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Piracy is largely a convenience issue, not just a financial issue. When Netflix's streaming platform rolled around people were largely happy to stop pirating, w

Piracy is largely a convenience issue, not just a financial issue. When Netflix's streaming platform rolled around people were largely happy to stop pirating, when Netflix's catalog fragmented across two dozen different services that forbid account sharing then piracy became a thing again for many people who stopped pirating. I had a Paramount+ subscription (alongside Disney, Netflix, Amazon, Apple TV) and wanted to watch a certain TV show on my device. Oops, my device was out of date so I couldn't download the app. No problems, I'll update it. Oops, my account is set to an overseas address so I can't download the app. No problems, I'll change my account settings. Oops, the app won't log in because my DNS blocks ads. No problems, I'll add a bypass for this app. Oops, the app sucks and crashes when I navigate through the catalog too quickly. No problems, I'll make my search more specific. Oops, the buffering speed is horrendous and scrubbing through the video crashes the app. Guess what I did? Uninstalled the app and searched for a pirated version of the TV show. A minute later it was streaming fine on my device.

kamikaz1k 3y ago
Might be “largely” true but ignore the existence of just cheap people who will not pay for anything unless they have to.
- swozey 3y ago
  Yeah, I'm on a discord for tracking 4090 prices/stock. So it's a lot of gamers who can afford a $2k video card. I'd say 70% of the people in that discord pirate everything.
- gchamonlive 3y ago
  With the planet getting warmer and warmer, it must be nice to have a little cool breeze from that moral high ground.
jvanderbot 3y ago
This has not been my 99% experience. I'm sure one or two of those stories are handy to have to justify a lifetime of unnecessary theft, but the bottom line for me is that I don't mind playing by their system on principle. This is how the artists asked us to do it, by selling their rights to distributors. Similarly with Spotify. I'd love to pay more to artists, I do go buy songs when I love them, and I'm happy to pay for a family Spotify account because Spotify has brought an amazing amount of positive to our house. Bottom line I'm actually willing to endure a small amount of inconvenience in 1% so that my happy path still supports artists and yes industries that have brought so much good to me.
- chx 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - jvanderbot 3y ago
    You can feel free to use any legitimate platform you like. I was arguing against piracy not arguing for exclusively Spotify.
  - madmask 3y ago
    Not everything needs to be an activist fight, should I not pay taxes because a party I don’t like is in power? I think we should all be a bit more open to voices we don’t like. Live and let live, etc.
    - beej71 3y ago
      There are a lot of voices I find worse, and I support them all being free of government persecution. But I'm not paying their platforms--that's _my_ voice.
    - jokethrowaway 3y ago
      You pay taxes because otherwise goons with guns will come and lock you in jail with criminal and child rapists. He can very well decide to not support a private company, that's the whole idea behind having a free market and not living in a socialist hell hole.
  - jvanderbot 3y ago
    Taking revenue from all artists you like because you dislike one artist is madness.
  - jwells89 3y ago
    I would say that the problem is larger than that, with how Spotify worked to close up and monetize a historically free and open medium (podcasts) and aggressively pushed their new business to users who were only interested in music. The way they deprecated libspotify while promising a fully capable replacement only to never live up to those promises (current APIs/SDKs are incapable of playback) to strip paying users of clients that aren't official also sucks.
screye 3y ago
