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Yep, same. I still pirate media from time to time, but it’s become increasingly infrequent that each time I think to do it I end up putting it off for months because I’d rather gargle broken glass, or watch politicians give state their opinion on topic or another, than go through all the rigmarole of pirating media.

Watching something on a streaming service, or using Apple / Google to “rent” it for a few days is like, what, three clicks away.

Rather than my media server updated over night and won’t boot, I’ve got it booting to a terminal session but the database is corrupted, fuck it I’ll just buy $2000 worth of new hard drives and then re down everything in Ultra 16k 96 bit colour with 4000 gigabit Dolby 400 channel surround-surround and upgraded to all gold plated fibre cabling and have this fixed in no time. Or my torrent site account got hacked or blocked, or the site changed URL again, or they updated their database and “hope to be back up soon”, or a Three Letter Agency seized the their hardware because they were also a involved in human trafficking of blood diamond child sex slaves, again.

It’s all too hard. I’d rather just listen to the footy on AM radio, or maybe read a book. Or occasionally complain about there being too many, or not enough, clouds / rain / sun / wind.

> mental overhead of navigating torrent websites, finding the correct file you want, downloading it with your torrent client behind the VPN they set up, and getting files to a point where they can watch it on TV to zero. When you think that stuff is fun you don’t count it

Heh, that’s what you think modern piracy is? How quaint. In reality I have my own “Netflix”, with access to effectively all media ever created and I click play. That’s it. That’s the entire process. No credit cards, no finding which service has it, no finding out that the service doesn’t have it in my country at this time, no ads. I punch in what I want to watch, I click play, and it plays.

> Nobody is ever going to convince me that pirating is actually easier than finding the thing I want to watch and putting it on my credit card.

Sounds like your problem. Though again, that’s already more steps than it is for me.

> which is that some people don’t want to pay for things

I was happy to pay, and did so for years. Then the services got worse, increasingly fragmented and ever increased in price as service got poorer. Now I’m no longer happy to pay; and have a superior service to boot. The industry successfully convinced me to give piracy up, before driving me back to it a decade later.

> Nobody is ever going to convince me that pirating is actually easier than finding the thing I want to watch and putting it on my credit card.

That's just because you're fine with consuming the low quality slop they stream out. Doesn't mean people who care more than you do are engaging in "mental gymnastics". We don't want the same things.

I want the best version of everything. The highest quality version. The uncensored version. The uncompressed version. The lossless version. The DRM-free version. The best version.

The copyright holders just aren't providing it. They only provide slop, and only on their terms, take it or leave it.

Then a bunch of fans gather together, hunt down an old film roll, drop tens of thousands of dollars on equipment to scan it and somehow it becomes a better version than the one the industry released. It's not fair to dismiss that level of commitment as "it's just people who don't want to pay for things". Industry should probably hire more people like that. People who give a shit.

> Then a bunch of fans gather together, hunt down an old film roll, drop tens of thousands of dollars on equipment to scan it and somehow it becomes a better version than the one the industry released. It's not fair to dismiss that level of commitment as "it's just people who don't want to pay for things".

This is absurdity. The average pirate is not downloading content that some fans spent $10K digitizing from an original film roll.

The average pirated content wasn’t even shot on film.

These piracy justifications are some of the weirdest mental gymnastics that happens on this site. I’m not taking about the pirate connoisseurs who only download the finest encoded sourced from artisanal film rolls to complete their collection. We’re talking about the average pirate who searches for a torrent or stream because they don’t want to pay a couple bucks.

This constant attempt to glorify pirates into the true, most moral, purest content consumers is so weird.

> This constant attempt to glorify pirates into the true, most moral, purest content consumers is so weird.

Why? You just said that they have to put more effort into it than the average person. Normie just signs up for netflix and watches whatever shows up. The pirate has to set up a torrent client, join private trackers and get connected with the so called scenesters, only to end up scrutinizing film grain of different encodes on screenshot comparison sites so he can spend his ratio budget on the best possible version.

It's true, that's a ton of work. Why would anyone put up with that nonsense, if not because they want higher quality than the industry is putting out? Netflix is not that expensive, and even if it was you can always share an account with some family members or something. Trivial.

> I want the best version of everything. The highest quality version. The uncensored version. The uncompressed version. The lossless version. The DRM-free version. The best version.

Basically the same greed that every billionaire has, just with negligible economic impact.

If billionaires are allowed to be extremely greedy then why aren't hundredaires allowed to be extremely greedy?

Sure, as long as they don’t have any moral concerns about society’s support for billionaires.

Appreciation of the arts getting compared with greed of billionaires ..... How the times have changed.

“Appreciation of the arts” = “stealing someone’s creative work”.

Nothing has changed, people are just trash.

If all billionaires wanted are copies of data which can be created at no cost there would be no problem with them.

That's true, but a lot of the time the best version is available on a blu ray you can buy.

The best version isn't some cumbersome Blu-Ray disc, it's the Blu-Ray's data remuxed into an mkv you can play with mpv.

Sometimes the best version just isn't sold anymore. See the 4K77 project for a concrete example.

There's apps for that these days. Not going to names them, but if you're still downloading a torrent file on a computer, you're behind the times. It's as easy as Netflix on an Android TV with a remote these days.

Don’t all those apps also expose you to VPN services using your connection as a gateway, or enrol you in a botnet, or exfiltrate your watch history to this weeks popular bad-actor, or expose everything on your local network to the internet?

No there are services that provide global cdn access to torrents. Your provider sees https traffic from your closest cdn edge. You don't share back at any point. These things are a couple of steps more to setup than getting a Netflix subscription and work almost an any device.

So all of these free (or paid apps? I don’t know, I don’t use any) that offer access to pirated content…

They’re all above board? Not doing anything nefarious?

That’s obviously not an argument anyone would intentionally make.

They are making money out of this. Subscription is like a month's Netflix for a year's access to everything. Multiple "providers" offering this which means there is money to be made.

So their business model is to profit off pirated content, and that’s why you trust them?

I don't think I said anything about trust. I was talking about content delivery. All the things you mentioned before are avoided using this method of delivery.

So you’ve audited the code of these apps, apps published by active criminals, and confirmed in a via reproducible build that none of these apps are a vector for VPN access, nor try to take advantage of vulnerabilities in any of the other software installed on that system.

I think you are either pretending that you don't understand or can't understand what I'm saying.

At which point did I mention apps?

Anyway this discussion is over.

Or ask your savvy friend for a copy on DVD-R. That's quite easy.

And to be clear: this was the original piracy, friend-to-friend networks. This was the original "scene" before torrenting and can still work this way with torrenting, or Usenet or whatever. We've just become more atomized and less group-oriented in general so chances are you aren't a member of a friend group that has a piracy guy, and you have to learn it yourself to get it done.