16 ms·

Anecdata, but I’d say 90% of the piracy from people who would otherwise legitimately paid for content I’ve seen or read about falls into one or more of four cat

by ddelt 7y ago

Anecdata, but I’d say 90% of the piracy from people who would otherwise legitimately paid for content I’ve seen or read about falls into one or more of four categories: 1. The person can’t legally access the content at all, due to age, country of residence, or other imposed barrier 2. The person can’t afford the entire price of the content 3. The content has no form of sample/trial/demo, which imposes a fear of buying without fully understanding whether or not the purchase provides value 4. The person actually has or was planning to buy the content legally, but diverted due to DRM which is only present in the legal copies. All of these reasons indicate that the issue lies outside of the piracy, at least in my eyes. So I’m happy at least one nation has adopted some modern legislation about this topic.

taneq 7y ago
I think 2. is more ”the person felt that the asking price was unreasonable“. Most of us could afford to pay $30+ for a DVD but I’d imagine most of us wouldn’t be willing to.
- iforgotpassword 7y ago
  For a DRM free digital copy I'd be willing to pay around 20 bucks after release and would expect a drop in prices layer on, just like with physical releases. 1080p, maybe 4k but I don't even have a TV for that yet. I'm only watching movies very occasionally so I'm not sure if that kind of business model would be feasible, but my guess is that just the paranoia of selling something without DRM is too big.
  - benbristow 7y ago
    $20 is a lot of money for about 2 hours of entertainment. If films were like $1-$3 for a high resolution download I think they'd sell like wildfire. I'd definitely pay for the convenience.
    - taneq 7y ago
      To put that in context, it's about $18 for a movie ticket where I live and $30 if you buy popcorn and a drink. But yeah, it still seems like a lot to pay for a few-year-old movie that you'll only ever watch once.
      - Dylan16807 7y ago
        And to put that in context, the closest theater to me generally has month or two old movies and charges $2-6. And I don't want popcorn anyway.
        taneq 7y ago
        I'm gonna go out on a limb and say people where you live probably torrent less than people where I live. :P
        Dylan16807 7y ago
        It's in the middle of the US. It's more about the difference between a brand new movie and one that isn't.
      - dkersten 7y ago
        Cinema is still pretty expensive. If I go to a pub to hang out with friends, I spend under $10/hour and get beer for the money.
        jacobush 7y ago
        One beer. :-/
        dkersten 7y ago
        I might drink 8 pints in a night hanging out with friends, spread out over about 6 hours. The beers I drink in pubs cost on average 6 Euro. That works out as 8 euro/hour, which is about US$8.84 and is 1 and 1/3 pints an hour. If I drink one more, for an average of 1.5 an hour, then it works out as US$9.94, still under $10/hour on average spread over about 6 hours.
- paulcole 7y ago
  A classic case of privileged people thinking that the rules don’t apply to them. And if they don’t like the rules someone else made, it is their right to break them and make up some BS justification.
  - rayiner 7y ago
    They’re anti-social. These are the same people who drive in the HOV lane with nobody else in the car, or litter or jaywalk. They’re free riders. They violate the following moral principle: “If everyone did what I’m doing, what would happen?” In the case of piracy, the thing you’re downloading wouldn’t exist unless the majority of people followed the rules.
    - ravenstine 7y ago
      > They violate the following moral principle: “If everyone did what I’m doing, what would happen?” The reason a lot of people, perhaps most, don't follow that idea is because it's a lot like the slippery slope fallacy. Hypothetically, if everyone pirated all their content, perhaps there'd be serious problems as a result. In reality, that's never actually going to happen.
      - SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
        Some other sucker is paying for your entertainment, so it's all cool?
        ravenstine 7y ago
        I never said that. I just don't find the "if everyone did that" argument very compelling. For instance, if all 7.7 billion people lit wood fires every day, we'd have ash constantly falling down on us and the skies would be darkened, but we don't need to feel bad about setting the occasional campfire because the reality is that most people aren't going to be lighting fires all the time.
        7y ago
- alexis_fr 7y ago
  $30+ DVD... with ads. I’ve always found it insulting to the consumer. I wouldn’t mind ads on a cheap trinket, but not a full-price DVD.
  - DanBC 7y ago
    A lot of people like the ads. The un-skippable is what people don't like.
    - martius 7y ago
      Seriously? While I sometimes enjoy watching trailers for other films in the "bonuses/special features", when I buy a film (whatever the price), what I want is to watch the film: I put the disc in the player, I press play a couple of times after I chose the spoken language/subtitles, and then, I watch the film. Even if you can skip them, I really dislike the sequence of trailers, ads, "FBI WARNINGs", more ads, "enjoy the full experience of ULTRA HD", THX deep note, yet more ads.
      - kgwxd 7y ago
        I have an old Disney DVD with a feature called FastPlay. It has a 30 second, unskippable, description of FastPlay.
    - dkersten 7y ago
      They might be fine the first time you watch a DVD, but when, later, you see outdated adverts every. damn. time? That's actually the exact thing that made me abandon DVD's years ago.
- ptero 7y ago
  The use case that I did personally hit a couple of times is old, out of print books. They were relatively inexpensive (say, $10-$15 at publication 30 years ago), but did not publish a lot of copies. Thus my choice is between getting free digital scans off hobbyist sites (I guess also known as those evil "pirates") or searching for an occasional seller on ebay asking $200 for a copy of unknown quality. Can I afford $200 for a copy? Yes. Will I pay it? Not so sure, sorry. My 2c.
  - delecti 7y ago
    Maybe there's no clear line between the two, but there's a difference between pirating something out of print which has greatly appreciated in value due to rarity far beyond the typical asking price for media of that type, and being unable/unwilling to pay the typical retail price of a currently in-print item. I may have tried to tell myself otherwise, but when I was pirating blockbuster video games in college it was just because I didn't have $60 spare, not because there's anything inherently unreasonable about a $60 price tag for the game. Not least among the reasons why is that the original creator won't get any of your money for the out of print item.
antocv 7y ago
5. The person considers it a civil disobedience to not pay for services which lobby against the rights of said person/s. To not pay for your "service" is a political act. I could afford every content I consume, yet I make sure my content cost is 0 dollars and 0 cents.
- lucb1e 7y ago
  I'm not sure if I'm feeding a troll by replying, but I genuinely don't understand your comment. I would ask a question but it's more that the whole thing seems incoherent. Could you try to explain it to me in different words?
  - delecti 7y ago
