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This quote conveniently leaves out that the pirate's product doesn't cost the end user any money. When would the pirate's service not be more valuable?

PostOnce 13y ago
finding a virus-free torrent with up-to-date patches and enough seeds to download at >1megabyte/sec may take more time than people are willing to invest to save $2 on a steam sale for something that guaranteed works and is up to date.
chimeracoder 13y ago
> This quote conveniently leaves out that the pirate's product doesn't cost the end user any money. This is not necessarily true. There are people who spend more on a seedbox or VPN each month than a Netflix + Rdio/Spotify subscription cost. Furthermore, private trackers have restrictions on them (ratio limits, etc.). Depending on what kind of content you're looking for, it's not exactly "free" either in money or time to be an active Bittorrent user. It just so happens that that cost is still less than the "legal" alternative - if a legal alternative even exists (look at pippy's comment about accessing content in New Zealand).
- derefr 13y ago
  > Furthermore, private trackers have restrictions on them (ratio limits, etc.) You know, I've never understood the point of private "community" trackers. Anything mainstream will be on TPB. Anything extremely fresh will be on the release group's own (almost-always-public) tracker. And for the really long-tail stuff--unpopular nonfiction books from the 80s, for example--they've just never been digitized at all. What's an example of the sort of thing people find private trackers uniquely valuable for?
  - PhasmaFelis 13y ago
    Curation and organization is one. For example, search a good movie tracker for Pulp Fiction and you'll get a dedicated page for that film--including stuff like poster image, YouTube trailers, and IMDB link--with torrents organized by quality, resolution, special features, and so forth. The other is, well, you're wrong about the long-tail stuff. TPB, for example, has lots of audiobooks but is very short on printed material. A dedicated book tracker may have a much better selection of fiction, textbooks, and other sorts of specialty books (tabletop RPGs, for example).
  - gibybo 13y ago
    They are often faster (higher ratio of seeders to leechers), and are much less likely to have swarms of bots connecting to their torrents recording all the connected IPs so they can send threatening letters to ISPs/users.
  - JelteF 13y ago
    The unpopular old stuff will still be seeded when you want it a couple of years later, since (almost) everyone that has downloaded it and hasn't thrown it away want's their ratio's up. They won't stop seeding it until they remove the files. So the main reason to do it is high download speeds on old unpopular torrents.
  - enneff 13y ago
    Curation and organization. Continued seeding of really old stuff.
  - disposablename 13y ago
    Private trackers have per-user torrent keys and are often even locked to your IP address, so anyone who is not authorized (MPAA) will not be able to see any peers (a list of who to send scary letters to).
  - jd007 13y ago
    private trackers usually offer much faster release time than public trackers (shows are available less than a minute after pre on the good trackers, which often is about a few minutes after airing), have tons of good seeders so you can get pretty much all files very fast (even if its a bit old), and content that is otherwise not available elsewhere at all (for content-specific trackers mostly, such as music ones) also, release groups usually dont have their own trackers, their releases are generally ftp'd to a few topsites and distributed from there (some private trackers get directly from the source thus having a slightly faster pre time and are more desirable/exclusive, others get it further down the chain of distribution)
  - Haywain 13y ago
    Private trackers, especially private niche trackers, have far more obscure and interesting content than any single release group or TPB. Private trackers are full of very dedicated users that will go far and beyond to fill even the most absurd and rare requests. The difference between private and public trackers is quite literally night and day, in terms of both content and security. Also, there is Usenet which is great for quick release and sometimes rare stuff but had been hammered by the DMCA recently.
  - w1ntermute 13y ago
    Private trackers have much more carefully curated content than public trackers. It makes for a much smoother download experience. Not to mention that the downloads happen as fast as your connection can support. I haven't used public torrent sites in years - the private option is so much more attractive.
  - thebrokencube 13y ago
    Quality control, and speed. This may not be as big of a problem as it used to be a few years ago, but private trackers give you quite a bit more assurance that what you're downloading is what is advertised. Also, since to be part of a private tracker you have to maintain the ratio, many users set up seedboxes and just leave their torrents on, while this doesn't seem to happen quite as much on public trackers.
  - STRiDEX 13y ago
    Private trackers get scene releases hours (maybe 1 or 2) before they show up on TPB. On good trackers the number of seedboxes can max out any leecher's connection. The best trackers race to supply the content the quickest. This is called tracing or torrent racing. The groups with public trackers are p2p groups. The scene does not use torrents. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warez_scene http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warez_scene Watch tracing live: https://trace.corrupt-net.org/live.php https://trace.corrupt-net.org/live.php
  - krrrh 13y ago
    You'd be amazed at the effort that goes into curation and comprehensiveness on a good private tracker. Because ratios are so important there is a strong incentive to upload obscure stuff that is missing. Additionally, the ratio economy can be tweaked for things like providing subtitles (including translations where there have been none before). There's a private film tracker that I'm aware of where I believe half of the members must be film studies professors. They will post monthly themes on obscure genres such as "queer cinema prior to 1950" or "Italien cinema under Mussolini" and these will literally include hundreds of films. It's so impressive that I think some of these private trackers could reasonably argue in court that they are engaging in fair use for academic study. It's archival work at a scale that would be unimaginable if restricted to recognized institutions.
  - Noxchi 13y ago
    This is like saying why do you need niche news websites like HN, when anything mainstreem will be on the 3-letter channel and everything else will be obscure, unpopular stuff. It's true, private trackers generally are "obscure" if you consider every person in the world (just like the majority of the world doesn't read HN). But if you niche down to your basic interests, then there are good private torrent trackers that will generally have almost everything worth having in that area.
- dsrguru 13y ago
  I believe nlawalker's point was that if a paid service is identical in functionality to a free "pirate" alternative, there's still an incentive to use the free one. Even if the paid service is better than the free one, many people would opt to stream illegally over, say, purchasing region-free non-drm DVDs.
  - stormbrew 13y ago
    A stream is not identical in functionality to a DVD. Aside from that, this is a difficult to prove assertion. I'm not sure there's actually been a paid legitimate service that's actually better than the free pirate one overall, when you take out the morality equation. Netflix, rdio, etc. do seem to be doing quite well at proving that people are still willing to pay for a good service with legitimate content, though. Imagine if they were actually as good as the alternative.
    - Blahah 13y ago
