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> Every new service is a colossal headache to set up payment, remember to cancel payment if you only wanted to see the single event and have no need for the ser

> Every new service is a colossal headache to set up payment, remember to cancel payment if you only wanted to see the single event and have no need for the service the rest of the year, find what's playing on what when I just don't find these arguments convincing after watching my friend spend cumulative hours upon hours jumping between pirate streaming services trying to find a stable feed for every game. This feels too much like a post-hoc rationalization. I know I'll never win this argument on Hacker News because every piracy conversation turns into an infinite game of moving goalposts, where there's always a new rationalization at every turn. I don't think it's worth discussing until we can be honest and admit that a lot of people pirate because they want free stuff. Every HN piracy conversation has a lot of words written to try to avoid admitting that "free stuff" is a big motivator for a lot of people

squigz 7mo ago
In my experience, people's reasons for piracy are a pretty even mix of all these issues (service problems, principles, and cost) I'd certainly pirate less if I could afford it, but even if I could, I'd still pirate a lot of stuff because I don't want to worry about what streaming service it's on this week, or because I don't want to contribute to monopolization of some industry. And sure, I'd still pirate some things because I find they're overpriced. > I know I'll never win this argument on Hacker News because every piracy conversation turns into an infinite game of moving goalposts, where there's always a new rationalization at every turn. What argument are you referring to, out of curiosity? That some people pirate things 'cause they're poor and make nice-sounding rationalizations about it? Okay, that definitely happens, you win. But I don't think that really takes away from the other valid arguments for piracy?
- akramachamarei 7mo ago
  > I'd certainly pirate less if I could afford it
  - squigz 7mo ago
    What's your point?
    - akramachamarei 7mo ago
      Try substituting some other verbs in there to see if it comes to you: "I'd certainly wrestle less if I could afford it." "I'd certainly eat less ice cream if I could afford it."
- otterley 7mo ago
  What are these "valid arguments for piracy" you refer to? Content isn't food, shelter, or clothing. It's a "nice to have" in one's life. It's literally entertainment.
  - necovek 7mo ago
    They wrote them out. And digital media is similarly fungible, and media companies owning copyright can produce a single copy at insignificant cost — and illegal copies are usually produced at no cost to them too. If you would rather not consume content than pay with time and money being asked of you, there is no real loss to anyone if you consume an illegal copy.
    - otterley 7mo ago
      > They wrote them out. Convenience is not a valid reason to violate others' rights. > there is no real loss to anyone if you consume an illegal copy. There is a real loss: The owner isn’t getting paid when people consume their product for free and without their permission. The entire point of copyright is to protect the time investment of and opportunity cost borne by the author when marginal reproduction cost is zero, or close to zero. This is because we as a society value intellectual labor. We want people to invent things and produce entertainment, and we incentivize it via the profit motive. You can’t write software for a living and not understand this. It’s what puts food on your own table. Don’t try to rationalize it.
      - necovek 7mo ago
        I've spent the bulk of my career being paid to write software that was published under open source licenses. I was paid to write exactly the software the business needed to be built, with software being the tool for the business to provide value to their customers and not a money extracting scheme. I've also worked on complex web applications/systems, where operation of the web site is ultimately the cost that needs to be continuously borne to extract profit from software itself. Yes, someone else can optimize and do operation better than you (eg. see Amazon vs Elastic and numerous other cases of open-source companies being overtaken by their SW being run by well funded teams), but there is low risk of illegal use in this case. Today I am paid to write software that the business believes will provide them profit that will pay for my services. The software I write is tied to a physical product being sold and is effectively the enabler and mostly useless without the physical product itself. Other engineers at the company I am at are building software that requires a lot of support to operate as it manages critical infrastructure country-sized systems, and ultimately, even if someone could get this software without paying a license, they'd probably have no idea how to operate it effectively. Most of the internet infrastructure works on open and free software, where at "worst", copyright protections are turned upside down to make them copyleft if software is not available under more permissive licenses like MIT, BSD or even put into public domain. Companies that used to pay best SW engineering salaries like Google, Meta and Amazon would likely not face any significant business loss if all of their software (source code included) was publicly leaked: SW is a tool for them to provide an ad platform or cloud infrastructure service.