I mostly agree, but this tool is for spotify. Spotify is about as convieinient as a streaming music platform gets. That being said, most people (including me) happily pay for spotify, so your point still stands. I refuse to pay for a streaming platform that's not Netflix or prime. The former benefits from being grand fathered in and the latter is a free bonus on something I would buy anyway. It also sucks that cancelling a subscription is as hard as it is. If you want me to pay to watch 1 specific TV show, then give me a payment plan that allows me to pay for an expiring subscription. Simple.
- jjulius 3y ago
  >Spotify is about as convieinient as a streaming music platform gets. Convenient for users, but you'd be hard-pressed to find artists who are content with the payments they get from Spotify. And that's across the spectrum, from world-famous pop artists to indie artists struggling to get heard. I'm huge into music so I'm "OK" with Spotify for the sake of convenience and all that, but if people are really digging a piece of music then please buy it directly from the label, the artist, etc. via other means, if possible.
  - selfmodruntime 3y ago
    >Convenient for users, but you'd be hard-pressed to find artists who are content with the payments they get from Spotify. And that's across the spectrum, from world-famous pop artists to indie artists struggling to get heard. You're aware that you're in a thread for a tool which circumvents payments?
    - jjulius 3y ago
      Well aware, but thanks for that snark. Might as well still ask people to support artists they love in a thread related to pirating, right?
      - MPSimmons 3y ago
        I think it's mostly orthogonal. Pirating music only takes money away from artists in the case that you were going to buy their music, and don't now because you downloaded a file, which is probably the vast minority of downloads, I would guess. On the other hand, there are a ton of ways to support artists if you have the means, whether it's attending shows, buying merch, or what have you, none of which can be properly "pirated" in this sense.
paulcole 3y ago
What was the TV show?
KronisLV 3y ago
> Piracy is largely a convenience issue, not just a financial issue. I'd say it can definitely be both. For example, when I was a broke teenager, I pirated all the video games, because the alternative was simply missing out on them and the option to acquire them through dubious means was there. When I actually got disposable income I realized that Steam is so well made, that I buy all my games there nowadays. It's gotten to the point where I'd rather buy a game than pirate it, especially when the game does have some sort of an online component. The only exception is cases when I feel like I might need a refund (e.g. seeing how a VR game runs before buying it, because refunds still feel like a hassle). I still sometimes resort to something like G2A (Steam key reseller site, not a very good reputation) or just buying games on other stores like GOG or Epic when they're much cheaper there, but aside from that it's easier to just not play some expensive AAA game on launch altogether, since I don't care that much about being first to experience it anymore. As for music, I can actually just listen to whatever I want on YouTube which is good enough for me, but I don't see why the same principles couldn't apply to something like Spotify.
mort96 3y ago
When I pirate, it's sometimes based on convenience or quality (where else can I download DRM-free blu-ray quality movies? Or a band's discography lossless?), but other times, it's certainly about money. For example, I don't use FL studio anywhere near enough to warrant paying for it (I have literally just opened it a couple of times to play with it), but paying for a license would have been less work than pirating it. Same with Windows; I pretty much never use it, the last time I booted into it must be around a year ago, so I'm not gonna pay $250 for it. I like to have it on my PC however for the occasional situation where I need it to play some game which doesn't work in Proton with friends, so I pirated it, even though buying a license key would've been more convenient than dealing with cracking tools.
- mock-possum 3y ago
  $250 for Windows?? You’re off by an order of magnitude, just buy it from a reseller: g2a.com/search?query=Windows I’ve never had a problem with that site.
  - eek2121 3y ago
    You don’t even need to buy a license. Alternate activation servers exist.
    - mort96 3y ago
      Which is certainly a form of piracy.
  - saintfire 3y ago
