Ask HN: How many of you are open to Piracy again?

all in again, i left alternative methods for getting my media years ago. but now im fed up with the poor user experience of the multiple services with synthetic border blockades, so i have set up a signal group shared for a group of friends, it has a bot and you can ask him for a movie or series and the bots download it from private trackers with a VPN and it shares an streaming url in the same group or privately with subtitles and everything. all the people share the cost of the infrastructure, which is like 50 USD /month. also it has a nice unexpected social aspect.

> And of course, taking it to the extreme, people simply will stop creating works. Or, some folks may not be able to afford to create works.

Being broke has never prevented artists from making great art. In fact, historically and today, the majority of artists have never been fairly compensated for their work, even with insane copyright laws. I do believe that artists should be correctly compensated for their work if they wish it, like any other work, but copyright laws (even if introduced as a way to protect artists) have been transformed into something that doesn't protect the artists, but the copyright holders (which are most of the time record labels and big companies).

Here is the point of view from musical artists:

You have two major scenarios: - you are a musician which does not produce original music. Then you make your money with gig playing mostly (weddings, venues, orchestras, ...). Copyright law is not siding with these musicians, and these musicians don't care about piracy. - you are a composer which produces original music. Here again, copyright law doesn't help, artists are trapped to distribute their music through either record labels or popular streaming services which don't care about their artists (spotify will pay artists 0.004$ per stream).

Often, musicians will be doing both (composing and playing at gigs). But most of the money to be made is in gigs, and maybe a fan base that will buy your CDs and come to your concerts. Distributing your music on popular streaming services is just a way to grow your own fan base, not to make money. So piracy can even help here by making the music even more accessible.

What I want to say is that from the point of view of musicians, copyright law doesn't help. Sometimes it even works against you: if you are a classical musician and putting some public domain music (that you played yourself) on youtube, you will be inevitably copystriked by some random record label that doesn't give a shit about you and there is nothing you can do. Copyright law also prevents musicians to rearrange popular music, to make transformative art unless you pay some fees. You can't play music from somebody even if the author has been dead for 50 years. And these fees won't probably go to the other musician you are arranging from, but to the copyright holder (which will be a record label or big company).

When do you return Amazon stuff? I have returned online clothes purchases from other stores but I'm pretty sure I've never returned anything I bought from Amazon. Basically because I buy "things" from it, and I end up doing so much research before buying that I'm always happy with the purchase.

For years I've been saying the era of every company thinking they can get $20 per month from everyone has to come to an end in some form. There's a real limit to how many $20/month payments people can or are willing to make. At some point budgetary limits come into play. There's also payment exhaustion (where you start feeling like you are bleeding money every month and ask yourself "Is it really worth it?".

This isn't true just for streaming services. Software is another good example. MS Office, CAD and EDA tools, online tools/SaaS, email, etc.

My simple example is what used to be called the Adobe Creative Suite. We used to buy full suites for everyone who needed it in the company and update them with every release. That worked well until CS6, the last time we sent money to Adobe. The subscription-only approach put an end to that. While we still use CS6 (we own a bunch of licenses), this has caused us to look into alternatives. One remarkable example of this is GIMP. It's a fantastic tool. It has as much, if not more, depth as Photoshop. It does everything we need to do and more (Python scripting is incredibly useful). And so, by pushing subscriptions, Adobe pretty much lost a loyal customer forever.

The business equation is, at the core, simple. You have inputs and outputs. If you want to remain viable and grow you have to increase one and decrease the other. Subscriptions force you to bleed money every month just to be able to keep working. In many cases you don't have the option to take a break. Imagine 2020, 2021 pandemic timeline when, for lots of companies, the music stopped (the inputs).

There are companies like JetBrains who get it. If you take a break you are entitled to use the product without updates (I think it reverts to the last full years' version. That's acceptable. If I remember correctly, with products like Office 360 and Fusion 360, you stop paying and you are done until you send more money. That simply isn't acceptable. I think of files and projects I have dating back to early 1980's AutoCAD and other tools.

Another example is Altium Designer. Altium has been trying really hard to shove people into a cloud-based paradigm. They spent a tremendous amount of time and money adding a whole cloud layer to their product. The strategy was to try to sell the company. AutoDesk almost bought them. The problem, in my opinion, was that they devoted so much time and effort to the cloud paradigm that they caused serious damage to the product. Every time they touched it they introduced ten new bugs. It got to the point where you almost could not trust the product. We certainly got there. After over twenty years of supporting this company with multiple licenses and annual maintenance payments, we decided to pull the plug. Last year we begun a transition to KiCAD and could not be happier. We are also happy to support the effort financially by sending a portion of what was our annual maintenance fees to the KiCAD foundation. This is very similar to what happened with Photoshop and GIMP.

That said, I do understand companies liking the subscription model. You get to shift into a consistent revenue stream and can focus on upgrading software over time. I get it. The issues is that I just don't think this is the best model for the customer. If you are going to constantly demand money there need to be non-trivial benefits to someone spending that money. Objectively speaking, there are no major benefits between Excel 2016 and whatever you get with an Office 360 subscription. Sure, a few things here and there and some collaboration benefits. Guess what, the world ran just fine before all of that.

I’m now using virtual disposable card for any subscription to a service I'm not sure to use more than one month. If I forget it that means I don't use it and the subscription will end itself.

If I somehow still need it after the first month, I usually get a email reminder or a message about payment processing failure and I can fix that with a non-disposable card.