      Google play almost solves this problem for me with music. I have a hopeless addiction to fairly off-the-beaten-track hip-hop, and used to have to use private trackers and forums to find good stuff. I got Google play music recently, uploaded stuff I already had, and now I get really good suggestions for new, rare stuff every day. It's still not as comprehensive as what's available on the rest of the internet, but it's better than any other paid music thing I've tried.
    - e12e 13y ago
      I think the closest I know of is vodo.net -- but it has the usual problem of free/indy media -- a lot of it is simply crap. But it has some low-budget gems, like Pioneer One: http://vodo.net/pioneerone http://vodo.net/pioneerone (Note that one person's gem is often another person's crap...) Yet, vodo.net, even being free -- still has higher friction than The Pirate Bay, less choice in [encoding] quality -- but at least supports offline usage (unlike Netflix).
      - Blahah 13y ago
        PioneerOne plot sounds a lot like Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land.
rdmckenzie 13y ago
When the risk of of obtaining content by illegal means is not outweighed by the cost of doing so by legal means. If I can pay USD 1 or Ɖ1500 or some other small amount to watch a movie not listed on Netflix instantly I would gladly do so. The risk of getting a "friendly reminder" from the RIAA or some other entity that $UNIVERSITY is required to disclose who I am and that I've been a bad boy completely outweighs such a low cost. However if it costs me $5 or $10 or I run Linux (which I do) and can't even use any of the legal services then it becomes worth my time, effort and risk to find three proxy services which I halfway trust and run a Torrent client over some combination of them.
hcarvalhoalves 13y ago
Sorry, but this is bull. I used torrents and music blogs a lot to discover new music (and napster/kazaa back then), but nowadays I have a Rdio subscription which is much more convenient. The point is, Rdio is one of the few streaming providers working in my country. If Spotify / iTunes worked, I would subscribe too, since their catalogues are complementary. If the labels don't want to stream into the 7th world economy for whatever stupid reason, too bad... they are the ones losing money.
krschultz 13y ago
I no longer pirate anything - haven't in 10 years. It was fun while I had no assets, prefer not to risk getting sued these days. That said, there are many times that I can't see a movie I want to see or watch a TV show that I want to see even if I have my wallet out. Sometimes it is locked into HBO GO, sometimes it is not available on Netflix/iTunes/Redbox. In all of those cases I am sure it is available via bittorrent, but literally no one wants to just take my money and let me watch the damn thing. In those cases I simply don't watch it. It's not that important to me. But I'm sure others at that point just say screw it I'm going to pirate it. Either way - the industry makes no money off the viewer when they easily could have.
- ultimoo 13y ago
  I'm mostly in the same boat. The last time this happened to me was when I wanted to (re)watch Star Wars but didn't have the DVDs at hand. It's impossible to pay for and watch the damn thing online/on-demand/pay-per-view/you-name-it.
  - existencebox 13y ago
    This hit my fiancee recently, she wanted to grab grim fandango, and your options were a secondhand very used copy from ebay/amazon, or pirating. (the latter even had more baked in support for running on modern platforms, too...) GoG is doing good work in making a lot of these things available, it solved the big System Shock 2 hole in game retail.
    - 72deluxe 13y ago
      How did she get on running it on modern systems? It runs horribly for me on XP as I recall, so I attempted it under Wine on Linux with mixed results. What do you recommend? Grim Fandango is a brilliant game. I bought mine on ebay :-)
      - henriks 13y ago
        http://residualvm.org/ http://residualvm.org/ is a re-implementation of the engine used in Grim Fandango (and Monkey Island 4) that enables you to play the game on modern systems. It requires the original game files, and is similar in idea to ScummVM.
akira2501 13y ago
Offer free copies yourself. Degrade the quality, embed advertising and maintain a solid back catalog.
- nnnnni 13y ago
  > maintain a solid back catalog It drives me crazy when the licensing drops out for a show while you're in the middle of watching through the series!
deciplex 13y ago
Cost is not value. The pirate's service will be more valuable to me when he offers more that I value than the legal provider does. How much either charges for the service has no bearing on that. Now, the legal provider may actually offer something more valuable, but some people will still choose to pirate because the cost is free. But that is clearly not always the case, since people still often pay for content. Otherwise, Steam wouldn't be a business. That's what Gabe is getting at. I could pirate games for free, but it's a pain compared to Steam, and I value my time. Since the service provided by Steam is superior to pirating the software, and because paying on Steam is less hassle than attempting to pirate a thing, I use Steam. (There are other reasons, but from pure rational self-interest or whatever, that's how it works for me.) So legal providers that offer more than pirates do will still face issues of piracy, however legal providers that offer an inferior service to even pirates might expect that their product will have near-100% piracy rates, and they will be forced out of business.
- nlawalker 13y ago
  > How much either charges for the service has no bearing on that. This is just dodging the subject; I'm talking about net value. How valuable would Steam be to you if it cost $100 a month to be a member? Anyways, my point was meant to be in the context of movies, which is what's offered by the linked service. Steam works because they sell games, not movies. Games aren't hard to pirate (a game's bits aren't any harder to get than a movie's), but pirated copies are hard to use compared to legal copies because it's easy to build games that require Internet connectivity to verify authenticity. No one minds this because they probably need the Internet to play the game in the first place (Google "World of Goo piracy" for an example of what can happen when just this one point doesn't hold true, and tell me again that piracy is just a service problem). People like to say Steam is "DRM done right" but it's not, it's just that it happens to be the case that the DRM doesn't require anything you don't already need to enjoy the content. Movies are obviously different. How would one offer a service that can beat piracy on convenience, when piracy offers un-DRMed files that you can use anywhere? It's conceivable, but how much would they be willing to charge for this service? Therein lies the rub. The root of the problem is that the movie industry does not agree with people's valuation of their content. They don't want to sell you a just-released movie, unDRMed, for a buck, or anything approaching the $0 that piracy charges. They'd rather keep their existing business model and try to raise the perceived risk of piracy. It's disingenuous to say that it's a service problem and not a pricing problem merely because the service doesn't exist, when the primary reason that the service doesn't exist is pricing. The movie industry isn't going to invest in building a service if they can't sell their content at the price point they want. The most important thing to note about Steam isn't the DRM, it's the prices. The content producers have conceded to the fact that they have to adjust their prices to match the public's perception of the value of their content. The movie industry hasn't made that concession. Yet.
Gustomaximus 13y ago
There have been paid piracy services like AllOfMP3 that were very popular. Also people are willing to pay for access when pirating in regards to seed boxes, VPN's etc. So I wouldn't say there is no user cost for piracy. For me, occasions I have been tempted to pirate something it is more about convenience or lack of access.
curun1r 13y ago