    It used to be the case that they were all keys that aren't technically allowed to be resold per their agreement. Either OEM or business copies and the like. So really we're back to some form of piracy because Windows is too expensive.
    - mort96 3y ago
      You say that used to be the case; has that changed? How does it work now?
wombat-man 3y ago
Yeah I just don't understand how paramount+ is so bad. I've unsubscribed but I got it to watch a tv show on a plane, and so downloaded it onto my phone. The app would NOT play the video on the plane. At first I thought for some reason it needed to connect to the internet. Then after landing it wouldn't play even with the internet. Then there's the chromecast app. I want to watch an episode of survivor, a show with 45 seasons now. Apparently it just loads all the episode data for the entire show in one go, and hangs for a bit when opening the episode select page. This is one of their bigger shows I think. It's just so lazy and bad.
- swozey 3y ago
  I had the same thing happen on a flight last year so when I got home I tested every streaming app I could think of and a bunch of them removed their download feature from the last time I used it or they put it behind a connection requirement like you said. I forget if there's a second one, I know Netflix says you can download on its ad but I don't have netflix to test. The one I know for sure that you can download and watch offline is Prime. You MIGHT be able to download and watch offline with HBOgo. I know at one point I could. But that might also be one of the ones that took that feature away. I also don't know about any of the disney/paramount/apple ones. I think I tested Prime, HBOgo, Crunchyroll (iirc this can do it but theyre always missing episodes its annoying), Youtube (requires connection) and hulu.
  - wombat-man 3y ago
    It's just gotten to the point where I optimize for laziness. When I'm at home I watch on the streaming apps for the most part, because it's easy. When I'm traveling, I download tv shows I think I want to watch and stick it in VLC on my iPad. The exception being movies from the apple TV app. I have had no problems renting and downloading the video through that. Maybe they fixed it, but ever since I downloaded a bunch in the HBO app only to find it would NOT play once I was in the air, I just gotta do what I gotta do to be able to actually watch in flight. Oh man, and the other thing apps will do, is if you're not careful, they'll download some awful low res version of the show by default. ugh.
nlnn 3y ago
It's also about having more control over the viewing/listening experience for me. I pay for a bunch of services (Deezer/Netflix/Prime Video), but I'll often end up watching pirated versions of content I can legally watch on those platforms. Often that's down to tons of annoyances and lack of control over the viewing/listening platform. E.g. in VLC or similar I can tweak subtitle positions, sizes, fonts etc. for the best viewing experience. I can nudge the audio back/forwards a bit if it's out of sync with the video. It also means I don't have to deal with whatever nonsense the platform is trying to push on me. I don't want to be bombarded with ads for podcasts, I don't want to have various videos autoplay at me just because I've hovered over them for too long, I don't want giant animated album artwork taking up 90% of my mobile screen and wasting battery, I just want to listen to music and watch films, not interact with a platform/app that changes on the whims of some revenue-driven organisation.
dangus 3y ago
Most of the problems you had were self-imposed to be fair.
jsnell 3y ago
This submission shows that it's not about convenience. Spotify, Apple Music and YouTube Music are all incredibly convenient. They range from free with ads to very affordable monthly subscriptions (the price of a single CD for unlimited music for a month). They have vast libraries with more music of all styles than anyone could listen to in a lifetime with, as far as I can tell, effectively no geo restrictions. And despite that, look at where we are. A "pirate your music for free" app with 400 upvotes is at the top of HN, with some posters pretty much writing fanfic about how this will be great for the artists. "It's just a service problem" my ass. It's about people wanting something for free, and taking it.

