6 ms·

Of course this is 100% the correct reasoning. When I was a broke college kid I pirated all the things, and at the time wished, when I could afford it, I’d rath

by dgfitz 3y ago

Of course this is 100% the correct reasoning. When I was a broke college kid I pirated all the things, and at the time wished, when I could afford it, I’d rather just pay. When I could, I did, for years. Now we’re back at the path-of-least-resistance is pirating.

eastbound 3y ago
But that means companies must sell for the marginal price of their website’s ergonomics, not for the marginal price of producing movies. (Which is not a big loss, because I can’t imagine producing the Netflix knockoffs be a hundredth the price of a 007).
- al_borland 3y ago
  It’s not about an individual website, it’s about the industry. It’s not that Netflix, or any other service, is hard to use on its own. It’s the fragmentation of the content that makes it hard to use. This was solved for with music where pretty much every service has pretty much every song. People don’t need multiple music services, they just pick the one that best fits their style and needs. This is what the movie and TV industry needs to do if they want to beat piracy. This is what they should have done 15 years ago. Their greed is hurting them more than it’s helping.
  - jowea 3y ago
    I wonder if mandating content licenses being non-exclusive and separating media distributors from producers would help.
    - deaddodo 3y ago
      This seems to be the most obvious solution, and is what solved the movie industry's greed back in the the studio system days. But, the industry will fight it tooth and nail, because they lose control and potential margins on it at the expense of the consumer.
    - dehrmann 3y ago
      It's mostly working for music. Spotify and Apple aren't competing on their catalogs.
      - Mindwipe 3y ago
        Spotify loses money (which is why they keep trying to do things that are not music to keep the company afloat), and while Apple doesn't split out Music it's fairly unlikely that is a profitable business either. Music is literally a textbook example of why it doesn't work.
        Aeolun 3y ago
        Spotify can just raise prices by 50% and make money? If they tell me the choice is between Spotify disappearing and me paying more, the choice is extremely easy.
        Mindwipe 3y ago
        If Spotify raises prices they have to pay the vast majority of that out to labels still, it's all percentage models. And they likely lose subscribers to they literally get poorer. Spotify knows it's only way out is exclusive content, hence the Rogan deal et al.
        int_19h 3y ago
        Image we actually had a law like that. Then Spotify would have to charge whatever they need to charge to remain profitable without exclusive content. And the labels would have to charge Spotify whatever they need to charge for Spotify to exist, because otherwise they wouldn't have anywhere to sell their content.
  - baby_souffle 3y ago
    > It’s the fragmentation of the content that makes it hard to use. I wish somebody could get all the media execs in a room and just deliver a simple message: "You can't compete on price; your competition is free. You must compete on experience if you're to compete at all." With just a few hours worth of time and effort, it's possible to get a pretty sophisticated and automatic system set up that essentially makes getting a copy of a movie a literal one-click operation. You won't be able to watch it _right then_ as the find, download, process, import ... etc pipe takes time to run but at the end you'll have a high quality copy that will work on any device anywhere in the world. Other than the immediacy, piracy is cheaper and less burdensome.
    - internet101010 3y ago
      Yeah that's what I have and I will never go back. I open one app for VOD content and one for audio content. The quality is often superior to the streaming platforms for movies. Not having to care about which platform something is on is so nice.
    - TeMPOraL 3y ago
      > I wish somebody could get all the media execs in a room and just deliver a simple message: "You can't compete on price; your competition is free. You must compete on experience if you're to compete at all." Unfortunately, there is the House of the Mouse, aka. Disney Legal Military Industrial Complex, and they don't let individuals or governments tell them what they can or can't compete on.