Try Googling "Better than Free" and you'll find the answer to your question. The three most important reasons, for me, are: - immediacy/ease of use: It just works and I can find what I want easily. I value my time at roughly $200/hr, so it's easy to justify ~$10/mo if it saves me even 3 minutes of my time. - availability: I don't need to have terabytes of local storage because I can just stream whatever I want, whenever I want. - patronage: This is the most important thing for me...I want to pay for content. I think the industry has, by and large, behaved like spoiled toddlers for the better part of 2 decades now, but that doesn't make it right to not pay them for their work. And I think I'll get better content if I pay for the things I like.
- gdy 13y ago
  Are you conscious of the fact that you've just lost $10 or $20 while writing this comment?
  - onetwofiveten 13y ago
    I think "spent" rather than "lost" would be more appropriate - time spent sharing and discussing ideas isn't a total waste.
- dTal 13y ago
  $200 an hour? Holy shit, where do you work that it's even worth going in? In all seriousness unless you're stupendously rich surely that's an overestimate by roughly an order of magnitude? You'd pay me a hundred bucks to drive you home in half an hour instead of taking the hour-long bus?
  - _archon_ 13y ago
    $50 at his rate. And wouldn't he have to pay less, say $45, to come out ahead on the transaction? I, too, am curious where GP works.
    - curun1r 13y ago
      I work at what used to be a startup until it was acquired by a large company. I arrived at that number by dividing my annual comp by 2000 (40 hours per week, 50 weeks per year) and then rounding down to the nearest hundred. It's probably still a bit high because my comp will drop a bit in two years when I stop vesting my retention bonus. In retrospect, I wish I'd chosen a number that others would relate to a little better. At $50/hr, an $8.99 Netflix subscription is still paid for in just over 10 minutes of free time, which is just as illustrative of the point I was trying to make.
jkrems 13y ago
There's always the convenience in having something that is freely advertised. So just "official, legal and safe" is a value. And if the existence (and success) of iTunes, Spotify, Steam, and others are any proof, those values are very well understood by people. People don't only want to have the cheapest thing, most people also don't want to hurt others (and they understand that not paying the content producer hurts them).
cenhyperion 13y ago
I stopped pirating music the day I got spotify premium, if that's worth anything to this discussion.
chadillac 13y ago
I used to have hard drives full of downloaded music... the Grooveshark pretty much killed that... Spotify offered mobile streaming and offline playback. I haven't pirated a song in about 5 or 6 years with the exception of a leaked album (Random Access Memories). NetFlix meets a lot of my movie needs, and ironically reignited my movie pirating when they removed "2001: A Space Odyssey". If you give the consume an easy and convenient means to access your content, most users will consume it via that method. Most people don't "get" torrents, or care to learn how to use them. My Mom still pays $.99/mp3 on iTunes... I can't get her to switch to spotify.
- frewsxcv 13y ago
  Why is Spotify better than owning your data? What happens to your music once Spotify dies?
  - aaron-lebo 13y ago
    You lose access to it, but since you've only been paying $10 a month, it isn't that big a loss. Here's a comparison. You could buy a new album off of Amazon or iTunes every month for $10. These would be DRM free copies that you would own. So for $10 a month you could have 1 album that you own, or you could pay $10 a month and have access to I don't know, 4 million that you are renting? We could also imagine that after a year Spotify goes out of business. You've spent $120 on Spotify and don't have anything in return. In the same amount of time you would have spent $120 on iTunes or another service and own 12 albums. There's a convenience factor here and I think it is obvious that especially in the short term (which is what most people are weighing), it just makes sense to use Spotify or another service, even if you don't actually own your music.
    - _djo_ 13y ago
      Music from Amazon and iTunes is DRM-free these days.
    - __david__ 13y ago
      > These would be DRM copies that you would own. Did you mean "DRM free"?
bertil 13y ago
Well, not exactly: I’m still paying for Netflix. I travel a lot and use VPN for professional reasons, between countries that have a good Netflix offering, those without and those with partial offers. I still pirate most of it because a film I started watching is not available anymore in the country I'm in. It's annoying up to the point that I’ve stopped trying. If I paid by film watched, what you said would make sense; I don't think anyone does anymore.
- waps 13y ago
  That is piracy. You're not following the conditions of the licence of the copyrighted material, nor your contract with netflix. That's just as much piracy as torrenting everything. Worse: if the purpose of the VPN is explicitly to lie about fulfilling your end of the contract (and you state here that you do use it for that), it could in the worst case be considered fraud. If you enable the VPN outside of the country because you can't watch netflix otherwise, that's definitely fraud (whether or not you actually read the contract with netflix). Also note that neither of these facts need to be proven beyond reasonable doubt, as this is not criminal law, the judge merely needs to believe it to be true.
  - bertil 13y ago
    I’m sorry: are you arguing that travelling is piracy? The upside is that we are getting closer to what piracy actually is (taking a boat by means violence) as opposed to the over-dramatised and legally void attempt by the MPAA to call unlicensed use of media something else; the downside is that you fail to notice that the idea of jurisdiction isn’t really nearly as plain as what most “hurr-Heer-Merica!” lawyers and military hawks like to thing.
    - waps 13y ago
      I am arguing that you signed(/agreed) a contract with netflix. Second, in order to actually watch the content you have to licence it. This next bit is only 90% accurate, but will do for this discussion : that licence is another contract that at some point (probably as part of the netflix contract signing) you saw and agreed to follow. The difference between both contracts is the other party. In the first it's netflix, in the second it's the copyright owner. Both contracts stipulate that you won't look at the content outside of a given service area. You then proceed to a) violate the actual provision (contract violation / copyright violation) b) use technical means to fool the other contracting party into thinking you haven't violated the contract (fraud) Not following the terms of a licence, that's exactly what piracy is (gets more complex if there are multiple licences for the same content, but ...). Just like fraud is nothing more or less than deceiving parties you've contracted with into believing you're respecting the contract, with intent to violate said contract.
product50 13y ago
No, that was the whole point of the quote. Many people pirate for convenience reasons rather than financial reasons. Check out this blog post by Fred Wilson on this subject: http://avc.com/2012/01/scarcity-is-a-shitty-business-model/ http://avc.com/2012/01/scarcity-is-a-shitty-business-model/
m_mueller 13y ago
Price doesn't usually give a product value, except for luxury goods. Value is depending on every potential buyer and his usecase. Usually an illegal counterfeit has a vastly lower price and a somewhat lower value to most. If the value is equal or higher, you know you're in trouble.
sytelus 13y ago
This is also upper-middle class geek view. A person who flips burgers at McDonnalds or moves crates at Walmark is much more likely to lean towards saving $8/mo than CEO of Valve or $100/hr tech crowd here. Also in developing countries like India or China people would strongly prefer something free even though it's lower quality and involves more hassles. No one there gives damn to any copyright violation. The general population view there is why to give more money to all those actors and movie makers who are already multi-millionaires.