kamikaz1k 3y ago

Might be “largely” true but ignore the existence of just cheap people who will not pay for anything unless they have to.

swozey 3y ago
Yeah, I'm on a discord for tracking 4090 prices/stock. So it's a lot of gamers who can afford a $2k video card. I'd say 70% of the people in that discord pirate everything.
gchamonlive 3y ago
With the planet getting warmer and warmer, it must be nice to have a little cool breeze from that moral high ground.

jvanderbot 3y ago

This has not been my 99% experience. I'm sure one or two of those stories are handy to have to justify a lifetime of unnecessary theft, but the bottom line for me is that I don't mind playing by their system on principle. This is how the artists asked us to do it, by selling their rights to distributors. Similarly with Spotify. I'd love to pay more to artists, I do go buy songs when I love them, and I'm happy to pay for a family Spotify account because Spotify has brought an amazing amount of positive to our house. Bottom line I'm actually willing to endure a small amount of inconvenience in 1% so that my happy path still supports artists and yes industries that have brought so much good to me.

chx 3y ago
[flagged]
- jvanderbot 3y ago
  You can feel free to use any legitimate platform you like. I was arguing against piracy not arguing for exclusively Spotify.
- madmask 3y ago
  Not everything needs to be an activist fight, should I not pay taxes because a party I don’t like is in power? I think we should all be a bit more open to voices we don’t like. Live and let live, etc.
  - beej71 3y ago
    There are a lot of voices I find worse, and I support them all being free of government persecution. But I'm not paying their platforms--that's _my_ voice.
  - jokethrowaway 3y ago
    You pay taxes because otherwise goons with guns will come and lock you in jail with criminal and child rapists. He can very well decide to not support a private company, that's the whole idea behind having a free market and not living in a socialist hell hole.
- jvanderbot 3y ago
  Taking revenue from all artists you like because you dislike one artist is madness.
- jwells89 3y ago
  I would say that the problem is larger than that, with how Spotify worked to close up and monetize a historically free and open medium (podcasts) and aggressively pushed their new business to users who were only interested in music. The way they deprecated libspotify while promising a fully capable replacement only to never live up to those promises (current APIs/SDKs are incapable of playback) to strip paying users of clients that aren't official also sucks.

screye 3y ago

I mostly agree, but this tool is for spotify. Spotify is about as convieinient as a streaming music platform gets. That being said, most people (including me) happily pay for spotify, so your point still stands. I refuse to pay for a streaming platform that's not Netflix or prime. The former benefits from being grand fathered in and the latter is a free bonus on something I would buy anyway. It also sucks that cancelling a subscription is as hard as it is. If you want me to pay to watch 1 specific TV show, then give me a payment plan that allows me to pay for an expiring subscription. Simple.

jjulius 3y ago
>Spotify is about as convieinient as a streaming music platform gets. Convenient for users, but you'd be hard-pressed to find artists who are content with the payments they get from Spotify. And that's across the spectrum, from world-famous pop artists to indie artists struggling to get heard. I'm huge into music so I'm "OK" with Spotify for the sake of convenience and all that, but if people are really digging a piece of music then please buy it directly from the label, the artist, etc. via other means, if possible.
- selfmodruntime 3y ago
  >Convenient for users, but you'd be hard-pressed to find artists who are content with the payments they get from Spotify. And that's across the spectrum, from world-famous pop artists to indie artists struggling to get heard. You're aware that you're in a thread for a tool which circumvents payments?
  - jjulius 3y ago
    Well aware, but thanks for that snark. Might as well still ask people to support artists they love in a thread related to pirating, right?
    - MPSimmons 3y ago
      I think it's mostly orthogonal. Pirating music only takes money away from artists in the case that you were going to buy their music, and don't now because you downloaded a file, which is probably the vast minority of downloads, I would guess. On the other hand, there are a ton of ways to support artists if you have the means, whether it's attending shows, buying merch, or what have you, none of which can be properly "pirated" in this sense.

paulcole 3y ago

What was the TV show?

KronisLV 3y ago

> Piracy is largely a convenience issue, not just a financial issue. I'd say it can definitely be both. For example, when I was a broke teenager, I pirated all the video games, because the alternative was simply missing out on them and the option to acquire them through dubious means was there. When I actually got disposable income I realized that Steam is so well made, that I buy all my games there nowadays. It's gotten to the point where I'd rather buy a game than pirate it, especially when the game does have some sort of an online component. The only exception is cases when I feel like I might need a refund (e.g. seeing how a VR game runs before buying it, because refunds still feel like a hassle). I still sometimes resort to something like G2A (Steam key reseller site, not a very good reputation) or just buying games on other stores like GOG or Epic when they're much cheaper there, but aside from that it's easier to just not play some expensive AAA game on launch altogether, since I don't care that much about being first to experience it anymore. As for music, I can actually just listen to whatever I want on YouTube which is good enough for me, but I don't see why the same principles couldn't apply to something like Spotify.

mort96 3y ago

When I pirate, it's sometimes based on convenience or quality (where else can I download DRM-free blu-ray quality movies? Or a band's discography lossless?), but other times, it's certainly about money. For example, I don't use FL studio anywhere near enough to warrant paying for it (I have literally just opened it a couple of times to play with it), but paying for a license would have been less work than pirating it. Same with Windows; I pretty much never use it, the last time I booted into it must be around a year ago, so I'm not gonna pay $250 for it. I like to have it on my PC however for the occasional situation where I need it to play some game which doesn't work in Proton with friends, so I pirated it, even though buying a license key would've been more convenient than dealing with cracking tools.