kelsey98765431 7mo ago
it's shocking to me that you refuse to see that the "awful experience" your friend has is not better than what they give people who pay. are you a billionaire literally out of touch with reality and the cost of living?
- nh23423fefe 7mo ago
  insane response. feign shock, lie, insult, non sequitur
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
bnteke 7mo ago
your argument is that one person puts up with the annoyance of switching tabs to avoid paying, ignoring the fact that many people these days actually pay for the pirated sports packages to avoid that annoyance, it's a huge business. sure those who refuse to pay anything will likely always do so but there is a big part of the market who are priced out/fed up with needing multiple sports packages
stdbrouw 7mo ago
Before Netflix was a thing, I sometimes tried to have conversations with people about "gee, it's a bit annoying that my only options to watch a movie is to buy an expensive dvd that I will watch once, or to pirate it" and the most common response was complete befuddlement, they simply could not comprehend that someone might not want to pirate things if they could, they could not comprehend that besides being illegal it was also just... wrong. Not absolutely evil, for sure, but still something that maybe you might want to avoid doing. Now that you can just pay 10-20 euro for a streaming service, most of them have switched over, so, yeah, service does matter, but a lack of risk or consequences on the one hand and vague notions about actors and directors (and soccer players) already being rich enough as it is, were enough to convince very many people that piracy was a victimless crime.
- quacked 7mo ago
  > Now that you can just pay 10-20 euro for a streaming service, The nice thing about piracy is that you can find what you want immediately. You don't have to go to an aggregator site to find out where it's available, and then log on to the streaming platform site to find that the aggregator site is lagging the real availability, or find that certain content isn't available in your country, or that the content is available but only on the special extra++ cost plan instead of the basic plan. If you want to watch content legally, the workflow looks like this: Search content -> go to aggregator site -> select streaming site -> enter electronic contact and payment info and physical address (for payment) -> confirm email account -> watch content -> dig around on site to find deliberately hidden unsubscribe workflow -> pass all the "are you sure you want to leave" screens -> monitor your card payment the next month to make sure you actually cancelled The illegal workflow looks like this: Search content -> click 1-3 sketchy sites, closing 15 pop up ads -> watch content -> forget about it
  - necovek 7mo ago
    I strongly believe the fact that media companies struggle to accept payments worldwide and region-lock their content when you do pay is why their services ultimately suck for customers. Eg. for my HBO GO subscription provided by my cable operator to continue working, I had to disable load balancing/failover between my other ISP for HBO addresses at home or it'd just stop working when it detects I've been switched to a different network. And then you travel and can't access it anymore either. It is completely bonkers. As a sibling comment said, Netflix won (at that point) because they made service easy and converted a bunch of customers over.
shaboinkin 7mo ago
My opinion is the original 99 cent app, then followed free apps and services caused a public devaluation of software costs. Use Youtube as an example. It tickles me hearing people complain about the cost of a YouTube subscription. In my head, I’m well aware of the colossal amount of costs that go into the hardware and software that allows for such a service to exist in the first place. Yet it’s a bloody outrage to spend money on it to remove ads. Maybe someone could tell me what actually is a fair value of tapping into literally every single video uploaded in YouTube’s existence on demand? $16 a month seems reasonable to me.
- nemomarx 7mo ago
  I liked it better at 10 a month tbh. If they keep increasing the price like Amazon they need to offer more features to compensate.
- hansvm 7mo ago
  Yes and no. Storage should cost in the ballpark of $200M/yr or less. Transcoding, networking, and delivery should be similar. Let's round up to $10B/yr just for fun. YT makes $40B/yr (revenue IIRC) across its 3B customers, or $1.11/mo. $16/mo seems high by comparison. It's very high with reasonable costs of $0.28/mo. Nearly every other industry on the planet is jealous of margins like that. A normal counter-argument here is that they should be allowed to reap those profits till competition forces them to do otherwise. That's a little at odds with our normal view toward monopolies, especially when the monopoly engages in anti-competitive acts to preserve that edge, but whatever; now you're at least having a real debate about real facts and things you care about. Another is that YT's expenses in practice are way higher than that because they need to hire a bunch of ML people or whatever to extract even more ad money out of you, and that's a point I disagree with pretty firmly. I'm not sure why my subscription needs to subsidize a company's other predatory tendencies.