    - izacus 3y ago
      They did... and the execs ordered everyone from OS, hardware to software companies to add more DRM instead.
  - data-ottawa 3y ago
    I had Prime Video, and when searching for content I would get told to subscribe to some channel within Prime. Now Crave (in Canada) does the same thing. Netflix doesn't bother integrating with Apple TV's search or aggregation features to try and drive you into the app. The end result is searching for legitimate content is a terrible experience. If it's a result from Prime, I just pass. If it's from Crave, I pass. If it's on Netflix, I don't see anything at all. At least a decade ago streaming boxes had one search box and it would return results from all the sources, and if it appeared you knew you could watch it. What the streamers provide today is a significantly worse experience than piracy, and I don't know how they haven't realized this.
    - inversetelecine 3y ago
      And now prime wants another $2.99 to stream without ads. Something I had previously included. Nickle and diming also drives customers away.
      - midasuni 3y ago
        Drove me away. Increasing the price on my yearly renewal wouldn’t have been noticed. Sending me adverts means Amazon have lost out on far more than my cancelled prime subscription - I haven’t bought anything from them, and that’s over $100 a month revenue lost.
      - Aeolun 3y ago
        You can make the ads go away by paying more? How? Seeing ads on my paid for service is driving me absolutely crazy.
    - fragmede 3y ago
      If HBO and all the other content houses would all go to Netflix and say we'll close down our streaming service and license you all our content, and take our share of a household $60/month, everyone would all make more money, but there's negative infinity chance of that happening; on top of Netflix making their own content, so what's the way forwards? He government could step in and say that online distribution platforms can't also make their own non-self-marketing content, but there's also zero chance of that happening either, so it's a tragedy of commons until someone goes bankrupt, and it's not OnlyFans that's going to be the content farm to fail here, so someones is going to have to buy everyone else until the DoJ gets involved for antitrust reasons, and then we're left with two subscription services (US consumers aren't properly able to count higher than that. Apple vs Google, Democrats vs Republicans, McDonald's vs Burger King, CVS vs Walgreens, AT&T vs Verizon, etc)
  - vineyardmike 3y ago
    Let’s not forget that “music solved this” ignores the fact that Spotify is not profitable, and may never be due to the record labels cut. Apple Music, Amazon Music and YouTube Music may or may not be profitable but are undoubtedly subsidized by their corporate parents. Not sure if Tidal is profitable but they aren’t popular and are much more expensive than people are generally willing to spend. It’s also potentially subsidized by a corporate parent. There’s also a trail of unprofitable or tiny businesses like SoundCloud and Bandcamp that may or may not survive quarter to quarter. It’s not a solved problem.
    - shzhdbi09gv8ioi 3y ago
      > Spotify is not profitable Their stock value doubled in the last year Their CEO Daniel Ek is worth 3.7 billion dollar.
      - TheCapeGreek 3y ago
        Both of those numbers are not profit numbers.
        roenxi 3y ago
        I wouldn't want to be involved in a company that isn't turning a profit. But, in fairness, this is an industry that is adjacent to Hollywood. It is conceivable that they have some sort of weird profit-laundering scheme going to make sure not too much of the money goes back to the artists or something.
        vineyardmike 3y ago
        Profit and loss can be accounting fiction when needed (eg Amazon), but I think Spotify has the cartel curse. No matter how much money they make, it’s too easy for the labels to see the public finances of Spotify and decide they want to raise the price of licensing. Furthermore, the more people use Spotify, the less profitable the subscription becomes.
    - 3y ago
- acdha 3y ago
