Tell HN: I probably spend more on piracy than if I just paid for content

None of the streaming services allow you to watch purchased content at HD quality with Linux, and DRM is evil, so I don't use them. I don't really watch TV so it's not the end of the world for me, but they shouldn't be surprised at all that there's rampant piracy when you take the most high-skilled tech people and force them to pirate content to be able to watch it at all. It's ironic to me that we caved and let them put dangerous EME DRM crap (looking directly at you, W3C) in browsers and they still just locked out Linux users anyways. They've learned absolutely nothing from the DeCSS days, and the results are predictable: https://torrentfreak.com/google-takes-down-repositories-that...

RE the morality of it, as of right now, piracy is just a political act of resistance against this broken system to me. It's not about the cost, it's about not enabling this bad behavior to continue. I keep repeating the same thing over and over: as long as your eyeballs are made of flesh, the DRM protections will never stop piracy. Their only logical objective is violence: to throw my heroes in cages for doing things like legitimate security research, porting software to linux, etc.. and I don't want to support that (but again, I don't really watch TV so it's not much of a conundrum for me, but my condolences if "Is It Cake?" is something someone can't live without).

Here in Germany, it is almost impossible to pirate for free. If you download shows via BitTorrent you almost immediately get a fine ("Abmahnung"). There are some illegal streaming sites, but quality and reliability is poor in my experience.

But you can get a subscription to a VPN for about the same price as a Netflix subscription (~10€/month), that will allow you to torrent without worring about getting caught. Strangely, they manage to have an exit node in Frankfurt, and take credit card, although it is clear that they are frequently used for pirating. Alternatively, for a similar price you can get a premium "sharehoster" account, and then download all the shows using JDownloader.

I am firmly convinced that this is at least tolerated, if not even condoned by the film industry. The goal is to make pirating a bit inconvenient, and about as expensive as legal streaming. It is like a pressure valve. If it weren't for this "good enough" system, people would be motivated to build a P2P "Pirates' Netflix" (maybe with a friend-of-a-friend architecture, like RetroShare, where the lawers cannot get your IP). And that would really be a problem for the IP holders.

> Jokes aside, would you consider deleting your entire collection and then also cancel subscriptions and possibly give away or sell any tech equipment you do not use for work? And then find something else to do with the newly-freed time? Can you do it for 6 or 12 months? If not, why not? Try to figure out why you are doing it to begin with.

Anecdotally, I have a mild data hoarding hobby and no streaming subscriptions, and had my tech setup offline for about 6 months after moving to a new house. Spent most of the free time running ethernet, replacing dozens of recessed lights, replacing all the lights switches, assembling furniture, painting, picking up nails and rocks that reno guys left all over the lawn, and various other house things.

I bought a TV for black friday, wall-mounted it, and haven't even gotten around to plugging it in. (Or finding a piece of furniture from which to use it.) I'm looking forward to that; watching TV and playing video games is really more fun than patching drywall.

If I can buy a high quality digital file without DRM, built in ads, and other extra garbage, at a reasonable price, I happily pay for it. If I can't, I download it elsewhere. Music industry figured this out decades ago, I'm not sure why other media hasn't.

I used to be mostly happy with streaming services, I still have most of the big ones, but selection and quality is very hit or miss, I sometimes go over a month without using any of them. And "no ads" tiers have become a lie. Showing me a trailer for anything before the thing I chose to watch, even if it's for a show on the same service, is an ad. Stop it, you have a whole app/website to shove shit in my face, once I make a selection, leave me the fuck alone.

If you stop pirating you would still have 30TB of disk space. you might not need it but you would still have it. Anyway, it would be much easier to download stuff on demand than to hoard the entire movie archive on your disks

An idle computer (just disk IO) shouldn't cost 45$ a month in electricity unless your prices are much much higher then the average

you don't a 40$ subscription to pirate. just buy an invite to a couple of private trackers and you are done