    It made perfect sense to me. They're advocating "voting with your wallet". They don't want to financially support big companies that politically lobby against their interests. Paying for a Disney movie is (in at least some small way) a vote for the policies of the PR and corporate lobbying that Disney performs. If you support shorter copyright terms, it's understandable to not give money to someone who you reasonably expect to use that to extend copyright terms.
    - lucb1e 7y ago
      Ah, I understand the first part now, thanks. Makes sense not to want to support Disney. Not sure what's with the "I make sure my content is gratis" part (someone always puts time in it, and how does it help not to pay/donate to the indie artists that make it available for free? That doesn't help the lobby), but I can see how they're trying to avoid them the same way as others avoid Shell or Nestlé. Not sure if GP pays for any service in the industry though, that's kind of necessary to create a positive change.
    - criddell 7y ago
      I don't care if a movie I stream is DRM encumbered because I'm just there to watch it as it streams. It doesn't seem a lot different to me than going to a movie theater or to watch a play where you aren't allowed to record the show.
2muchcoffeeman 7y ago
5. Torrents are more convenient. I was happy to and still do pay for Netflix. But occasionally something comes along and I’m sure as hell not subscribing to 5 extra streaming services. One or two? Maybe even three? But now you have Amazon, YouTube, Netflix, Apple TV along with the other regional streaming services if you want to get content legally. And there’s more services to come.
- lucb1e 7y ago
  > 5. Torrents are more convenient. Right but then you don't fall within the 90% that OP estimates would have bought the product. In OP's points, you either would buy it if you could (1, 2), or are planning to buy after limited evaluation (3). Item 4 is a bit of an odd one (though it applies to me: I only pay for Audible $10/month because you can still do .aa exports and turn them into mp3s and play anywhere, any time; otherwise I'd pirate the books or find a competitor), but your 5th is squarely a lost sale. The text below your point doesn't really match your point, that sounds more like can't afford or just doesn't want to pay. Leaving in the middle whether it's reasonable to have to go to five "stores" to get everything you want, you either can afford it and are the (proposed) 10% or it falls under item 2.
  - the_af 7y ago
    I think "torrents are more convenient" is also about people who would have bought the product. Example: lots of people I know torrented Game of Thrones because paid services were actually worse. Things like HBO Go stuttered depending on internet connection -- and in one of the season premieres, the service was unavailable -- while torrents offered Full HD quality with no surprises. Another consideration is when you're paying for Netflix but it doesn't have all the seasons of a series yet. So people torrent the episodes even when they are already paying for a streaming service: torrents are more convenient. They get all the content when they want it, and with high quality too.
    - prepend 7y ago
      I torrented every season except the last when I used HBONow. The torrent experience was much better. Their app is bloated, shows ads, and is tough to navigate. Their app is worse than a folder where files show up and disappear when watched. That’s their competition and they failed.
theelous3 7y ago
I also think that when it comes to infinitly duplicateable products, value becomes extremely subjective. Paying full price for a movie just isn't worth it to me, even if I can afford it. I just dont value them highly. If the inly legal avenue for getting my hands on something I want to watch is priced way out of how I see the value proposition, I'll just pirate it. I favour a "pay what you want" model for a lot of these goods. I would pay 5e, but it's only available for 10e a month plus the work of cancelling subscriptions and so on, so instead I pay 0e.
iamben 7y ago
Along the same lines, but something applicable I heard with regards to software piracy in the late 90s or early 00s - for every 5 people, 1 will pay regardless, 2 will steal regardless and 2 will pay if it's easy, fair and convenient. As a loose rule of thumb, that seems to be roughly my experience when you take into account everyone that's accessing stuff (ie, kids, people earning money, parents, etc. etc.). I'm also reminded of the late 90s Gate's quote: "Although about 3 million computers get sold every year in China, people don't pay for the software. Someday they will, though. And as long as they're going to steal it, we want them to steal ours." -- It's exactly as you said. Make it easier and more convenient for people to get it legally than for them to get it illegally. When they have the cash they'll value the convenience. My subscriptions to Spotify, Netflix, Prime, Creative Cloud and so forth are a testament to this.
cheez 7y ago
> The person can’t legally access the content at all, due to age, country of residence, or other imposed barrier I buy stuff on iTunes then pirate it in my preferred format. Same for ebooks, audiobooks, etc. Not going to risk it disappearing.
- SturgeonsLaw 7y ago
  Or being edited. I (perhaps naively) didn't realise that happened to any real degree, but there was a thread on reddit today where someone had noticed that a series they wanted to stream had been retroactively edited to remove the music they liked from it. Archiving media by torrenting or ripping a stream is the closest we can get to owning media in this subscription based world we live in. Of course there's physical media, with the associated drawbacks others have mentioned (availability, ads, FBI warnings, etc). https://www.reddit.com/r/techsupport/comments/d68gi9/how_can_itunes_change_the_background_music_on_a/ https://www.reddit.com/r/techsupport/comments/d68gi9/how_can...
- erfgh 7y ago
  Itunes does not use DRM.
  - cheez 7y ago
    Pretty sure it does for movies, or at least you need to go through hassle to play it in your preferred form factor.
  - nichch 7y ago
    iTunes uses FairPlay DRM for tv shows and movies (at least).
rayiner 7y ago
In what other areas do you get to decide you don’t like the price someone is charging for something, or the terms and conditions, and get the product for free instead? I commute from a train station that has reserved parking spots. Quite a few are unused—if I park there, I’m not costing the garage any money. Is it okay if I park at one of those spots for free, so long as nobody was going to park there anyway? I’m not costing the garage anything right? Or displacing anyone else from getting a spot?
- Dylan16807 7y ago
  Is that one of the reasons listed in the post you replied to? The equivalent to piracy is that you park in a spot that's equivalent to a reserved spot but doesn't take up physical space inside the train station's land. And, well, that sounds fine.
- lzol 7y ago
  This is a poor analogy imo. It's not a physical medium. There's a finite number of parking spots. Once they're used up they're gone. Media is not a finite resource. If I have 50 friends over to watch the Avengers movie, there's nothing wrong with that. There's not less movie to go around, but there's probably fewer people who would spend money to rent it. I can't bring 50 people in my car to use a parking spot. There's physical limitations. Comparing digital things to physical things is always going to be a poor translation.
  - rayiner 7y ago