Aerolfos 7mo ago
> I don't think it's worth discussing until we can be honest and admit that a lot of people pirate because they want free stuff. Every HN piracy conversation has a lot of words written to try to avoid admitting that "free stuff" is a big motivator for a lot of people Well, see, the thing is you're right, but the "service problem" quote actually addressed that. There's a percentage of people who will never pay, it's true - and by never pay, it means never pay. You can't get them to pay by blocking or adding DRM or whatever. But of the actually relevant group, people who are willing to pay for stuff, then some percentage of them will stop paying if it isn't convenient enough. Now it's a service problem. The trick is getting the full market potential and preventing them from jumping ship. But the service bit only ever applied to potential customers - the other group don't enter the discussion in the first place because they're hopeless. But yeah usually this argument is at least in part misrepresented. However however, no amount of blocking will stop that free stuff group, no amount of hoops will be too much, there is simply no way to extract blood from a stone the way that some media companies keep telling themselves is possible. So all the original blocking and shutting down of half the internet is completely counterproductive regardless.
- Manuel_D 7mo ago
  To the contrary, there is evidence that DRM increased sales. Researchers analyzed data on sales before and after cracks for video games shows up to 20% lost sales of a game is cracked quickly: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2024/10/the-true-cost-of-game-piracy-20-percent-of-revenue-according-to-a-new-study/ https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2024/10/the-true-cost-of-game...
  - necovek 7mo ago
    It seems hard to take that interpretation at face value (20% seems to be an effect of a week 1 crack post-release with total revenue lost estimated at 25%; week 3 crack has estimated total losses at ~12%, and week 7 crack at less than 5% of total revenue loss..., ~0% for week 12+ cracks). This is also based on extrapolation on top of extrapolation covering only 86 games with "majority" surviving without cracks into week 12 — how significant is the effect if there are only a few games with cracks in early weeks (if it's 43 games across the first 12 weeks, it's less than 4 games per week on average)? How big are their revenues and copies sold in absolute numbers? (I do not have access to the full paper, perhaps it's answered there) But to be precise, even if all of the above is covered, this is not proof that DRM increases sales, but that crack availability for Denuvo-protected games decreases sales depending on the timing — it is a subtle distinction, but perhaps publicity of a crack availability motivates more people to take that route? Finally, let's not forget that game companies care about the profit (and revenue is only a proxy): looking at lost sales does not show how much a studio can save by not investing in DRM protection and thus having a higher gross margin or cheaper price to entice more customers.
necovek 7mo ago
I'd happily pay for DRM-free content, but it's rarely available in digital form in smaller markets like non-EU European country of Serbia: the only alternative is to look for BR or DVD or CD copies and then rip them myself, which is even more time consuming than finding a decent quality not-so-legal option. Even for music, I do spend time looking for DRM free options (eg. Apple only offers iTunes streaming in Serbia and I had to resort to options running a much smaller catalog like 7digital). I always try going first party first (eg. band's site for music), but it's increasingly not an option. And if I want local Serbian/Croatian/... content, no provider has it at all. As an example, one of local publishers recently started releasing "eBooks" readable only in their own mobile app for Android or iOS: none of my Kindle, Remarkable or Kobo can read them. I did let them know about my willingness to jump on their service if they actually made their books work on my eBook devices, but they did not even honour me with a reply :) For me at least, it is a service problem.
xenocratus 7mo ago
> I just don't find these arguments convincing after watching my friend spend cumulative hours upon hours jumping between pirate streaming services trying to find a stable feed for every game. Then you haven't been through enough cycles of subscribing to a service, using it for a while, then wanting to cancel and realising that the only way to do so is through some baroque direct interaction with someone whose job it is to stop you from doing so, instead of it just being a single "cancel" button. I still pay for things, but I 100% understand why some are unwilling to have to both pay, and then put in the same amount of effort they'd put otherwise, just to stop paying. Not to mention the bundling. For example, if I only want to watch climbing competitions in the UK, the only legal way is through a £34 per month subscription to a service that offers every sport under the sun. Even though climbing-wise you might have 4 events that month (sometimes fewer). So yeah, f whoever devised the model :)

