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Comment by tene80i | Hacker News Reader

Plenty of written works aren’t “information” but rather art. Most piracy is just about people preferring not to pay for novels, TV and film.

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Or not being able to. Regional licensing, missing and shuffling content.

To watch the world cup I had to spin up a VM in Brazil to watch it with Portuguese narration because the free transmissions are region locked.

I would gladly pay 5 bucks for it if it was possible otherwise and avoid the hassle.

There was no way in your country to pay and watch it? FIFA will have sold the tv rights there to someone, surely. In which case your complaint is what, that it was expensive?

Free on both, but not with the narration in my native language.

On Brazil the world cup was being transmitted on youtube. in NL only on traditional TV channels or Online for the same channels (all for free but in Dutch).

And literally as I write this I receive an email saying that my youtube premium was raised from 33 to 38 EURO. So there we have piracy getting juicier and juicier.

We humans, often forget that logistics is always the bottleneck in any Industry.

There is also a ton of tv shows, movies, music and books that you cannot buy, for now real good reason. I wouldn't be surprised that if in a few years there will be shows and movies that are only exists as pirated versions. With things increasingly only being available on streaming platforms or behind DRM in other ways, we risk looking back on the current era as a black hole 50 years from now.

My concern is that less popular content is just erases, lost in mergers or lost in massive datacenters, never to be seen again.

I agree there is an archival justification. I just don’t think that’s why most people who pirate things are doing it.

> I wouldn't be surprised that if in a few years there will be shows and movies that are only exists as pirated versions.

I can already think of a couple examples I've run into in the audiobook world. I have copies of Douglas Adams himself narrating his Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and subsequent books. As far as I know, these recordings are not available for purchase anywhere. I got them because someone was kind enough to upload them. I would have preferred to buy them but didn't have that choice.

Some of Iain Bank's audiobooks were only available in Europe for a time (and maybe still are). For those I was able to convince Amazon I was buying in Germany at least.

Indeed, art. And it is a pretty common position that all people should have access to art and culture. Add up the cost of buying the DVD/Blu-Ray releases for the 1500 or so films that make up the canon of cinema. That's a sum of money daunting even for people in developed countries, let alone most of the world. Piracy is going to be the realistic solution. (And before you say "Use the library", you know well-stocked libraries don't exist in most of the world, right?)

> And it is a pretty common position that all people should have access to art and culture.

Access to _all_ art and "culture"? For free?

Even if not all art, once something becomes canonical, it then becomes something that people should be able to easily familiarize themselves with for the sake of an educated and edified citizenry. And indeed, many countries subsidize public libraries and live performances for this very reason. But no state can manage to provide free or nearly-free access to the entire canon, so piracy helps fill the gap.

Do you have any examples of art or culture that is unavailable?

If you're saying "piracy is justified in those parts of the world where access to any art or culture is prohibitively expensive", then that's a pretty defensible position, not unlike "It's ok to steal bread if you are starving".

But that's not what many people defending piracy are doing. Many of them do indeed have great libraries nearby, and art and culture on demand at prices they happily spend having food delivered to their house.

I don't know if you have noticed, but piracy has declined greatly since the introduction of streaming. The scene is a shadow of its former self. The communities today that are keeping high-quality releases of canonical music and films available are overwhelmingly based in regions of the world with a dearth of good libraries.

Art is information, always.

It’s not tautological. Explain why, and particularly why it’s only information, which is the thing that purportedly wishes to be free.

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