    The fact that there are a finite number of reserved parking spots only matters if there are more people who want one than there are spots. In that case, you’re keeping a spot from a paying customer, costing the garage money. In my garage, however, the reserved spots have number been full, and many are empty every day. Does that make it okay to park there? The digital versus physical distinction is in my opinion meaningless. We’re not talking about an abstract bit pattern. We are talking about the product of peoples’ labor. (Indeed, movies are more uniquely the product of human labor than almost anything else. It’s not like a factory-produced widget.) People make these things and ask you to set the terms for your benefitting from the fruits of their labor. Whether the product takes the form of a physical thing or a bit pattern is irrelevant to the human dimension of the transaction.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
auggierose 7y ago
A typical scenario is like mine: I purchased season 1 and 2 of "private eyes" (I know, I know, but I just love this show :-)) from Apple TV. But season 3 is not available (yet?), but I know that season 3 is already out, so ...
overcast 7y ago
Sorry, but being free is the reason 99% of people pirate software. This list is a good spin on putting pirates into a positive light, but the fact of the matter, is that they are stealing software and entertainment. None of which are a basic human need or right. What if you could download a Playstation or new TV, and have it materialize in front of you for FREE? This is like arguing that torrents are mostly used for distributing freeware/shareware. Sure there are some, but the rest is illegal software.
- throwaway8941 7y ago
  They're stealing nothing. It's really hard to take you guys seriously when you talk about "stealing" information.
  - overcast 7y ago
    This message is really powerful coming from a throwaway account.
  - tzs 7y ago
    "Steal" in English means much more than just taking physical property without legal right and without intention of returning it. Here are several examples of common, correct, usage: • Someone says they do not like cats and have no interest in having one as a pet. A cute stray kitten shows up on their doorstep, they take pity and feed it. They fall in love with it and keep it. They might say that the kitten "stole" their heart. • An actor playing a minor role in a play gives a performance that outshines the performance of the stars. Many would say that the actor "stole" the show. • An employee of a rival company poses as a janitor to gain access to your lab and takes a photo of a whiteboard containing the formula for a chemical that is a trade secret in your manufacturing process. It would be common to say that the rival company "stole" your secret formula. • When crackers gain access to a company's list of customer email addresses, passwords, or credit card numbers, it is commonly said that the data was "stolen". • Alice is Bob's fiancé. Mallory woos Alice without Bob's knowledge. Alice elopes with Mallory. Most would find it acceptable if Bob said that Mallory "stole" his fiancé. • A team that has been behind since the start of the game but wins on a last second improbable play is often said to have "stolen" the game. Outside of court documents, statutes, law review articles, and your final exam in an IP law class, using the word "steal" for willful copyright infringement is common and correct usage.
erfgh 7y ago
Well maybe the rest of the people would never pay for all the content they pirate but they'd probably pay for at least a small portion of that.
thecopy 7y ago
I live in Switzerland, im paying for Netflix but i often download the movies i could watch on Netflix due to the bad streaming quality i get from Netflix. I have 10Gbit/s connects, so i usually get downloads speeds of ~60 MB/s when downloading a movie.
- andreasley 7y ago
  You might want to ask your ISP to participate in the Netflix Open Connect program [1], which provides service providers with free caching servers. My ISP (Init7) does that and the performance for Netflix is absolutely fantastic (instant playback in highest quality). [1] https://openconnect.netflix.com/ https://openconnect.netflix.com/
- nurb 7y ago
  You might want to preserve net neutrality and continue to use torrents like this.
CodeMage 7y ago
An interesting subcategory of #1 is when you're trying to watch a legally available movie that doesn't have subtitles in your language of choice. Watching Netflix in United States? Some stuff might have Spanish subtitles, but most doesn't. Amazon is even worse.
- danmaz74 7y ago
  Subtitles... or even audio. I've got an Italian Amazon subscription (even if I live in the UK now) and lots of US movies don't have the original soundtrack, only the dubbed one.
andreasley 7y ago
I've recently tried to watch the Netflix production "I am Mother", but it isn't available on Netflix in Switzerland – nor on any other streaming service or Blu-Ray. It's probably cheaper for production companies to ignore piracy to a certain extent than to fix the distribution/rights issues, but that's definitely not good service.
cmiles74 7y ago
Do individuals downloading some television or movies here and there for their own personal use really cost these media companies a lot of money, or is it more like a rounding error? There was a post yesterday that mentioned setting up a Plex Media Server and something like Sonarr to download television shows and the consensus was that this setup is way too complicated for most people. Given that, how big an issue is piracy, really? There was an article on Vice recently[0] that indicated BitTorrent traffic was on the rise (too many streaming services, too much exclusive content). But my knee-jerk reaction is that if it was really costing these media companies significant dollars they'd be investing in one streaming service rather than splitting off into more and more. [0]: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/d3q45v/bittorrent-usage-increases-netflix-streaming-sites https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/d3q45v/bittorrent-usage-i...
- rapind 7y ago
  put.io + showRSS trivializes it. Mind you put.io has a price, but maybe that illustrates the parent's point that people are willing to pay.
have_faith 7y ago
I think number 2 is very common in the professional software used by hobbyists world. For instance if you dabble in music or video production but can't afford your preferred DAW or editor then pirating the software is a very low friction option. I sometimes see companies offer "Lite" versions of their software for a reduced price but often stripping out desirable features making pirating the normal version even more appealing.
yummypaint 7y ago
Dont forget the people who already purchased the content but lost the physical media or their access to it
SkyBelow 7y ago
>due to age Many of the others make sense, but age seems like a hard one to work around. Generally these restrictions only apply to children, and legally (and to some extent socially) we treat even near adult children with the same attitude we treat toddlers. Yes, kids will pirate, but in this case giving them legal access may be a far worse choice as long as our society continues to view a child who is willing to pirate as being just a kid.
- emosupportfi 7y ago
  Another way to read the original post's "due to age" might be the age of the content itself, rather than the age of the user downloading it. For example, you can't get a digital copy of the original Star Wars theatrical release, but there are fan conversions of old VHS or film reels and additional reconstructions that aren't legally available, but are certainly out there. I know that when I was doing pop-culture research for a thesis on pre-WWII American Cartoons I ran into a lot of works that were only digitized by amateurs and hobbyists, and therefore not legally available anywhere.