- preemrust 13y ago
  I am from India and I gladly pay for Amazon ebooks, Audible audiobooks, iTunes music, movies and apps. I am not even rich - there are many of us from less affluent countries that understand that content creators should get their compensation. More than anything else, I want to reward these companies for making content accessible to me (no physical bookstore will come to a small city and open a branch). I lead a fairly contented life in my small corner of the world and there are probably two things that angers me equally. One is the way affluent countries treat me when I want a visa to visit or transit through them and second is the message on Amazon that a particular ebook is not available to me because of my geographical region. I only resort to searching online for a pirated ebook or converting youtube music to mp3 after I have exhausted all options of finding the content on a legit online store.
- mazesc 13y ago
  How much do you think you can make from someone who has no money to spend on such content? Fuck them, right?
CrystalCuckoo 13y ago
Piracy doesn't offer automatic updates, cloud saves, (usually) multiplayer, support when the game breaks, and a guarantee of not containing malware. I'm obviously using Steam as an example here, given the context.
the_af 13y ago
When I was younger I pirated almost all games (it helped that in my country there was no concept of legal games when I was a kid, and in fact I didn't even know there was another way of purchasing games). Later, when I knew what piracy vs legal was, it was definitely a convenience thing. Until very recently, legal games were painful and very inconvenient in comparison to pirated games. Pirated games offer many advantages: no DRM is the most frequently mentioned "feature", but also pirated games often were the only way to get the games in their original language (especially for those of us in countries whose primary language is not English). Keep in mind translations are usually awful, and were even worse back then. A bad translation could completely destroy a point & click adventure game! Then came the joys of indie games, Humble Bundle, Steam, GOG, and easily purchasable and downloadable legal games. But you may still wonder: what can they offer against the price of zero from downloaded warez? Well, they offer the huge satisfaction of letting me help the developers. For me, that's very valuable. I won't cheat the devs of their hard-earned money, and I get to play games without DRM in their original language. The best of both worlds, and pirates can't compete with that!
venomsnake 13y ago
Like if you have steam or gog - then installing a game is one click away. No need to find and search torrents for games 10 years old. And everything is patched and working. I have bought kindle dollar books just because I was lazy to find "drm free" version and convert it with calible. But my price for IP crashed way down - 5-10 Euro is the top I am paying for something.
Ihmahr 13y ago
I have netflix, but I will pirate if it is not on there.
DanBC 13y ago
Some people buy the legitimate product and then pirate it too because the product has weird restrictions. Some movies were not released in all regions. The user can import the DVD from a differet region. Some OSs impose restrictions on how many times the SVD drive can change its region. Piratig the content solves that.
- 72deluxe 13y ago
  This is true! I bought XMen Origins: Wolverine and it showed a happy family laughing and in ecstasy watching their legitimate DVD in their well-illuminated room compared to the glum-looking spotty dirty nerd in a poorly-illuminated room (more like a toilet). After this vision of deep joy, I felt satisfaction that I had bought the DVD and would soon be enjoying the DVD in my well illuminated room, laughing and frolicking around with my family at sheer delight at the film. I could barely see the DVD player with the tears of joy smearing my vision, running down my chubby cheeks to plop onto the legitimate plastic box that housed the DVD with a satisfying thud. It didn't play on my DVD player. The copy protection upset it and the DVD player refused to play my legitimate DVD that I had purchased. I could watch the introduction video showing me the deep joy from purchasing the DVD (why do that on the DVD that I had bought???) but not the actual film. It made me angry. But not angry enough to pirate films. I have never pirated a film. If I can't afford the cinema, I'll just wait until it appears on Lovefilm or ordinary TV. I don't need to rush to see a film. It's not like they're going to go out of circulation or will not be in the bargain DVD bin in 3 years time.
serge2k 13y ago
When Steam is just easier. Even Origin is easier. Netflix is easier.
- drdaeman 13y ago
  > Steam is just easier. Well, I thought so. But for older games Steam is harder and worse than torrenting. Say, old Gothic, Thief, TES, Fallout or, say, VtM: Bloodlines all either explicitly require or just really need some manual patching to properly work on modern OSes and hardware. GOG's nice in this aspect (pre-bundled unofficial patches, emulators and whatever), but it has US/EU-level pricing, which feels quite large in poorer countries like Russia. So, if the game's older than 2-3 years and it's not multiplayer one, it's probably better to set a sail for The Pirate Bay. If it's recent, then Steam's probably easier.
lmm 13y ago
Sure, all other things being equal free is better than expensive. But it's not a big factor. I don't pirate books any more because the kindle experience is better by enough to be worth paying for.
thaumasiotes 13y ago
I like to buy mp3s from Amazon because the metadata is correct. That's not as common as I'd like with peer-to-peer mp3s. In a similar vein, sometimes the pirate provides you with malware. Free malware isn't exactly a bargain over cheap content.
onetwofiveten 13y ago
An official service can improve on a pirate service in terms of reliability, speed, quality, security and ethical considerations. There is some real value in instant access to guaranteed high definition good quality videos that are free from viruses. I suppose an unscrupulous operator could even spend some effort flooding the pirate service with poor quality, corrupted data, so as to make their own service more valuable.
scott_s 13y ago
Because people's time is valuable. Most people will happily pay something for a painless user-experience that gives them what they want with no hassle.
baby 13y ago
I don't think the price is a factor in "convenience". The annoying steps to pay a subscription and to cancel a membership might be though. I subscribed to Netflix and none of those were too much trouble, it's just too easy to go on Netflix to check my favorite TV show episodes so I just stopped illegally acquiring them. Although some seasons are not on netflix so I just go back to piracy when its the case. As for tv shows I don't own, I find it too troublesome to pay two services so I'm not gonna buy a Hulu membership.
sliverstorm 13y ago
The pirate's service comes with risk and sometimes difficulty. Not everyone knows how to torrent, and you risk malware infection and/or "strikes" from your ISP. It doesn't cost any money, but that doesn't mean it has no costs.
TrevorJ 13y ago
Anecdotal evidence, but I know for a fact that a lot of the people I know want to pay for the media. They don't enjoy pirating, and would rather be above board with purchases, but after checking Netflix, Hulu, Apple and Amazon and not being able to find what they were looking for, they torrent as a last resort.
- fixedd 13y ago
  Minus Apple, this is me. The problem is further exacerbated by the fact that if you go straight to TPB you could have it already downloaded and ready to watch in less time than it takes to try and find a way to pay them. They've set the barrier to entry too high.