squigz 7mo ago

In my experience, people's reasons for piracy are a pretty even mix of all these issues (service problems, principles, and cost) I'd certainly pirate less if I could afford it, but even if I could, I'd still pirate a lot of stuff because I don't want to worry about what streaming service it's on this week, or because I don't want to contribute to monopolization of some industry. And sure, I'd still pirate some things because I find they're overpriced. > I know I'll never win this argument on Hacker News because every piracy conversation turns into an infinite game of moving goalposts, where there's always a new rationalization at every turn. What argument are you referring to, out of curiosity? That some people pirate things 'cause they're poor and make nice-sounding rationalizations about it? Okay, that definitely happens, you win. But I don't think that really takes away from the other valid arguments for piracy?

akramachamarei 7mo ago
> I'd certainly pirate less if I could afford it
- squigz 7mo ago
  What's your point?
  - akramachamarei 7mo ago
    Try substituting some other verbs in there to see if it comes to you: "I'd certainly wrestle less if I could afford it." "I'd certainly eat less ice cream if I could afford it."
otterley 7mo ago
What are these "valid arguments for piracy" you refer to? Content isn't food, shelter, or clothing. It's a "nice to have" in one's life. It's literally entertainment.
- necovek 7mo ago
  They wrote them out. And digital media is similarly fungible, and media companies owning copyright can produce a single copy at insignificant cost — and illegal copies are usually produced at no cost to them too. If you would rather not consume content than pay with time and money being asked of you, there is no real loss to anyone if you consume an illegal copy.
  - otterley 7mo ago
    > They wrote them out. Convenience is not a valid reason to violate others' rights. > there is no real loss to anyone if you consume an illegal copy. There is a real loss: The owner isn’t getting paid when people consume their product for free and without their permission. The entire point of copyright is to protect the time investment of and opportunity cost borne by the author when marginal reproduction cost is zero, or close to zero. This is because we as a society value intellectual labor. We want people to invent things and produce entertainment, and we incentivize it via the profit motive. You can’t write software for a living and not understand this. It’s what puts food on your own table. Don’t try to rationalize it.
    - necovek 7mo ago
      I've spent the bulk of my career being paid to write software that was published under open source licenses. I was paid to write exactly the software the business needed to be built, with software being the tool for the business to provide value to their customers and not a money extracting scheme. I've also worked on complex web applications/systems, where operation of the web site is ultimately the cost that needs to be continuously borne to extract profit from software itself. Yes, someone else can optimize and do operation better than you (eg. see Amazon vs Elastic and numerous other cases of open-source companies being overtaken by their SW being run by well funded teams), but there is low risk of illegal use in this case. Today I am paid to write software that the business believes will provide them profit that will pay for my services. The software I write is tied to a physical product being sold and is effectively the enabler and mostly useless without the physical product itself. Other engineers at the company I am at are building software that requires a lot of support to operate as it manages critical infrastructure country-sized systems, and ultimately, even if someone could get this software without paying a license, they'd probably have no idea how to operate it effectively. Most of the internet infrastructure works on open and free software, where at "worst", copyright protections are turned upside down to make them copyleft if software is not available under more permissive licenses like MIT, BSD or even put into public domain. Companies that used to pay best SW engineering salaries like Google, Meta and Amazon would likely not face any significant business loss if all of their software (source code included) was publicly leaked: SW is a tool for them to provide an ad platform or cloud infrastructure service.

kelsey98765431 7mo ago

it's shocking to me that you refuse to see that the "awful experience" your friend has is not better than what they give people who pay. are you a billionaire literally out of touch with reality and the cost of living?