  - SkyBelow 7y ago
    Good point. I guess both are reasons people are blocked, and the age of content is one that does apply to OP's point. But now that I've thought upon it, I do wonder how people feel about the age of viewer issue, especially since people can easily lie about their age or otherwise pirate the content.
wanderer2323 7y ago
4a. The person would by legally but content only comes in a form that the seller can delete remotely on a whim without any recourse (or will become unavailable if the seller goes out of business).
hiccuphippo 7y ago
6. Piracy isn't seen as something morally bad in your society. Where I come from, you can buy a bootleg dvd/bd from a store for a buck and nobody bats an eye.
chimi 7y ago
No one is entitled to any of what you describe. I believe that is the problem. The feeling of entitlement endemic in our society/culture/species. If you can't afford it or access it or demo it or feel comfortable with your purchase then do without. You aren't entitled to someone else's property.
- 4bpp 7y ago
  What is the notion of something being someone's property, though, if not an entitlement? The problem with this analysis is that it's completely dependent on what entitlements you are willing to acknowledge. There is no such thing as an empirically readable tag on an object or a particular combination of bits that identifies the owner; the notion is entirely constructed and maintained by humans, and therefore the weight of any particular notion that "A owns X" depends on which and how many humans believe it. On one end, pretty much all members of our society agree to and hone people's titles to movable objects like, say, a car. If the car is parked in place A, the owner is in place B and a random third party is in place A, then we believe that the owner has a moral right to demand that the random party not take the car, even though in some real sense the third party currently "has" the car, or at least has access to it. A hypothetical society in which people only believe in a very narrow set of property rights along the lines of "you have the right to not have your things ripped out of your hands" might write something like: "If you can't protect it or hold on to it or make sure that nobody else lays their hands on it then do without." If you consider, say, building squatters and their supporters, or public-right-of-way advocates, this intuition that government-granted title counts is already not nearly as universal for certain pairs of property and owners; a nontrivial number of living humans appears to believe that an individual living in a building or plot of land has more of a title to it than a faceless landlord nominally owning it without putting it to use out of some abstract economic consideration. In the eyes of those who tend to side with the squatters, it is the landlords who are acting entitled to somebody else's home, just because they paid money to get an official-looking piece of paper from another unrelated entity. (This becomes more apparent in cases where there isn't a single continuous government in control of an area. If governments A and B claim a territory, person X buys a title to a plot of land from government A and person Y buys a title to the same plot of land from goverment B and then they squabble over who gets to move in, which one is "acting entitled"?) There generally seems to be far less consensus once we talk about titles to "property" that is not even physical, and/or can be cloned rather than moved at zero cost. Is someone who designs and places a building in a public space entitled to restrict reproduction of its appearance in photos? (France says yes, most everyone else finds this ridiculous.) If we forget about reproduction, am I entitled to freely sell or give my unique copy of a book or game to somebody else, or is Valve or the author entitled to stop me from doing so? (Many Americans seem to lean towards siding with the publisher, a parallel thread mentions that the EU just reaffirmed that the publisher's rights are exhausted with the first sale.) Other cases where people disagree about whose title is valid : taxes, patents, copyright duration... You need to recognise that many anti-copyright campaigners come from a moral framework where the creator of a book or movie has no meaningful title to what someone does with data that they have stored; in this framework, it is the copyright owner who is by default assumed to be acting entitled to someone's manifest property (a sequence of bits on their harddrive, which they are not withholding from anyone else). Often, this goes hand in hand with a basic moral intuition that ownership := you are entitled to not lose use of the thing := you are entitled to not have others gain use of the thing. (That's why "you wouldn't download a car" is so universally made fun of in anti-copyright circles. It makes sense if you think of the point of owning a car being that others don't get to use it.) You might persuasively argue that this notion of property/pattern of recognised titles is inferior to yours - and this is the type of argument that is being made whenever people debate whether patents encourage or stifle innovation, rather than making the debate about whether the inventor or the commons is acting entitled - but to simply assert that the studios' title is valid and the copy-holder's title is not is as useful as shouting "no, MY moral principles are right".
Scapeghost 7y ago
There's another category: 5. The culture generally has no concept of placing monetary value upon intellectual property. I'm from a "third world" country, and throughout my life, I have almost never known or seen anyone pay for original software, movies or music. Originals were never easy to get here (few companies have official distribution here) to begin with, but even after widespread internet access (since the mid 2000s) and millions of smartphone (mostly Android) users, there's still virtually nobody who spends a dime on software or media.
blitmap 7y ago
Or you can't find the most valuable copy of something: highest bitrate video, multiple languages for subtitles, multiple audio streams for different languages. I just want 1 supreme copy of something.
ACow_Adonis 7y ago
I've torrented physical media I've bought because it's more convenient and I don't wan't to pay the long term price of storage (either in terms of data or physical space). It's an interesting thought experiment: if I buy a DVD and physically keep it, am I more entitled to watch a movie in perpetuity than if I buy it and burn it in a fire. What if i keep the ashes? Where's the digital equivalent of a perpetual ownership structure? (For me, this all comes back to the problem that intellectual property laws/ concepts are, as a general rule, farcical/nonsensical)
dorian-graph 7y ago
I think you're missing a huge group of people. Those who just want something for free. They easily step over/don't care about any of those barriers you've mentioned. I've said this before as well, but listing all those problems make it sound like someone, at any cost, simply must consume some pirated content, otherwise some terrible thing would befall them.
peterburkimsher 7y ago
Anecdotally, I agree with you, and memes [1] confirm this. Apologies for referencing 9gag, but that site did in fact go through Y Combinator. [1] https://9gag.com/gag/aj5DjOp https://9gag.com/gag/aj5DjOp