  I’m not sure it has to be exclusive: some people are inveterate freeloaders but most of us understand that the artists have to get paid, so it’s not just a question of being so cheap that piracy isn’t appealing but also having users feel like they’re not being taken advantage of. The problem feels a lot like the situation MoviePass worked themselves into where they priced it unsustainably low but cheap money allowed that to run long enough to train a generation of customers that their content was only worth that much. I imagine Netflix would dearly love to say that your subscription includes a certain number of movies but you can add on more, or that there’s a premium tier, etc. but there isn’t an easy way to try something like that now that everyone is used to the current model. The other side of the problem is that studios really don’t want market pricing. Subscriptions are banking on the idea that you’ll still pay $12/month and find something else to watch even if the big series/movie they’re promoting isn’t very good, and they’re keeping the prices for rentals really high which makes means people are often looking at 1-2 months of streaming charges for a single movie rental. The combination of the two seems likely to make a lot of people pirating for years to come. Most people do not want to juggle multiple services and if they’ve learned how to pirate anything once it’s always going to be there the next time someone jacks up prices or plays games with availability. I think that’s going to last until someone has the courage to let services like YouTube or AppleTV offer rentals of everything at reasonable prices.
- Geisterde 3y ago
  Which could be rapidly eclipsed, my synology nas is capable of following RSS feeds for new content, torrenting that content, and serving that content through my plex with audio options, subtitles, descriptions, cover art, ratings, age restrictions etc. (All behind a vpn of course) If I invested a weekend (4 days, maybe 2-3 weekends...) I could probably figure it out, and never ever ever again deal with the BS streaming services. It takes one person pissed off that they missed Ozark and that will be 1 click install, game on, open source tech only ever moves forward, its antifragile, unlike any individual business.
  - prepend 3y ago
    You need to invest about 10 minutes. It’s not complicated at all and makes a much better experience.
    - hedora 3y ago
      Setting it up properly probably takes a day or so. Which HDDs should you put in the synology (or are there SSDs that make more sense; need to check $/GB…)? Which VPN service makes the most sense? Which RSS thingy is as good as Prime, Netflix, HBO, etc, etc, combined?
      - prepend 3y ago
        Good point. I assumed the synology was already set up as a NAS. That takes a while. Setting up the rss is just minutes.
      - fragmede 3y ago
        Only if you over-optimize and get decision paralysis. Perfect is the enemy of the good. Cheapest is the enemy of actually-have-it-and-working.
    - pdimitar 3y ago
      Are there good step-by-step guides? I am on the fence but researching this seems exhausting so far.
- HumblyTossed 3y ago
  So pay for several services and then pirate the content because it’s just more convenient. Best of both worlds. You’ve paid and you get the content in the form(s) you need.
  - humpydumpy 3y ago
    and you have finanically supported services that offer shitty usability
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - HumblyTossed 3y ago
      It's going to be shitty if I pay or not. Probably even shittier if I don't pay. Either way, I've solutioned around that problem.
- doctorpangloss 3y ago
  > But that means companies must sell for the marginal price of their website’s ergonomics, not for the marginal price of producing movies. But that means companies must also realize the tech industry is a really bad business for 99% of companies in it.
- lupusreal 3y ago
  The movie industry is enormously wasteful, they could easily make the same movies with 10x less money if they cut out a fraction of their waste and corruption. Anyway, it's not my problem. It's their problem.
kylebenzle 3y ago
This is HACKER news, our central ethos is (should be) all information wants to be free. Sad to see the desire to pay for content is getting upvoted.
- lolinder 3y ago