nh23423fefe 7mo ago
insane response. feign shock, lie, insult, non sequitur

deleted 7mo ago

[deleted]

bnteke 7mo ago

your argument is that one person puts up with the annoyance of switching tabs to avoid paying, ignoring the fact that many people these days actually pay for the pirated sports packages to avoid that annoyance, it's a huge business. sure those who refuse to pay anything will likely always do so but there is a big part of the market who are priced out/fed up with needing multiple sports packages

stdbrouw 7mo ago

Before Netflix was a thing, I sometimes tried to have conversations with people about "gee, it's a bit annoying that my only options to watch a movie is to buy an expensive dvd that I will watch once, or to pirate it" and the most common response was complete befuddlement, they simply could not comprehend that someone might not want to pirate things if they could, they could not comprehend that besides being illegal it was also just... wrong. Not absolutely evil, for sure, but still something that maybe you might want to avoid doing. Now that you can just pay 10-20 euro for a streaming service, most of them have switched over, so, yeah, service does matter, but a lack of risk or consequences on the one hand and vague notions about actors and directors (and soccer players) already being rich enough as it is, were enough to convince very many people that piracy was a victimless crime.

quacked 7mo ago
> Now that you can just pay 10-20 euro for a streaming service, The nice thing about piracy is that you can find what you want immediately. You don't have to go to an aggregator site to find out where it's available, and then log on to the streaming platform site to find that the aggregator site is lagging the real availability, or find that certain content isn't available in your country, or that the content is available but only on the special extra++ cost plan instead of the basic plan. If you want to watch content legally, the workflow looks like this: Search content -> go to aggregator site -> select streaming site -> enter electronic contact and payment info and physical address (for payment) -> confirm email account -> watch content -> dig around on site to find deliberately hidden unsubscribe workflow -> pass all the "are you sure you want to leave" screens -> monitor your card payment the next month to make sure you actually cancelled The illegal workflow looks like this: Search content -> click 1-3 sketchy sites, closing 15 pop up ads -> watch content -> forget about it
- necovek 7mo ago
  I strongly believe the fact that media companies struggle to accept payments worldwide and region-lock their content when you do pay is why their services ultimately suck for customers. Eg. for my HBO GO subscription provided by my cable operator to continue working, I had to disable load balancing/failover between my other ISP for HBO addresses at home or it'd just stop working when it detects I've been switched to a different network. And then you travel and can't access it anymore either. It is completely bonkers. As a sibling comment said, Netflix won (at that point) because they made service easy and converted a bunch of customers over.

shaboinkin 7mo ago

My opinion is the original 99 cent app, then followed free apps and services caused a public devaluation of software costs. Use Youtube as an example. It tickles me hearing people complain about the cost of a YouTube subscription. In my head, I’m well aware of the colossal amount of costs that go into the hardware and software that allows for such a service to exist in the first place. Yet it’s a bloody outrage to spend money on it to remove ads. Maybe someone could tell me what actually is a fair value of tapping into literally every single video uploaded in YouTube’s existence on demand? $16 a month seems reasonable to me.

nemomarx 7mo ago
I liked it better at 10 a month tbh. If they keep increasing the price like Amazon they need to offer more features to compensate.
hansvm 7mo ago
Yes and no. Storage should cost in the ballpark of $200M/yr or less. Transcoding, networking, and delivery should be similar. Let's round up to $10B/yr just for fun. YT makes $40B/yr (revenue IIRC) across its 3B customers, or $1.11/mo. $16/mo seems high by comparison. It's very high with reasonable costs of $0.28/mo. Nearly every other industry on the planet is jealous of margins like that. A normal counter-argument here is that they should be allowed to reap those profits till competition forces them to do otherwise. That's a little at odds with our normal view toward monopolies, especially when the monopoly engages in anti-competitive acts to preserve that edge, but whatever; now you're at least having a real debate about real facts and things you care about. Another is that YT's expenses in practice are way higher than that because they need to hire a bunch of ML people or whatever to extract even more ad money out of you, and that's a point I disagree with pretty firmly. I'm not sure why my subscription needs to subsidize a company's other predatory tendencies.