by ddelt 7y ago

taneq 7y ago

I think 2. is more ”the person felt that the asking price was unreasonable“. Most of us could afford to pay $30+ for a DVD but I’d imagine most of us wouldn’t be willing to.

iforgotpassword 7y ago
For a DRM free digital copy I'd be willing to pay around 20 bucks after release and would expect a drop in prices layer on, just like with physical releases. 1080p, maybe 4k but I don't even have a TV for that yet. I'm only watching movies very occasionally so I'm not sure if that kind of business model would be feasible, but my guess is that just the paranoia of selling something without DRM is too big.
- benbristow 7y ago
  $20 is a lot of money for about 2 hours of entertainment. If films were like $1-$3 for a high resolution download I think they'd sell like wildfire. I'd definitely pay for the convenience.
  - taneq 7y ago
    To put that in context, it's about $18 for a movie ticket where I live and $30 if you buy popcorn and a drink. But yeah, it still seems like a lot to pay for a few-year-old movie that you'll only ever watch once.
    - Dylan16807 7y ago
      And to put that in context, the closest theater to me generally has month or two old movies and charges $2-6. And I don't want popcorn anyway.
      - taneq 7y ago
        I'm gonna go out on a limb and say people where you live probably torrent less than people where I live. :P
        Dylan16807 7y ago
        It's in the middle of the US. It's more about the difference between a brand new movie and one that isn't.
    - dkersten 7y ago
      Cinema is still pretty expensive. If I go to a pub to hang out with friends, I spend under $10/hour and get beer for the money.
      - jacobush 7y ago
        One beer. :-/
        dkersten 7y ago
        I might drink 8 pints in a night hanging out with friends, spread out over about 6 hours. The beers I drink in pubs cost on average 6 Euro. That works out as 8 euro/hour, which is about US$8.84 and is 1 and 1/3 pints an hour. If I drink one more, for an average of 1.5 an hour, then it works out as US$9.94, still under $10/hour on average spread over about 6 hours.
paulcole 7y ago
A classic case of privileged people thinking that the rules don’t apply to them. And if they don’t like the rules someone else made, it is their right to break them and make up some BS justification.
- rayiner 7y ago
  They’re anti-social. These are the same people who drive in the HOV lane with nobody else in the car, or litter or jaywalk. They’re free riders. They violate the following moral principle: “If everyone did what I’m doing, what would happen?” In the case of piracy, the thing you’re downloading wouldn’t exist unless the majority of people followed the rules.
  - ravenstine 7y ago
    > They violate the following moral principle: “If everyone did what I’m doing, what would happen?” The reason a lot of people, perhaps most, don't follow that idea is because it's a lot like the slippery slope fallacy. Hypothetically, if everyone pirated all their content, perhaps there'd be serious problems as a result. In reality, that's never actually going to happen.
    - SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
      Some other sucker is paying for your entertainment, so it's all cool?
      - ravenstine 7y ago
        I never said that. I just don't find the "if everyone did that" argument very compelling. For instance, if all 7.7 billion people lit wood fires every day, we'd have ash constantly falling down on us and the skies would be darkened, but we don't need to feel bad about setting the occasional campfire because the reality is that most people aren't going to be lighting fires all the time.
        7y ago
alexis_fr 7y ago
$30+ DVD... with ads. I’ve always found it insulting to the consumer. I wouldn’t mind ads on a cheap trinket, but not a full-price DVD.
- DanBC 7y ago
  A lot of people like the ads. The un-skippable is what people don't like.
  - martius 7y ago
    Seriously? While I sometimes enjoy watching trailers for other films in the "bonuses/special features", when I buy a film (whatever the price), what I want is to watch the film: I put the disc in the player, I press play a couple of times after I chose the spoken language/subtitles, and then, I watch the film. Even if you can skip them, I really dislike the sequence of trailers, ads, "FBI WARNINGs", more ads, "enjoy the full experience of ULTRA HD", THX deep note, yet more ads.
    - kgwxd 7y ago
      I have an old Disney DVD with a feature called FastPlay. It has a 30 second, unskippable, description of FastPlay.
  - dkersten 7y ago
    They might be fine the first time you watch a DVD, but when, later, you see outdated adverts every. damn. time? That's actually the exact thing that made me abandon DVD's years ago.
ptero 7y ago
The use case that I did personally hit a couple of times is old, out of print books. They were relatively inexpensive (say, $10-$15 at publication 30 years ago), but did not publish a lot of copies. Thus my choice is between getting free digital scans off hobbyist sites (I guess also known as those evil "pirates") or searching for an occasional seller on ebay asking $200 for a copy of unknown quality. Can I afford $200 for a copy? Yes. Will I pay it? Not so sure, sorry. My 2c.
- delecti 7y ago
  Maybe there's no clear line between the two, but there's a difference between pirating something out of print which has greatly appreciated in value due to rarity far beyond the typical asking price for media of that type, and being unable/unwilling to pay the typical retail price of a currently in-print item. I may have tried to tell myself otherwise, but when I was pirating blockbuster video games in college it was just because I didn't have $60 spare, not because there's anything inherently unreasonable about a $60 price tag for the game. Not least among the reasons why is that the original creator won't get any of your money for the out of print item.

antocv 7y ago

5. The person considers it a civil disobedience to not pay for services which lobby against the rights of said person/s. To not pay for your "service" is a political act. I could afford every content I consume, yet I make sure my content cost is 0 dollars and 0 cents.