  This is "Hacker" news for a bunch of independent definitions of "Hacker", and for most of us the definition isn't "breaks into computer systems and leaks stuff on the internet". For myself, when I think of the hacker ethos I think of Stallman and the GPL, which is explicitly designed around the idea that information can be ethically sold as long as you're actually selling it [0]. It's free as in freedom, not free as in beer, and under that philosophy being able to pay for services that respect your rights as a free human (which most current streaming services don't) is a desirable end state, not something to be condemned. > Many people believe that the spirit of the GNU Project is that you should not charge money for distributing copies of software, or that you should charge as little as possible—just enough to cover the cost. This is a misunderstanding. > Actually, we encourage people who redistribute free software to charge as much as they wish or can. If a license does not permit users to make copies and sell them, it is a nonfree license. If this seems surprising to you, please read on. [0] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.en.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.en.html
  - defrost 3y ago
    This is the ballpit sandbox forum for YCombinator, a club for software startup investment fund managers who can quote from the Tibetian Book of the Dead. The lesson here is that attrition and shrinkage will always be with us, it's only the rate that varies in market accordance with the enshittification of product. The 'better' the product, the lower the shrinkage. As supported by a majority of thread comments "I used to pirate when I was poor, then I didn't - now I do again as the commercial offering sucks". [attribution] https://thebillionscompanion.net/all/tag/Tibetan+Book+of+the+Dead https://thebillionscompanion.net/all/tag/Tibetan+Book+of+the...
  - int_19h 3y ago
    I distinctly recall Stallman himself saying that copyleft wouldn't really be necessary if copyright weren't a thing. In any case, hacking as a concept predates Stallman and FSF - indeed, they're the product of that mindset, not its originators. And the original hackers didn't care about copyright - just look at the early history of Unix.
robertoandred 3y ago
I mean, stealing is always easier than paying for something.
- calvinmorrison 3y ago
  Thats not true in even the most trivial sense. But the rise of piracy correlates strongly to not cost, but availability. Granted charging $1 per song is a little egregious as well
- Dban1 3y ago
  I'm sure you yourself can come up with counter-examples for that.
  - roenxi 3y ago
    And, furthermore, piracy isn't stealing. It is a major point here that the initial owner of the thing still possesses the thing. They're trying to assert some unnatural right of control over what other people do. It isn't even all that clear why this is a good idea. I can see how it makes sense for legislators because of the presumably significant kickbacks they get from lobbyists; but there is a still an open question of whether this is a good system. It looks like it has had a big negative impact on our ability to sustain a shared culture. If people have to buy in to a culture, a bunch of people won't. People still can't freely distribute Lord of the Rings for example. That isn't helping to get people reading it. J.R.R Tolkien has been dead for a while. Anything less famous than that has little chance to stick.
    - TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
      The original owner no longer possesses the commercial value of the thing. That's what you steal when you pirate. People have been buying into shared cultures for centuries. Sometimes being able to afford access to a certain culture - and excluding those who can't - is part of the culture itself. In a bottom-up cultures people are happy to pay because they feel part of the scene and they want to support it. A big part of that is user/costumer/fan experience and a feeling of community. Top-down cultures feel exploitative and predatory - because they are. They separate the culture into producers and consumers and enforce strict gatekeeping of the relationship between them - which usually means a one-way financial obligation that feels like extortion, and unnecessary complications and frictions in the experience. The real issue here is the insistence by the media-cos that movies can only ever be top-down. The predictable outcome is there's now a shared culture of piracy in which people willingly support the pirate sites instead of the official distributors, and running a pirate site can be incredibly profitable.