PostOnce 13y ago

finding a virus-free torrent with up-to-date patches and enough seeds to download at >1megabyte/sec may take more time than people are willing to invest to save $2 on a steam sale for something that guaranteed works and is up to date.

chimeracoder 13y ago

> This quote conveniently leaves out that the pirate's product doesn't cost the end user any money. This is not necessarily true. There are people who spend more on a seedbox or VPN each month than a Netflix + Rdio/Spotify subscription cost. Furthermore, private trackers have restrictions on them (ratio limits, etc.). Depending on what kind of content you're looking for, it's not exactly "free" either in money or time to be an active Bittorrent user. It just so happens that that cost is still less than the "legal" alternative - if a legal alternative even exists (look at pippy's comment about accessing content in New Zealand).

derefr 13y ago
> Furthermore, private trackers have restrictions on them (ratio limits, etc.) You know, I've never understood the point of private "community" trackers. Anything mainstream will be on TPB. Anything extremely fresh will be on the release group's own (almost-always-public) tracker. And for the really long-tail stuff--unpopular nonfiction books from the 80s, for example--they've just never been digitized at all. What's an example of the sort of thing people find private trackers uniquely valuable for?
- PhasmaFelis 13y ago
  Curation and organization is one. For example, search a good movie tracker for Pulp Fiction and you'll get a dedicated page for that film--including stuff like poster image, YouTube trailers, and IMDB link--with torrents organized by quality, resolution, special features, and so forth. The other is, well, you're wrong about the long-tail stuff. TPB, for example, has lots of audiobooks but is very short on printed material. A dedicated book tracker may have a much better selection of fiction, textbooks, and other sorts of specialty books (tabletop RPGs, for example).
- gibybo 13y ago
  They are often faster (higher ratio of seeders to leechers), and are much less likely to have swarms of bots connecting to their torrents recording all the connected IPs so they can send threatening letters to ISPs/users.
- JelteF 13y ago
  The unpopular old stuff will still be seeded when you want it a couple of years later, since (almost) everyone that has downloaded it and hasn't thrown it away want's their ratio's up. They won't stop seeding it until they remove the files. So the main reason to do it is high download speeds on old unpopular torrents.
- enneff 13y ago
  Curation and organization. Continued seeding of really old stuff.
- disposablename 13y ago
  Private trackers have per-user torrent keys and are often even locked to your IP address, so anyone who is not authorized (MPAA) will not be able to see any peers (a list of who to send scary letters to).
- jd007 13y ago
  private trackers usually offer much faster release time than public trackers (shows are available less than a minute after pre on the good trackers, which often is about a few minutes after airing), have tons of good seeders so you can get pretty much all files very fast (even if its a bit old), and content that is otherwise not available elsewhere at all (for content-specific trackers mostly, such as music ones) also, release groups usually dont have their own trackers, their releases are generally ftp'd to a few topsites and distributed from there (some private trackers get directly from the source thus having a slightly faster pre time and are more desirable/exclusive, others get it further down the chain of distribution)
- Haywain 13y ago
  Private trackers, especially private niche trackers, have far more obscure and interesting content than any single release group or TPB. Private trackers are full of very dedicated users that will go far and beyond to fill even the most absurd and rare requests. The difference between private and public trackers is quite literally night and day, in terms of both content and security. Also, there is Usenet which is great for quick release and sometimes rare stuff but had been hammered by the DMCA recently.
- w1ntermute 13y ago
  Private trackers have much more carefully curated content than public trackers. It makes for a much smoother download experience. Not to mention that the downloads happen as fast as your connection can support. I haven't used public torrent sites in years - the private option is so much more attractive.
- thebrokencube 13y ago
  Quality control, and speed. This may not be as big of a problem as it used to be a few years ago, but private trackers give you quite a bit more assurance that what you're downloading is what is advertised. Also, since to be part of a private tracker you have to maintain the ratio, many users set up seedboxes and just leave their torrents on, while this doesn't seem to happen quite as much on public trackers.
- STRiDEX 13y ago
  Private trackers get scene releases hours (maybe 1 or 2) before they show up on TPB. On good trackers the number of seedboxes can max out any leecher's connection. The best trackers race to supply the content the quickest. This is called tracing or torrent racing. The groups with public trackers are p2p groups. The scene does not use torrents. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warez_scene http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warez_scene Watch tracing live: https://trace.corrupt-net.org/live.php https://trace.corrupt-net.org/live.php
- krrrh 13y ago
  You'd be amazed at the effort that goes into curation and comprehensiveness on a good private tracker. Because ratios are so important there is a strong incentive to upload obscure stuff that is missing. Additionally, the ratio economy can be tweaked for things like providing subtitles (including translations where there have been none before). There's a private film tracker that I'm aware of where I believe half of the members must be film studies professors. They will post monthly themes on obscure genres such as "queer cinema prior to 1950" or "Italien cinema under Mussolini" and these will literally include hundreds of films. It's so impressive that I think some of these private trackers could reasonably argue in court that they are engaging in fair use for academic study. It's archival work at a scale that would be unimaginable if restricted to recognized institutions.
- Noxchi 13y ago
  This is like saying why do you need niche news websites like HN, when anything mainstreem will be on the 3-letter channel and everything else will be obscure, unpopular stuff. It's true, private trackers generally are "obscure" if you consider every person in the world (just like the majority of the world doesn't read HN). But if you niche down to your basic interests, then there are good private torrent trackers that will generally have almost everything worth having in that area.
dsrguru 13y ago
I believe nlawalker's point was that if a paid service is identical in functionality to a free "pirate" alternative, there's still an incentive to use the free one. Even if the paid service is better than the free one, many people would opt to stream illegally over, say, purchasing region-free non-drm DVDs.
- stormbrew 13y ago
  A stream is not identical in functionality to a DVD. Aside from that, this is a difficult to prove assertion. I'm not sure there's actually been a paid legitimate service that's actually better than the free pirate one overall, when you take out the morality equation. Netflix, rdio, etc. do seem to be doing quite well at proving that people are still willing to pay for a good service with legitimate content, though. Imagine if they were actually as good as the alternative.
  - Blahah 13y ago
    Google play almost solves this problem for me with music. I have a hopeless addiction to fairly off-the-beaten-track hip-hop, and used to have to use private trackers and forums to find good stuff. I got Google play music recently, uploaded stuff I already had, and now I get really good suggestions for new, rare stuff every day. It's still not as comprehensive as what's available on the rest of the internet, but it's better than any other paid music thing I've tried.
  - e12e 13y ago
    I think the closest I know of is vodo.net -- but it has the usual problem of free/indy media -- a lot of it is simply crap. But it has some low-budget gems, like Pioneer One: http://vodo.net/pioneerone http://vodo.net/pioneerone (Note that one person's gem is often another person's crap...) Yet, vodo.net, even being free -- still has higher friction than The Pirate Bay, less choice in [encoding] quality -- but at least supports offline usage (unlike Netflix).
    - Blahah 13y ago
      PioneerOne plot sounds a lot like Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land.