lucb1e 7y ago
I'm not sure if I'm feeding a troll by replying, but I genuinely don't understand your comment. I would ask a question but it's more that the whole thing seems incoherent. Could you try to explain it to me in different words?
- delecti 7y ago
  It made perfect sense to me. They're advocating "voting with your wallet". They don't want to financially support big companies that politically lobby against their interests. Paying for a Disney movie is (in at least some small way) a vote for the policies of the PR and corporate lobbying that Disney performs. If you support shorter copyright terms, it's understandable to not give money to someone who you reasonably expect to use that to extend copyright terms.
  - lucb1e 7y ago
    Ah, I understand the first part now, thanks. Makes sense not to want to support Disney. Not sure what's with the "I make sure my content is gratis" part (someone always puts time in it, and how does it help not to pay/donate to the indie artists that make it available for free? That doesn't help the lobby), but I can see how they're trying to avoid them the same way as others avoid Shell or Nestlé. Not sure if GP pays for any service in the industry though, that's kind of necessary to create a positive change.
  - criddell 7y ago
    I don't care if a movie I stream is DRM encumbered because I'm just there to watch it as it streams. It doesn't seem a lot different to me than going to a movie theater or to watch a play where you aren't allowed to record the show.

2muchcoffeeman 7y ago

5. Torrents are more convenient. I was happy to and still do pay for Netflix. But occasionally something comes along and I’m sure as hell not subscribing to 5 extra streaming services. One or two? Maybe even three? But now you have Amazon, YouTube, Netflix, Apple TV along with the other regional streaming services if you want to get content legally. And there’s more services to come.

lucb1e 7y ago
> 5. Torrents are more convenient. Right but then you don't fall within the 90% that OP estimates would have bought the product. In OP's points, you either would buy it if you could (1, 2), or are planning to buy after limited evaluation (3). Item 4 is a bit of an odd one (though it applies to me: I only pay for Audible $10/month because you can still do .aa exports and turn them into mp3s and play anywhere, any time; otherwise I'd pirate the books or find a competitor), but your 5th is squarely a lost sale. The text below your point doesn't really match your point, that sounds more like can't afford or just doesn't want to pay. Leaving in the middle whether it's reasonable to have to go to five "stores" to get everything you want, you either can afford it and are the (proposed) 10% or it falls under item 2.
- the_af 7y ago
  I think "torrents are more convenient" is also about people who would have bought the product. Example: lots of people I know torrented Game of Thrones because paid services were actually worse. Things like HBO Go stuttered depending on internet connection -- and in one of the season premieres, the service was unavailable -- while torrents offered Full HD quality with no surprises. Another consideration is when you're paying for Netflix but it doesn't have all the seasons of a series yet. So people torrent the episodes even when they are already paying for a streaming service: torrents are more convenient. They get all the content when they want it, and with high quality too.
  - prepend 7y ago
    I torrented every season except the last when I used HBONow. The torrent experience was much better. Their app is bloated, shows ads, and is tough to navigate. Their app is worse than a folder where files show up and disappear when watched. That’s their competition and they failed.

theelous3 7y ago

I also think that when it comes to infinitly duplicateable products, value becomes extremely subjective. Paying full price for a movie just isn't worth it to me, even if I can afford it. I just dont value them highly. If the inly legal avenue for getting my hands on something I want to watch is priced way out of how I see the value proposition, I'll just pirate it. I favour a "pay what you want" model for a lot of these goods. I would pay 5e, but it's only available for 10e a month plus the work of cancelling subscriptions and so on, so instead I pay 0e.

iamben 7y ago

Along the same lines, but something applicable I heard with regards to software piracy in the late 90s or early 00s - for every 5 people, 1 will pay regardless, 2 will steal regardless and 2 will pay if it's easy, fair and convenient. As a loose rule of thumb, that seems to be roughly my experience when you take into account everyone that's accessing stuff (ie, kids, people earning money, parents, etc. etc.). I'm also reminded of the late 90s Gate's quote: "Although about 3 million computers get sold every year in China, people don't pay for the software. Someday they will, though. And as long as they're going to steal it, we want them to steal ours." -- It's exactly as you said. Make it easier and more convenient for people to get it legally than for them to get it illegally. When they have the cash they'll value the convenience. My subscriptions to Spotify, Netflix, Prime, Creative Cloud and so forth are a testament to this.

cheez 7y ago

> The person can’t legally access the content at all, due to age, country of residence, or other imposed barrier I buy stuff on iTunes then pirate it in my preferred format. Same for ebooks, audiobooks, etc. Not going to risk it disappearing.

SturgeonsLaw 7y ago
Or being edited. I (perhaps naively) didn't realise that happened to any real degree, but there was a thread on reddit today where someone had noticed that a series they wanted to stream had been retroactively edited to remove the music they liked from it. Archiving media by torrenting or ripping a stream is the closest we can get to owning media in this subscription based world we live in. Of course there's physical media, with the associated drawbacks others have mentioned (availability, ads, FBI warnings, etc). https://www.reddit.com/r/techsupport/comments/d68gi9/how_can_itunes_change_the_background_music_on_a/ https://www.reddit.com/r/techsupport/comments/d68gi9/how_can...
erfgh 7y ago
Itunes does not use DRM.
- cheez 7y ago
  Pretty sure it does for movies, or at least you need to go through hassle to play it in your preferred form factor.
- nichch 7y ago
  iTunes uses FairPlay DRM for tv shows and movies (at least).

rayiner 7y ago

In what other areas do you get to decide you don’t like the price someone is charging for something, or the terms and conditions, and get the product for free instead? I commute from a train station that has reserved parking spots. Quite a few are unused—if I park there, I’m not costing the garage any money. Is it okay if I park at one of those spots for free, so long as nobody was going to park there anyway? I’m not costing the garage anything right? Or displacing anyone else from getting a spot?