by dgfitz 3y ago

eastbound 3y ago

But that means companies must sell for the marginal price of their website’s ergonomics, not for the marginal price of producing movies. (Which is not a big loss, because I can’t imagine producing the Netflix knockoffs be a hundredth the price of a 007).

al_borland 3y ago
It’s not about an individual website, it’s about the industry. It’s not that Netflix, or any other service, is hard to use on its own. It’s the fragmentation of the content that makes it hard to use. This was solved for with music where pretty much every service has pretty much every song. People don’t need multiple music services, they just pick the one that best fits their style and needs. This is what the movie and TV industry needs to do if they want to beat piracy. This is what they should have done 15 years ago. Their greed is hurting them more than it’s helping.
- jowea 3y ago
  I wonder if mandating content licenses being non-exclusive and separating media distributors from producers would help.
  - deaddodo 3y ago
    This seems to be the most obvious solution, and is what solved the movie industry's greed back in the the studio system days. But, the industry will fight it tooth and nail, because they lose control and potential margins on it at the expense of the consumer.
  - dehrmann 3y ago
    It's mostly working for music. Spotify and Apple aren't competing on their catalogs.
    - Mindwipe 3y ago
      Spotify loses money (which is why they keep trying to do things that are not music to keep the company afloat), and while Apple doesn't split out Music it's fairly unlikely that is a profitable business either. Music is literally a textbook example of why it doesn't work.
      - Aeolun 3y ago
        Spotify can just raise prices by 50% and make money? If they tell me the choice is between Spotify disappearing and me paying more, the choice is extremely easy.
        Mindwipe 3y ago
        If Spotify raises prices they have to pay the vast majority of that out to labels still, it's all percentage models. And they likely lose subscribers to they literally get poorer. Spotify knows it's only way out is exclusive content, hence the Rogan deal et al.
        int_19h 3y ago
        Image we actually had a law like that. Then Spotify would have to charge whatever they need to charge to remain profitable without exclusive content. And the labels would have to charge Spotify whatever they need to charge for Spotify to exist, because otherwise they wouldn't have anywhere to sell their content.
- baby_souffle 3y ago
  > It’s the fragmentation of the content that makes it hard to use. I wish somebody could get all the media execs in a room and just deliver a simple message: "You can't compete on price; your competition is free. You must compete on experience if you're to compete at all." With just a few hours worth of time and effort, it's possible to get a pretty sophisticated and automatic system set up that essentially makes getting a copy of a movie a literal one-click operation. You won't be able to watch it _right then_ as the find, download, process, import ... etc pipe takes time to run but at the end you'll have a high quality copy that will work on any device anywhere in the world. Other than the immediacy, piracy is cheaper and less burdensome.
  - internet101010 3y ago
    Yeah that's what I have and I will never go back. I open one app for VOD content and one for audio content. The quality is often superior to the streaming platforms for movies. Not having to care about which platform something is on is so nice.
  - TeMPOraL 3y ago
    > I wish somebody could get all the media execs in a room and just deliver a simple message: "You can't compete on price; your competition is free. You must compete on experience if you're to compete at all." Unfortunately, there is the House of the Mouse, aka. Disney Legal Military Industrial Complex, and they don't let individuals or governments tell them what they can or can't compete on.
  - izacus 3y ago
    They did... and the execs ordered everyone from OS, hardware to software companies to add more DRM instead.
- data-ottawa 3y ago
  I had Prime Video, and when searching for content I would get told to subscribe to some channel within Prime. Now Crave (in Canada) does the same thing. Netflix doesn't bother integrating with Apple TV's search or aggregation features to try and drive you into the app. The end result is searching for legitimate content is a terrible experience. If it's a result from Prime, I just pass. If it's from Crave, I pass. If it's on Netflix, I don't see anything at all. At least a decade ago streaming boxes had one search box and it would return results from all the sources, and if it appeared you knew you could watch it. What the streamers provide today is a significantly worse experience than piracy, and I don't know how they haven't realized this.
  - inversetelecine 3y ago
    And now prime wants another $2.99 to stream without ads. Something I had previously included. Nickle and diming also drives customers away.
    - midasuni 3y ago
      Drove me away. Increasing the price on my yearly renewal wouldn’t have been noticed. Sending me adverts means Amazon have lost out on far more than my cancelled prime subscription - I haven’t bought anything from them, and that’s over $100 a month revenue lost.
    - Aeolun 3y ago
      You can make the ads go away by paying more? How? Seeing ads on my paid for service is driving me absolutely crazy.
  - fragmede 3y ago
    If HBO and all the other content houses would all go to Netflix and say we'll close down our streaming service and license you all our content, and take our share of a household $60/month, everyone would all make more money, but there's negative infinity chance of that happening; on top of Netflix making their own content, so what's the way forwards? He government could step in and say that online distribution platforms can't also make their own non-self-marketing content, but there's also zero chance of that happening either, so it's a tragedy of commons until someone goes bankrupt, and it's not OnlyFans that's going to be the content farm to fail here, so someones is going to have to buy everyone else until the DoJ gets involved for antitrust reasons, and then we're left with two subscription services (US consumers aren't properly able to count higher than that. Apple vs Google, Democrats vs Republicans, McDonald's vs Burger King, CVS vs Walgreens, AT&T vs Verizon, etc)