rdmckenzie 13y ago

When the risk of of obtaining content by illegal means is not outweighed by the cost of doing so by legal means. If I can pay USD 1 or Ɖ1500 or some other small amount to watch a movie not listed on Netflix instantly I would gladly do so. The risk of getting a "friendly reminder" from the RIAA or some other entity that $UNIVERSITY is required to disclose who I am and that I've been a bad boy completely outweighs such a low cost. However if it costs me $5 or $10 or I run Linux (which I do) and can't even use any of the legal services then it becomes worth my time, effort and risk to find three proxy services which I halfway trust and run a Torrent client over some combination of them.

hcarvalhoalves 13y ago

Sorry, but this is bull. I used torrents and music blogs a lot to discover new music (and napster/kazaa back then), but nowadays I have a Rdio subscription which is much more convenient. The point is, Rdio is one of the few streaming providers working in my country. If Spotify / iTunes worked, I would subscribe too, since their catalogues are complementary. If the labels don't want to stream into the 7th world economy for whatever stupid reason, too bad... they are the ones losing money.

krschultz 13y ago

I no longer pirate anything - haven't in 10 years. It was fun while I had no assets, prefer not to risk getting sued these days. That said, there are many times that I can't see a movie I want to see or watch a TV show that I want to see even if I have my wallet out. Sometimes it is locked into HBO GO, sometimes it is not available on Netflix/iTunes/Redbox. In all of those cases I am sure it is available via bittorrent, but literally no one wants to just take my money and let me watch the damn thing. In those cases I simply don't watch it. It's not that important to me. But I'm sure others at that point just say screw it I'm going to pirate it. Either way - the industry makes no money off the viewer when they easily could have.

ultimoo 13y ago
I'm mostly in the same boat. The last time this happened to me was when I wanted to (re)watch Star Wars but didn't have the DVDs at hand. It's impossible to pay for and watch the damn thing online/on-demand/pay-per-view/you-name-it.
- existencebox 13y ago
  This hit my fiancee recently, she wanted to grab grim fandango, and your options were a secondhand very used copy from ebay/amazon, or pirating. (the latter even had more baked in support for running on modern platforms, too...) GoG is doing good work in making a lot of these things available, it solved the big System Shock 2 hole in game retail.
  - 72deluxe 13y ago
    How did she get on running it on modern systems? It runs horribly for me on XP as I recall, so I attempted it under Wine on Linux with mixed results. What do you recommend? Grim Fandango is a brilliant game. I bought mine on ebay :-)
    - henriks 13y ago
      http://residualvm.org/ http://residualvm.org/ is a re-implementation of the engine used in Grim Fandango (and Monkey Island 4) that enables you to play the game on modern systems. It requires the original game files, and is similar in idea to ScummVM.

akira2501 13y ago

Offer free copies yourself. Degrade the quality, embed advertising and maintain a solid back catalog.

nnnnni 13y ago
> maintain a solid back catalog It drives me crazy when the licensing drops out for a show while you're in the middle of watching through the series!

deciplex 13y ago

Cost is not value. The pirate's service will be more valuable to me when he offers more that I value than the legal provider does. How much either charges for the service has no bearing on that. Now, the legal provider may actually offer something more valuable, but some people will still choose to pirate because the cost is free. But that is clearly not always the case, since people still often pay for content. Otherwise, Steam wouldn't be a business. That's what Gabe is getting at. I could pirate games for free, but it's a pain compared to Steam, and I value my time. Since the service provided by Steam is superior to pirating the software, and because paying on Steam is less hassle than attempting to pirate a thing, I use Steam. (There are other reasons, but from pure rational self-interest or whatever, that's how it works for me.) So legal providers that offer more than pirates do will still face issues of piracy, however legal providers that offer an inferior service to even pirates might expect that their product will have near-100% piracy rates, and they will be forced out of business.

nlawalker 13y ago
> How much either charges for the service has no bearing on that. This is just dodging the subject; I'm talking about net value. How valuable would Steam be to you if it cost $100 a month to be a member? Anyways, my point was meant to be in the context of movies, which is what's offered by the linked service. Steam works because they sell games, not movies. Games aren't hard to pirate (a game's bits aren't any harder to get than a movie's), but pirated copies are hard to use compared to legal copies because it's easy to build games that require Internet connectivity to verify authenticity. No one minds this because they probably need the Internet to play the game in the first place (Google "World of Goo piracy" for an example of what can happen when just this one point doesn't hold true, and tell me again that piracy is just a service problem). People like to say Steam is "DRM done right" but it's not, it's just that it happens to be the case that the DRM doesn't require anything you don't already need to enjoy the content. Movies are obviously different. How would one offer a service that can beat piracy on convenience, when piracy offers un-DRMed files that you can use anywhere? It's conceivable, but how much would they be willing to charge for this service? Therein lies the rub. The root of the problem is that the movie industry does not agree with people's valuation of their content. They don't want to sell you a just-released movie, unDRMed, for a buck, or anything approaching the $0 that piracy charges. They'd rather keep their existing business model and try to raise the perceived risk of piracy. It's disingenuous to say that it's a service problem and not a pricing problem merely because the service doesn't exist, when the primary reason that the service doesn't exist is pricing. The movie industry isn't going to invest in building a service if they can't sell their content at the price point they want. The most important thing to note about Steam isn't the DRM, it's the prices. The content producers have conceded to the fact that they have to adjust their prices to match the public's perception of the value of their content. The movie industry hasn't made that concession. Yet.