Dylan16807 7y ago
Is that one of the reasons listed in the post you replied to? The equivalent to piracy is that you park in a spot that's equivalent to a reserved spot but doesn't take up physical space inside the train station's land. And, well, that sounds fine.
lzol 7y ago
This is a poor analogy imo. It's not a physical medium. There's a finite number of parking spots. Once they're used up they're gone. Media is not a finite resource. If I have 50 friends over to watch the Avengers movie, there's nothing wrong with that. There's not less movie to go around, but there's probably fewer people who would spend money to rent it. I can't bring 50 people in my car to use a parking spot. There's physical limitations. Comparing digital things to physical things is always going to be a poor translation.
- rayiner 7y ago
  The fact that there are a finite number of reserved parking spots only matters if there are more people who want one than there are spots. In that case, you’re keeping a spot from a paying customer, costing the garage money. In my garage, however, the reserved spots have number been full, and many are empty every day. Does that make it okay to park there? The digital versus physical distinction is in my opinion meaningless. We’re not talking about an abstract bit pattern. We are talking about the product of peoples’ labor. (Indeed, movies are more uniquely the product of human labor than almost anything else. It’s not like a factory-produced widget.) People make these things and ask you to set the terms for your benefitting from the fruits of their labor. Whether the product takes the form of a physical thing or a bit pattern is irrelevant to the human dimension of the transaction.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

auggierose 7y ago

A typical scenario is like mine: I purchased season 1 and 2 of "private eyes" (I know, I know, but I just love this show :-)) from Apple TV. But season 3 is not available (yet?), but I know that season 3 is already out, so ...

overcast 7y ago

Sorry, but being free is the reason 99% of people pirate software. This list is a good spin on putting pirates into a positive light, but the fact of the matter, is that they are stealing software and entertainment. None of which are a basic human need or right. What if you could download a Playstation or new TV, and have it materialize in front of you for FREE? This is like arguing that torrents are mostly used for distributing freeware/shareware. Sure there are some, but the rest is illegal software.

throwaway8941 7y ago
They're stealing nothing. It's really hard to take you guys seriously when you talk about "stealing" information.
- overcast 7y ago
  This message is really powerful coming from a throwaway account.
- tzs 7y ago
  "Steal" in English means much more than just taking physical property without legal right and without intention of returning it. Here are several examples of common, correct, usage: • Someone says they do not like cats and have no interest in having one as a pet. A cute stray kitten shows up on their doorstep, they take pity and feed it. They fall in love with it and keep it. They might say that the kitten "stole" their heart. • An actor playing a minor role in a play gives a performance that outshines the performance of the stars. Many would say that the actor "stole" the show. • An employee of a rival company poses as a janitor to gain access to your lab and takes a photo of a whiteboard containing the formula for a chemical that is a trade secret in your manufacturing process. It would be common to say that the rival company "stole" your secret formula. • When crackers gain access to a company's list of customer email addresses, passwords, or credit card numbers, it is commonly said that the data was "stolen". • Alice is Bob's fiancé. Mallory woos Alice without Bob's knowledge. Alice elopes with Mallory. Most would find it acceptable if Bob said that Mallory "stole" his fiancé. • A team that has been behind since the start of the game but wins on a last second improbable play is often said to have "stolen" the game. Outside of court documents, statutes, law review articles, and your final exam in an IP law class, using the word "steal" for willful copyright infringement is common and correct usage.

erfgh 7y ago

Well maybe the rest of the people would never pay for all the content they pirate but they'd probably pay for at least a small portion of that.

thecopy 7y ago

I live in Switzerland, im paying for Netflix but i often download the movies i could watch on Netflix due to the bad streaming quality i get from Netflix. I have 10Gbit/s connects, so i usually get downloads speeds of ~60 MB/s when downloading a movie.

andreasley 7y ago
You might want to ask your ISP to participate in the Netflix Open Connect program [1], which provides service providers with free caching servers. My ISP (Init7) does that and the performance for Netflix is absolutely fantastic (instant playback in highest quality). [1] https://openconnect.netflix.com/ https://openconnect.netflix.com/
nurb 7y ago
You might want to preserve net neutrality and continue to use torrents like this.

CodeMage 7y ago

An interesting subcategory of #1 is when you're trying to watch a legally available movie that doesn't have subtitles in your language of choice. Watching Netflix in United States? Some stuff might have Spanish subtitles, but most doesn't. Amazon is even worse.

danmaz74 7y ago
Subtitles... or even audio. I've got an Italian Amazon subscription (even if I live in the UK now) and lots of US movies don't have the original soundtrack, only the dubbed one.

andreasley 7y ago

I've recently tried to watch the Netflix production "I am Mother", but it isn't available on Netflix in Switzerland – nor on any other streaming service or Blu-Ray. It's probably cheaper for production companies to ignore piracy to a certain extent than to fix the distribution/rights issues, but that's definitely not good service.

cmiles74 7y ago

Do individuals downloading some television or movies here and there for their own personal use really cost these media companies a lot of money, or is it more like a rounding error? There was a post yesterday that mentioned setting up a Plex Media Server and something like Sonarr to download television shows and the consensus was that this setup is way too complicated for most people. Given that, how big an issue is piracy, really? There was an article on Vice recently[0] that indicated BitTorrent traffic was on the rise (too many streaming services, too much exclusive content). But my knee-jerk reaction is that if it was really costing these media companies significant dollars they'd be investing in one streaming service rather than splitting off into more and more. [0]: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/d3q45v/bittorrent-usage-increases-netflix-streaming-sites https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/d3q45v/bittorrent-usage-i...

rapind 7y ago
put.io + showRSS trivializes it. Mind you put.io has a price, but maybe that illustrates the parent's point that people are willing to pay.

have_faith 7y ago

I think number 2 is very common in the professional software used by hobbyists world. For instance if you dabble in music or video production but can't afford your preferred DAW or editor then pirating the software is a very low friction option. I sometimes see companies offer "Lite" versions of their software for a reduced price but often stripping out desirable features making pirating the normal version even more appealing.

yummypaint 7y ago

Dont forget the people who already purchased the content but lost the physical media or their access to it

SkyBelow 7y ago

>due to age Many of the others make sense, but age seems like a hard one to work around. Generally these restrictions only apply to children, and legally (and to some extent socially) we treat even near adult children with the same attitude we treat toddlers. Yes, kids will pirate, but in this case giving them legal access may be a far worse choice as long as our society continues to view a child who is willing to pirate as being just a kid.

