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

Their products are also strictly inferior to simply downloading movie files.

I'm older now so am not pirating myself like I used to, but I fight each and every day to try and get momentum going for a Constitutional Amendment in the USA to abolish (c)opywrong and patents laws once and for all: https://breckyunits.com/the-intellectual-freedom-amendment.h...

Before I proceed, I have to say that in my personal opinion piracy makes sense when it comes to media, as in music, movies, shows. I feel like application piracy is a different thing. Mainly because with an application you use it a lot, while media, you own a CD, you can listen to it, but it won't be daily for years (like Windows for example). I'm also against book piracy, with the exception of university books because it's predatory.

If I did pirate stuff it would for the exact same reasons why I would have had a pirate FTP server in the 90s.

In the 90s it was because you had to pay multiple fees (or had to buy multiple CDs etc) to get access to media. If you lacked the money, you had no access. As a poor college student, it made sense to use piracy bridged that gap financially.

In the mid 2000s you basically had to use Netflix and Pandora/Spotify/Internet Radio, I have to pay a few fees, and have access, or watch small advertisements and get it for free. At that point piracy would be doing more work to get the same result.

Nowadays you have multiple services, they each have tiny niches which is exactly how Cable TV works in the States, and why piracy made sense in the 90s to begin with. If you like 4 TV shows, there are probably in 4 different streaming apps you need to use. All with their own fees. To make things worse services like Hulu, and others are still going to have advertisements. Essentially you are paying the services to watch a show, and they make money a second time by forcing advertisements down your throat.

That's BS. Maybe I just don't like spending money.

There is another problem about ownership. Anything in the cloud, you don't own, even if you paid for it. $4.99 to get this movie online annoys me. I have no control of it. I can't resell it. Sometimes it's hard to even tell what you own. I rather have it in my hard drive, then I can do what I want to it.

Ultimately though, piracy is about greed and money, both for the pirate and the services that get affected. In the 90s it was about freedom of access. That's not as much an issue case anymore.

I want to watch the latest of , which service is it on? Prime? Netflix? Great. Disney? OK, that has a lot of content we enjoy too.

But there's also Stan, Binge (or NowTV in the UK) ... and wtf? Apple tv? Not really there yet IMHO though the dinosaur thing was good. AMC or Paramount? Now you're just taking the piss. One or two services is fine, but what seems to be happening is the old-school distributors are trying to get in on the game (NowTV/Binge etc) and the production networks are trying to regain access to streaming bucks by pulling a few 'anchor' shows off the other services and putting them on their otherwise execrable offering.

I don't know what the answer is. But I do know I'm already using a VPN to log into the same services in different countries to try and watch stuff, and taking a lot of 'free trials' that I then cancel when I've watched the thing I want.

Piracy has got to be easier! And when it is, it thrives. When paying is easier (Spotify/Deezer/Whatever) then that wins.