Aerolfos 7mo ago

> I don't think it's worth discussing until we can be honest and admit that a lot of people pirate because they want free stuff. Every HN piracy conversation has a lot of words written to try to avoid admitting that "free stuff" is a big motivator for a lot of people Well, see, the thing is you're right, but the "service problem" quote actually addressed that. There's a percentage of people who will never pay, it's true - and by never pay, it means never pay. You can't get them to pay by blocking or adding DRM or whatever. But of the actually relevant group, people who are willing to pay for stuff, then some percentage of them will stop paying if it isn't convenient enough. Now it's a service problem. The trick is getting the full market potential and preventing them from jumping ship. But the service bit only ever applied to potential customers - the other group don't enter the discussion in the first place because they're hopeless. But yeah usually this argument is at least in part misrepresented. However however, no amount of blocking will stop that free stuff group, no amount of hoops will be too much, there is simply no way to extract blood from a stone the way that some media companies keep telling themselves is possible. So all the original blocking and shutting down of half the internet is completely counterproductive regardless.

Manuel_D 7mo ago
To the contrary, there is evidence that DRM increased sales. Researchers analyzed data on sales before and after cracks for video games shows up to 20% lost sales of a game is cracked quickly: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2024/10/the-true-cost-of-game-piracy-20-percent-of-revenue-according-to-a-new-study/ https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2024/10/the-true-cost-of-game...
- necovek 7mo ago
  It seems hard to take that interpretation at face value (20% seems to be an effect of a week 1 crack post-release with total revenue lost estimated at 25%; week 3 crack has estimated total losses at ~12%, and week 7 crack at less than 5% of total revenue loss..., ~0% for week 12+ cracks). This is also based on extrapolation on top of extrapolation covering only 86 games with "majority" surviving without cracks into week 12 — how significant is the effect if there are only a few games with cracks in early weeks (if it's 43 games across the first 12 weeks, it's less than 4 games per week on average)? How big are their revenues and copies sold in absolute numbers? (I do not have access to the full paper, perhaps it's answered there) But to be precise, even if all of the above is covered, this is not proof that DRM increases sales, but that crack availability for Denuvo-protected games decreases sales depending on the timing — it is a subtle distinction, but perhaps publicity of a crack availability motivates more people to take that route? Finally, let's not forget that game companies care about the profit (and revenue is only a proxy): looking at lost sales does not show how much a studio can save by not investing in DRM protection and thus having a higher gross margin or cheaper price to entice more customers.

necovek 7mo ago

I'd happily pay for DRM-free content, but it's rarely available in digital form in smaller markets like non-EU European country of Serbia: the only alternative is to look for BR or DVD or CD copies and then rip them myself, which is even more time consuming than finding a decent quality not-so-legal option. Even for music, I do spend time looking for DRM free options (eg. Apple only offers iTunes streaming in Serbia and I had to resort to options running a much smaller catalog like 7digital). I always try going first party first (eg. band's site for music), but it's increasingly not an option. And if I want local Serbian/Croatian/... content, no provider has it at all. As an example, one of local publishers recently started releasing "eBooks" readable only in their own mobile app for Android or iOS: none of my Kindle, Remarkable or Kobo can read them. I did let them know about my willingness to jump on their service if they actually made their books work on my eBook devices, but they did not even honour me with a reply :) For me at least, it is a service problem.

xenocratus 7mo ago

> I just don't find these arguments convincing after watching my friend spend cumulative hours upon hours jumping between pirate streaming services trying to find a stable feed for every game. Then you haven't been through enough cycles of subscribing to a service, using it for a while, then wanting to cancel and realising that the only way to do so is through some baroque direct interaction with someone whose job it is to stop you from doing so, instead of it just being a single "cancel" button. I still pay for things, but I 100% understand why some are unwilling to have to both pay, and then put in the same amount of effort they'd put otherwise, just to stop paying. Not to mention the bundling. For example, if I only want to watch climbing competitions in the UK, the only legal way is through a £34 per month subscription to a service that offers every sport under the sun. Even though climbing-wise you might have 4 events that month (sometimes fewer). So yeah, f whoever devised the model :)