emosupportfi 7y ago
Another way to read the original post's "due to age" might be the age of the content itself, rather than the age of the user downloading it. For example, you can't get a digital copy of the original Star Wars theatrical release, but there are fan conversions of old VHS or film reels and additional reconstructions that aren't legally available, but are certainly out there. I know that when I was doing pop-culture research for a thesis on pre-WWII American Cartoons I ran into a lot of works that were only digitized by amateurs and hobbyists, and therefore not legally available anywhere.
- SkyBelow 7y ago
  Good point. I guess both are reasons people are blocked, and the age of content is one that does apply to OP's point. But now that I've thought upon it, I do wonder how people feel about the age of viewer issue, especially since people can easily lie about their age or otherwise pirate the content.

wanderer2323 7y ago

4a. The person would by legally but content only comes in a form that the seller can delete remotely on a whim without any recourse (or will become unavailable if the seller goes out of business).

hiccuphippo 7y ago

6. Piracy isn't seen as something morally bad in your society. Where I come from, you can buy a bootleg dvd/bd from a store for a buck and nobody bats an eye.

chimi 7y ago

No one is entitled to any of what you describe. I believe that is the problem. The feeling of entitlement endemic in our society/culture/species. If you can't afford it or access it or demo it or feel comfortable with your purchase then do without. You aren't entitled to someone else's property.

4bpp 7y ago
What is the notion of something being someone's property, though, if not an entitlement? The problem with this analysis is that it's completely dependent on what entitlements you are willing to acknowledge. There is no such thing as an empirically readable tag on an object or a particular combination of bits that identifies the owner; the notion is entirely constructed and maintained by humans, and therefore the weight of any particular notion that "A owns X" depends on which and how many humans believe it. On one end, pretty much all members of our society agree to and hone people's titles to movable objects like, say, a car. If the car is parked in place A, the owner is in place B and a random third party is in place A, then we believe that the owner has a moral right to demand that the random party not take the car, even though in some real sense the third party currently "has" the car, or at least has access to it. A hypothetical society in which people only believe in a very narrow set of property rights along the lines of "you have the right to not have your things ripped out of your hands" might write something like: "If you can't protect it or hold on to it or make sure that nobody else lays their hands on it then do without." If you consider, say, building squatters and their supporters, or public-right-of-way advocates, this intuition that government-granted title counts is already not nearly as universal for certain pairs of property and owners; a nontrivial number of living humans appears to believe that an individual living in a building or plot of land has more of a title to it than a faceless landlord nominally owning it without putting it to use out of some abstract economic consideration. In the eyes of those who tend to side with the squatters, it is the landlords who are acting entitled to somebody else's home, just because they paid money to get an official-looking piece of paper from another unrelated entity. (This becomes more apparent in cases where there isn't a single continuous government in control of an area. If governments A and B claim a territory, person X buys a title to a plot of land from government A and person Y buys a title to the same plot of land from goverment B and then they squabble over who gets to move in, which one is "acting entitled"?) There generally seems to be far less consensus once we talk about titles to "property" that is not even physical, and/or can be cloned rather than moved at zero cost. Is someone who designs and places a building in a public space entitled to restrict reproduction of its appearance in photos? (France says yes, most everyone else finds this ridiculous.) If we forget about reproduction, am I entitled to freely sell or give my unique copy of a book or game to somebody else, or is Valve or the author entitled to stop me from doing so? (Many Americans seem to lean towards siding with the publisher, a parallel thread mentions that the EU just reaffirmed that the publisher's rights are exhausted with the first sale.) Other cases where people disagree about whose title is valid : taxes, patents, copyright duration... You need to recognise that many anti-copyright campaigners come from a moral framework where the creator of a book or movie has no meaningful title to what someone does with data that they have stored; in this framework, it is the copyright owner who is by default assumed to be acting entitled to someone's manifest property (a sequence of bits on their harddrive, which they are not withholding from anyone else). Often, this goes hand in hand with a basic moral intuition that ownership := you are entitled to not lose use of the thing := you are entitled to not have others gain use of the thing. (That's why "you wouldn't download a car" is so universally made fun of in anti-copyright circles. It makes sense if you think of the point of owning a car being that others don't get to use it.) You might persuasively argue that this notion of property/pattern of recognised titles is inferior to yours - and this is the type of argument that is being made whenever people debate whether patents encourage or stifle innovation, rather than making the debate about whether the inventor or the commons is acting entitled - but to simply assert that the studios' title is valid and the copy-holder's title is not is as useful as shouting "no, MY moral principles are right".

Scapeghost 7y ago

There's another category: 5. The culture generally has no concept of placing monetary value upon intellectual property. I'm from a "third world" country, and throughout my life, I have almost never known or seen anyone pay for original software, movies or music. Originals were never easy to get here (few companies have official distribution here) to begin with, but even after widespread internet access (since the mid 2000s) and millions of smartphone (mostly Android) users, there's still virtually nobody who spends a dime on software or media.

blitmap 7y ago

Or you can't find the most valuable copy of something: highest bitrate video, multiple languages for subtitles, multiple audio streams for different languages. I just want 1 supreme copy of something.

ACow_Adonis 7y ago

I've torrented physical media I've bought because it's more convenient and I don't wan't to pay the long term price of storage (either in terms of data or physical space). It's an interesting thought experiment: if I buy a DVD and physically keep it, am I more entitled to watch a movie in perpetuity than if I buy it and burn it in a fire. What if i keep the ashes? Where's the digital equivalent of a perpetual ownership structure? (For me, this all comes back to the problem that intellectual property laws/ concepts are, as a general rule, farcical/nonsensical)

dorian-graph 7y ago

I think you're missing a huge group of people. Those who just want something for free. They easily step over/don't care about any of those barriers you've mentioned. I've said this before as well, but listing all those problems make it sound like someone, at any cost, simply must consume some pirated content, otherwise some terrible thing would befall them.

peterburkimsher 7y ago

Anecdotally, I agree with you, and memes [1] confirm this. Apologies for referencing 9gag, but that site did in fact go through Y Combinator. [1] https://9gag.com/gag/aj5DjOp https://9gag.com/gag/aj5DjOp