Gustomaximus 13y ago

There have been paid piracy services like AllOfMP3 that were very popular. Also people are willing to pay for access when pirating in regards to seed boxes, VPN's etc. So I wouldn't say there is no user cost for piracy. For me, occasions I have been tempted to pirate something it is more about convenience or lack of access.

curun1r 13y ago

Try Googling "Better than Free" and you'll find the answer to your question. The three most important reasons, for me, are: - immediacy/ease of use: It just works and I can find what I want easily. I value my time at roughly $200/hr, so it's easy to justify ~$10/mo if it saves me even 3 minutes of my time. - availability: I don't need to have terabytes of local storage because I can just stream whatever I want, whenever I want. - patronage: This is the most important thing for me...I want to pay for content. I think the industry has, by and large, behaved like spoiled toddlers for the better part of 2 decades now, but that doesn't make it right to not pay them for their work. And I think I'll get better content if I pay for the things I like.

gdy 13y ago
Are you conscious of the fact that you've just lost $10 or $20 while writing this comment?
- onetwofiveten 13y ago
  I think "spent" rather than "lost" would be more appropriate - time spent sharing and discussing ideas isn't a total waste.
dTal 13y ago
$200 an hour? Holy shit, where do you work that it's even worth going in? In all seriousness unless you're stupendously rich surely that's an overestimate by roughly an order of magnitude? You'd pay me a hundred bucks to drive you home in half an hour instead of taking the hour-long bus?
- _archon_ 13y ago
  $50 at his rate. And wouldn't he have to pay less, say $45, to come out ahead on the transaction? I, too, am curious where GP works.
  - curun1r 13y ago
    I work at what used to be a startup until it was acquired by a large company. I arrived at that number by dividing my annual comp by 2000 (40 hours per week, 50 weeks per year) and then rounding down to the nearest hundred. It's probably still a bit high because my comp will drop a bit in two years when I stop vesting my retention bonus. In retrospect, I wish I'd chosen a number that others would relate to a little better. At $50/hr, an $8.99 Netflix subscription is still paid for in just over 10 minutes of free time, which is just as illustrative of the point I was trying to make.

jkrems 13y ago

There's always the convenience in having something that is freely advertised. So just "official, legal and safe" is a value. And if the existence (and success) of iTunes, Spotify, Steam, and others are any proof, those values are very well understood by people. People don't only want to have the cheapest thing, most people also don't want to hurt others (and they understand that not paying the content producer hurts them).

cenhyperion 13y ago

I stopped pirating music the day I got spotify premium, if that's worth anything to this discussion.

chadillac 13y ago

I used to have hard drives full of downloaded music... the Grooveshark pretty much killed that... Spotify offered mobile streaming and offline playback. I haven't pirated a song in about 5 or 6 years with the exception of a leaked album (Random Access Memories). NetFlix meets a lot of my movie needs, and ironically reignited my movie pirating when they removed "2001: A Space Odyssey". If you give the consume an easy and convenient means to access your content, most users will consume it via that method. Most people don't "get" torrents, or care to learn how to use them. My Mom still pays $.99/mp3 on iTunes... I can't get her to switch to spotify.

frewsxcv 13y ago
Why is Spotify better than owning your data? What happens to your music once Spotify dies?
- aaron-lebo 13y ago
  You lose access to it, but since you've only been paying $10 a month, it isn't that big a loss. Here's a comparison. You could buy a new album off of Amazon or iTunes every month for $10. These would be DRM free copies that you would own. So for $10 a month you could have 1 album that you own, or you could pay $10 a month and have access to I don't know, 4 million that you are renting? We could also imagine that after a year Spotify goes out of business. You've spent $120 on Spotify and don't have anything in return. In the same amount of time you would have spent $120 on iTunes or another service and own 12 albums. There's a convenience factor here and I think it is obvious that especially in the short term (which is what most people are weighing), it just makes sense to use Spotify or another service, even if you don't actually own your music.
  - _djo_ 13y ago
    Music from Amazon and iTunes is DRM-free these days.
  - __david__ 13y ago
    > These would be DRM copies that you would own. Did you mean "DRM free"?

bertil 13y ago

Well, not exactly: I’m still paying for Netflix. I travel a lot and use VPN for professional reasons, between countries that have a good Netflix offering, those without and those with partial offers. I still pirate most of it because a film I started watching is not available anymore in the country I'm in. It's annoying up to the point that I’ve stopped trying. If I paid by film watched, what you said would make sense; I don't think anyone does anymore.

waps 13y ago
That is piracy. You're not following the conditions of the licence of the copyrighted material, nor your contract with netflix. That's just as much piracy as torrenting everything. Worse: if the purpose of the VPN is explicitly to lie about fulfilling your end of the contract (and you state here that you do use it for that), it could in the worst case be considered fraud. If you enable the VPN outside of the country because you can't watch netflix otherwise, that's definitely fraud (whether or not you actually read the contract with netflix). Also note that neither of these facts need to be proven beyond reasonable doubt, as this is not criminal law, the judge merely needs to believe it to be true.
- bertil 13y ago
  I’m sorry: are you arguing that travelling is piracy? The upside is that we are getting closer to what piracy actually is (taking a boat by means violence) as opposed to the over-dramatised and legally void attempt by the MPAA to call unlicensed use of media something else; the downside is that you fail to notice that the idea of jurisdiction isn’t really nearly as plain as what most “hurr-Heer-Merica!” lawyers and military hawks like to thing.
  - waps 13y ago
    I am arguing that you signed(/agreed) a contract with netflix. Second, in order to actually watch the content you have to licence it. This next bit is only 90% accurate, but will do for this discussion : that licence is another contract that at some point (probably as part of the netflix contract signing) you saw and agreed to follow. The difference between both contracts is the other party. In the first it's netflix, in the second it's the copyright owner. Both contracts stipulate that you won't look at the content outside of a given service area. You then proceed to a) violate the actual provision (contract violation / copyright violation) b) use technical means to fool the other contracting party into thinking you haven't violated the contract (fraud) Not following the terms of a licence, that's exactly what piracy is (gets more complex if there are multiple licences for the same content, but ...). Just like fraud is nothing more or less than deceiving parties you've contracted with into believing you're respecting the contract, with intent to violate said contract.

product50 13y ago

No, that was the whole point of the quote. Many people pirate for convenience reasons rather than financial reasons. Check out this blog post by Fred Wilson on this subject: http://avc.com/2012/01/scarcity-is-a-shitty-business-model/ http://avc.com/2012/01/scarcity-is-a-shitty-business-model/

m_mueller 13y ago

Price doesn't usually give a product value, except for luxury goods. Value is depending on every potential buyer and his usecase. Usually an illegal counterfeit has a vastly lower price and a somewhat lower value to most. If the value is equal or higher, you know you're in trouble.

sytelus 13y ago

This is also upper-middle class geek view. A person who flips burgers at McDonnalds or moves crates at Walmark is much more likely to lean towards saving $8/mo than CEO of Valve or $100/hr tech crowd here. Also in developing countries like India or China people would strongly prefer something free even though it's lower quality and involves more hassles. No one there gives damn to any copyright violation. The general population view there is why to give more money to all those actors and movie makers who are already multi-millionaires.

preemrust 13y ago
I am from India and I gladly pay for Amazon ebooks, Audible audiobooks, iTunes music, movies and apps. I am not even rich - there are many of us from less affluent countries that understand that content creators should get their compensation. More than anything else, I want to reward these companies for making content accessible to me (no physical bookstore will come to a small city and open a branch). I lead a fairly contented life in my small corner of the world and there are probably two things that angers me equally. One is the way affluent countries treat me when I want a visa to visit or transit through them and second is the message on Amazon that a particular ebook is not available to me because of my geographical region. I only resort to searching online for a pirated ebook or converting youtube music to mp3 after I have exhausted all options of finding the content on a legit online store.
mazesc 13y ago
How much do you think you can make from someone who has no money to spend on such content? Fuck them, right?