- vineyardmike 3y ago
  Let’s not forget that “music solved this” ignores the fact that Spotify is not profitable, and may never be due to the record labels cut. Apple Music, Amazon Music and YouTube Music may or may not be profitable but are undoubtedly subsidized by their corporate parents. Not sure if Tidal is profitable but they aren’t popular and are much more expensive than people are generally willing to spend. It’s also potentially subsidized by a corporate parent. There’s also a trail of unprofitable or tiny businesses like SoundCloud and Bandcamp that may or may not survive quarter to quarter. It’s not a solved problem.
  - shzhdbi09gv8ioi 3y ago
    > Spotify is not profitable Their stock value doubled in the last year Their CEO Daniel Ek is worth 3.7 billion dollar.
    - TheCapeGreek 3y ago
      Both of those numbers are not profit numbers.
      - roenxi 3y ago
        I wouldn't want to be involved in a company that isn't turning a profit. But, in fairness, this is an industry that is adjacent to Hollywood. It is conceivable that they have some sort of weird profit-laundering scheme going to make sure not too much of the money goes back to the artists or something.
        vineyardmike 3y ago
        Profit and loss can be accounting fiction when needed (eg Amazon), but I think Spotify has the cartel curse. No matter how much money they make, it’s too easy for the labels to see the public finances of Spotify and decide they want to raise the price of licensing. Furthermore, the more people use Spotify, the less profitable the subscription becomes.
  - 3y ago
acdha 3y ago
I’m not sure it has to be exclusive: some people are inveterate freeloaders but most of us understand that the artists have to get paid, so it’s not just a question of being so cheap that piracy isn’t appealing but also having users feel like they’re not being taken advantage of. The problem feels a lot like the situation MoviePass worked themselves into where they priced it unsustainably low but cheap money allowed that to run long enough to train a generation of customers that their content was only worth that much. I imagine Netflix would dearly love to say that your subscription includes a certain number of movies but you can add on more, or that there’s a premium tier, etc. but there isn’t an easy way to try something like that now that everyone is used to the current model. The other side of the problem is that studios really don’t want market pricing. Subscriptions are banking on the idea that you’ll still pay $12/month and find something else to watch even if the big series/movie they’re promoting isn’t very good, and they’re keeping the prices for rentals really high which makes means people are often looking at 1-2 months of streaming charges for a single movie rental. The combination of the two seems likely to make a lot of people pirating for years to come. Most people do not want to juggle multiple services and if they’ve learned how to pirate anything once it’s always going to be there the next time someone jacks up prices or plays games with availability. I think that’s going to last until someone has the courage to let services like YouTube or AppleTV offer rentals of everything at reasonable prices.
Geisterde 3y ago
Which could be rapidly eclipsed, my synology nas is capable of following RSS feeds for new content, torrenting that content, and serving that content through my plex with audio options, subtitles, descriptions, cover art, ratings, age restrictions etc. (All behind a vpn of course) If I invested a weekend (4 days, maybe 2-3 weekends...) I could probably figure it out, and never ever ever again deal with the BS streaming services. It takes one person pissed off that they missed Ozark and that will be 1 click install, game on, open source tech only ever moves forward, its antifragile, unlike any individual business.
- prepend 3y ago
  You need to invest about 10 minutes. It’s not complicated at all and makes a much better experience.
  - hedora 3y ago
    Setting it up properly probably takes a day or so. Which HDDs should you put in the synology (or are there SSDs that make more sense; need to check $/GB…)? Which VPN service makes the most sense? Which RSS thingy is as good as Prime, Netflix, HBO, etc, etc, combined?
    - prepend 3y ago
      Good point. I assumed the synology was already set up as a NAS. That takes a while. Setting up the rss is just minutes.
    - fragmede 3y ago
      Only if you over-optimize and get decision paralysis. Perfect is the enemy of the good. Cheapest is the enemy of actually-have-it-and-working.
  - pdimitar 3y ago
    Are there good step-by-step guides? I am on the fence but researching this seems exhausting so far.
HumblyTossed 3y ago
So pay for several services and then pirate the content because it’s just more convenient. Best of both worlds. You’ve paid and you get the content in the form(s) you need.
- humpydumpy 3y ago
  and you have finanically supported services that offer shitty usability
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - HumblyTossed 3y ago
    It's going to be shitty if I pay or not. Probably even shittier if I don't pay. Either way, I've solutioned around that problem.
doctorpangloss 3y ago
> But that means companies must sell for the marginal price of their website’s ergonomics, not for the marginal price of producing movies. But that means companies must also realize the tech industry is a really bad business for 99% of companies in it.
lupusreal 3y ago
The movie industry is enormously wasteful, they could easily make the same movies with 10x less money if they cut out a fraction of their waste and corruption. Anyway, it's not my problem. It's their problem.

