alternative.

The other side of it is people have short term memories. They’ll eventually forget about that time Sony took away their purchased content when there’s something else they really want to watch on the platform. We need laws that prevent companies from using the word “Buy” or “Purchase.” If we want real change, it’ll happen when the verbiage by law is “Rent” on everything and the blinders are pulled off so people can see that they own nothing and rent everything. For now the illusion of ownership is too strong.

The media industry has been training the public to accept whatever they are given, however it is given to them. They want you to pay them forever while giving you nothing but what they choose to give you. "You'll own nothing and be happy" really is the goal.

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