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Comment by Leonard_of_Q | Hacker News Reader

Of course there is competition: "piracy". The thing streaming was supposed to (mostly) eliminate by being "legal", easy, not too expensive, ad-free and easy to use while offering a wealth of things to see and hear. It even worked, for a while, in some places. Then they limited what could be seen and heard because of corporate politicking. Then the price went up, just a bit. Then more movies and artists suddenly went dark. Prices were raised again. Terms of use were changed allowing "limited" advertising where there was none before. Prices went up again while disallowing that TV upstairs to partake without buying another subscription. More ads, fewer things to see and hear, price rises, rinse and repeat.

What is that I see in the distance? A ship, right? They hail me, "Ahoy matey, come aboard, arrrrrrrrrrr...."

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This is, however, part of why we're trending towards mandatory ID verification to use the internet+ attempts to illegalize encryption and consumer VPNs.

VPNs only help you with Bittorrent piracy. The kind where you buy a set-top box is still most easily caught by a police officer seeing you using the box, or selling you the box, not by anything they can do on the internet.

You can route the box's traffic through a VPN.

You don't have to.

That is the internet equivalent of fare dodging. Some people are doing it? Not that much of a problem. More people are doing it? See, they'll say it's not worth it anymore to produce expensive shows and movies. And that's it.

I'd rather see a healthy physical media culture again. Hard to enshitify that.

The fare-dodging example is valid for recent movies and music but it falters for older stuff where "older" means "older than the original copyright term", i.e. between 18 and 21 years. Beyond that it is more comparable to charging a wind-fee to sailing boats or a current-fee to river runners: taking money for a common good. Copyright has been extended and extended again just to keep people from drawing a cartoon mouse or singing a birthday song and that makes current copyright terms just as piratical as the self-styled internet pirates who have no qualms about releasing movies the day they are premiered.

Here's a fix: bring copyright terms back to something sensible, say 15 years. After that point copyrighted material is free to use for non-commercial purposes. For commercial purposes you still need a licence for another 10-15 years. Beyond that it becomes public domain, no licence required.

This is an argument for not pirating indie games or books from smaller authors. There's no way Disney sees people pirating and just stops making content. It is all they know how to do

They should start making good quality products and charging a price people are willing to pay then. Do you realise piracy is just about the only leverage consumers have here?

It's not unprecedented either. Basically every time in history that the common people got rights, it was a reaction to the common people ceasing to give the nobles what the nobles needed, forcing them to the bargaining table.

> And that's it.

But there will still be demand for content, and people who are willing to pay for a non-enshittified experience. Piracy is essentially the consumer bargaining chip in an era of unprecedented centralization and monopoly power.

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