mock-possum 3y ago
$250 for Windows?? You’re off by an order of magnitude, just buy it from a reseller: g2a.com/search?query=Windows I’ve never had a problem with that site.
- eek2121 3y ago
  You don’t even need to buy a license. Alternate activation servers exist.
  - mort96 3y ago
    Which is certainly a form of piracy.
- saintfire 3y ago
  It used to be the case that they were all keys that aren't technically allowed to be resold per their agreement. Either OEM or business copies and the like. So really we're back to some form of piracy because Windows is too expensive.
  - mort96 3y ago
    You say that used to be the case; has that changed? How does it work now?

wombat-man 3y ago

Yeah I just don't understand how paramount+ is so bad. I've unsubscribed but I got it to watch a tv show on a plane, and so downloaded it onto my phone. The app would NOT play the video on the plane. At first I thought for some reason it needed to connect to the internet. Then after landing it wouldn't play even with the internet. Then there's the chromecast app. I want to watch an episode of survivor, a show with 45 seasons now. Apparently it just loads all the episode data for the entire show in one go, and hangs for a bit when opening the episode select page. This is one of their bigger shows I think. It's just so lazy and bad.

swozey 3y ago
I had the same thing happen on a flight last year so when I got home I tested every streaming app I could think of and a bunch of them removed their download feature from the last time I used it or they put it behind a connection requirement like you said. I forget if there's a second one, I know Netflix says you can download on its ad but I don't have netflix to test. The one I know for sure that you can download and watch offline is Prime. You MIGHT be able to download and watch offline with HBOgo. I know at one point I could. But that might also be one of the ones that took that feature away. I also don't know about any of the disney/paramount/apple ones. I think I tested Prime, HBOgo, Crunchyroll (iirc this can do it but theyre always missing episodes its annoying), Youtube (requires connection) and hulu.
- wombat-man 3y ago
  It's just gotten to the point where I optimize for laziness. When I'm at home I watch on the streaming apps for the most part, because it's easy. When I'm traveling, I download tv shows I think I want to watch and stick it in VLC on my iPad. The exception being movies from the apple TV app. I have had no problems renting and downloading the video through that. Maybe they fixed it, but ever since I downloaded a bunch in the HBO app only to find it would NOT play once I was in the air, I just gotta do what I gotta do to be able to actually watch in flight. Oh man, and the other thing apps will do, is if you're not careful, they'll download some awful low res version of the show by default. ugh.

nlnn 3y ago

It's also about having more control over the viewing/listening experience for me. I pay for a bunch of services (Deezer/Netflix/Prime Video), but I'll often end up watching pirated versions of content I can legally watch on those platforms. Often that's down to tons of annoyances and lack of control over the viewing/listening platform. E.g. in VLC or similar I can tweak subtitle positions, sizes, fonts etc. for the best viewing experience. I can nudge the audio back/forwards a bit if it's out of sync with the video. It also means I don't have to deal with whatever nonsense the platform is trying to push on me. I don't want to be bombarded with ads for podcasts, I don't want to have various videos autoplay at me just because I've hovered over them for too long, I don't want giant animated album artwork taking up 90% of my mobile screen and wasting battery, I just want to listen to music and watch films, not interact with a platform/app that changes on the whims of some revenue-driven organisation.

dangus 3y ago

Most of the problems you had were self-imposed to be fair.

jsnell 3y ago

This submission shows that it's not about convenience. Spotify, Apple Music and YouTube Music are all incredibly convenient. They range from free with ads to very affordable monthly subscriptions (the price of a single CD for unlimited music for a month). They have vast libraries with more music of all styles than anyone could listen to in a lifetime with, as far as I can tell, effectively no geo restrictions. And despite that, look at where we are. A "pirate your music for free" app with 400 upvotes is at the top of HN, with some posters pretty much writing fanfic about how this will be great for the artists. "It's just a service problem" my ass. It's about people wanting something for free, and taking it.