CrystalCuckoo 13y ago

Piracy doesn't offer automatic updates, cloud saves, (usually) multiplayer, support when the game breaks, and a guarantee of not containing malware. I'm obviously using Steam as an example here, given the context.

the_af 13y ago

When I was younger I pirated almost all games (it helped that in my country there was no concept of legal games when I was a kid, and in fact I didn't even know there was another way of purchasing games). Later, when I knew what piracy vs legal was, it was definitely a convenience thing. Until very recently, legal games were painful and very inconvenient in comparison to pirated games. Pirated games offer many advantages: no DRM is the most frequently mentioned "feature", but also pirated games often were the only way to get the games in their original language (especially for those of us in countries whose primary language is not English). Keep in mind translations are usually awful, and were even worse back then. A bad translation could completely destroy a point & click adventure game! Then came the joys of indie games, Humble Bundle, Steam, GOG, and easily purchasable and downloadable legal games. But you may still wonder: what can they offer against the price of zero from downloaded warez? Well, they offer the huge satisfaction of letting me help the developers. For me, that's very valuable. I won't cheat the devs of their hard-earned money, and I get to play games without DRM in their original language. The best of both worlds, and pirates can't compete with that!

venomsnake 13y ago

Like if you have steam or gog - then installing a game is one click away. No need to find and search torrents for games 10 years old. And everything is patched and working. I have bought kindle dollar books just because I was lazy to find "drm free" version and convert it with calible. But my price for IP crashed way down - 5-10 Euro is the top I am paying for something.

Ihmahr 13y ago

I have netflix, but I will pirate if it is not on there.

DanBC 13y ago

Some people buy the legitimate product and then pirate it too because the product has weird restrictions. Some movies were not released in all regions. The user can import the DVD from a differet region. Some OSs impose restrictions on how many times the SVD drive can change its region. Piratig the content solves that.

72deluxe 13y ago
This is true! I bought XMen Origins: Wolverine and it showed a happy family laughing and in ecstasy watching their legitimate DVD in their well-illuminated room compared to the glum-looking spotty dirty nerd in a poorly-illuminated room (more like a toilet). After this vision of deep joy, I felt satisfaction that I had bought the DVD and would soon be enjoying the DVD in my well illuminated room, laughing and frolicking around with my family at sheer delight at the film. I could barely see the DVD player with the tears of joy smearing my vision, running down my chubby cheeks to plop onto the legitimate plastic box that housed the DVD with a satisfying thud. It didn't play on my DVD player. The copy protection upset it and the DVD player refused to play my legitimate DVD that I had purchased. I could watch the introduction video showing me the deep joy from purchasing the DVD (why do that on the DVD that I had bought???) but not the actual film. It made me angry. But not angry enough to pirate films. I have never pirated a film. If I can't afford the cinema, I'll just wait until it appears on Lovefilm or ordinary TV. I don't need to rush to see a film. It's not like they're going to go out of circulation or will not be in the bargain DVD bin in 3 years time.

serge2k 13y ago

When Steam is just easier. Even Origin is easier. Netflix is easier.

drdaeman 13y ago
> Steam is just easier. Well, I thought so. But for older games Steam is harder and worse than torrenting. Say, old Gothic, Thief, TES, Fallout or, say, VtM: Bloodlines all either explicitly require or just really need some manual patching to properly work on modern OSes and hardware. GOG's nice in this aspect (pre-bundled unofficial patches, emulators and whatever), but it has US/EU-level pricing, which feels quite large in poorer countries like Russia. So, if the game's older than 2-3 years and it's not multiplayer one, it's probably better to set a sail for The Pirate Bay. If it's recent, then Steam's probably easier.

lmm 13y ago

Sure, all other things being equal free is better than expensive. But it's not a big factor. I don't pirate books any more because the kindle experience is better by enough to be worth paying for.

thaumasiotes 13y ago

I like to buy mp3s from Amazon because the metadata is correct. That's not as common as I'd like with peer-to-peer mp3s. In a similar vein, sometimes the pirate provides you with malware. Free malware isn't exactly a bargain over cheap content.

onetwofiveten 13y ago

An official service can improve on a pirate service in terms of reliability, speed, quality, security and ethical considerations. There is some real value in instant access to guaranteed high definition good quality videos that are free from viruses. I suppose an unscrupulous operator could even spend some effort flooding the pirate service with poor quality, corrupted data, so as to make their own service more valuable.

scott_s 13y ago

Because people's time is valuable. Most people will happily pay something for a painless user-experience that gives them what they want with no hassle.

baby 13y ago

I don't think the price is a factor in "convenience". The annoying steps to pay a subscription and to cancel a membership might be though. I subscribed to Netflix and none of those were too much trouble, it's just too easy to go on Netflix to check my favorite TV show episodes so I just stopped illegally acquiring them. Although some seasons are not on netflix so I just go back to piracy when its the case. As for tv shows I don't own, I find it too troublesome to pay two services so I'm not gonna buy a Hulu membership.

sliverstorm 13y ago

The pirate's service comes with risk and sometimes difficulty. Not everyone knows how to torrent, and you risk malware infection and/or "strikes" from your ISP. It doesn't cost any money, but that doesn't mean it has no costs.

TrevorJ 13y ago

Anecdotal evidence, but I know for a fact that a lot of the people I know want to pay for the media. They don't enjoy pirating, and would rather be above board with purchases, but after checking Netflix, Hulu, Apple and Amazon and not being able to find what they were looking for, they torrent as a last resort.

fixedd 13y ago
Minus Apple, this is me. The problem is further exacerbated by the fact that if you go straight to TPB you could have it already downloaded and ready to watch in less time than it takes to try and find a way to pay them. They've set the barrier to entry too high.