kylebenzle 3y ago

This is HACKER news, our central ethos is (should be) all information wants to be free. Sad to see the desire to pay for content is getting upvoted.

lolinder 3y ago
This is "Hacker" news for a bunch of independent definitions of "Hacker", and for most of us the definition isn't "breaks into computer systems and leaks stuff on the internet". For myself, when I think of the hacker ethos I think of Stallman and the GPL, which is explicitly designed around the idea that information can be ethically sold as long as you're actually selling it [0]. It's free as in freedom, not free as in beer, and under that philosophy being able to pay for services that respect your rights as a free human (which most current streaming services don't) is a desirable end state, not something to be condemned. > Many people believe that the spirit of the GNU Project is that you should not charge money for distributing copies of software, or that you should charge as little as possible—just enough to cover the cost. This is a misunderstanding. > Actually, we encourage people who redistribute free software to charge as much as they wish or can. If a license does not permit users to make copies and sell them, it is a nonfree license. If this seems surprising to you, please read on. [0] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.en.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.en.html
- defrost 3y ago
  This is the ballpit sandbox forum for YCombinator, a club for software startup investment fund managers who can quote from the Tibetian Book of the Dead. The lesson here is that attrition and shrinkage will always be with us, it's only the rate that varies in market accordance with the enshittification of product. The 'better' the product, the lower the shrinkage. As supported by a majority of thread comments "I used to pirate when I was poor, then I didn't - now I do again as the commercial offering sucks". [attribution] https://thebillionscompanion.net/all/tag/Tibetan+Book+of+the+Dead https://thebillionscompanion.net/all/tag/Tibetan+Book+of+the...
- int_19h 3y ago
  I distinctly recall Stallman himself saying that copyleft wouldn't really be necessary if copyright weren't a thing. In any case, hacking as a concept predates Stallman and FSF - indeed, they're the product of that mindset, not its originators. And the original hackers didn't care about copyright - just look at the early history of Unix.

robertoandred 3y ago

I mean, stealing is always easier than paying for something.

calvinmorrison 3y ago
Thats not true in even the most trivial sense. But the rise of piracy correlates strongly to not cost, but availability. Granted charging $1 per song is a little egregious as well
Dban1 3y ago
I'm sure you yourself can come up with counter-examples for that.
- roenxi 3y ago
  And, furthermore, piracy isn't stealing. It is a major point here that the initial owner of the thing still possesses the thing. They're trying to assert some unnatural right of control over what other people do. It isn't even all that clear why this is a good idea. I can see how it makes sense for legislators because of the presumably significant kickbacks they get from lobbyists; but there is a still an open question of whether this is a good system. It looks like it has had a big negative impact on our ability to sustain a shared culture. If people have to buy in to a culture, a bunch of people won't. People still can't freely distribute Lord of the Rings for example. That isn't helping to get people reading it. J.R.R Tolkien has been dead for a while. Anything less famous than that has little chance to stick.
  - TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
    The original owner no longer possesses the commercial value of the thing. That's what you steal when you pirate. People have been buying into shared cultures for centuries. Sometimes being able to afford access to a certain culture - and excluding those who can't - is part of the culture itself. In a bottom-up cultures people are happy to pay because they feel part of the scene and they want to support it. A big part of that is user/costumer/fan experience and a feeling of community. Top-down cultures feel exploitative and predatory - because they are. They separate the culture into producers and consumers and enforce strict gatekeeping of the relationship between them - which usually means a one-way financial obligation that feels like extortion, and unnecessary complications and frictions in the experience. The real issue here is the insistence by the media-cos that movies can only ever be top-down. The predictable outcome is there's now a shared culture of piracy in which people willingly support the pirate sites instead of the official distributors, and running a pirate site can be incredibly profitable.