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

I switched to purchasing one of the first among my peers, for any type of service. But I will pirate stuff which is artificially restricted for me by the location and won't feel any remorse. Regional locks should have died decade ago. As for the service fragmentation - I've picked two of each - Netflix+Prime Video, Steam+GOG, Spotify+YT, so far I simply don't have more free time to watch or play anything more. My wait lists are rather long even on these few services :) . If other companies try to create artificial scarcity by pulling content to their new silos, well, it's their loss. They won't get my money that way.

Games: I rarely use it as demo if I’m not sure about a game. Helped me avoid CP77 ;)

Music: I gave up on my RIAA&Co protest and nowadays just buy the albums, usually on bandcamp. Not using streaming services.

TV: Depends a lot on availability. Sometimes things are not available in English with English subs (I’m in Germany), sometimes not available at all. Don’t have much patience for either issue. Otherwise, I always have Prime and often Netflix.

Movies: I don’t watch movies.

About Amazon Prime, they are finally raising the prices in Germany, from 70€/year to 90€ a year. But besides the streaming being decent, the shipping is a nice bonus (and here Amazon has the best prices quite often, especially if shipping is free), and there’s also Twitch Prime, canceling Prime would mean I’d subscribe to one more channel, which would be almost 50€ a year anyway…

I don't know what all these companies were thinking when they started splitting up content into different services like this. Piracy only really arises when there's a service problem, and right now that's the case.

Here in CZ, where pirating has long tradition, mainly because it's legal to download movies and copyrighted files for own use. Or at least it's in gray area now because of push from EU but still nobody is willing to prosecute it. (Uploading/uploaders are prosecuted normally, since it's illegal to upload)

Many people is buying games from Steam, because it's convenient. Not gonna mention we have same prices like US or even bigger, because it's in EUR, yet we have 4x smaller median salaries. And still we buy games from Steam.

Netflix was popular here too, but recently (me included) everybody is switching back to fileshares and torrents. It's unbearable to pay for multiple streaming services and that's just foreign movies, if you want our local movies, there are different streaming services for it.

Thanks but no thanks.

I wish I had the discipline to manage things that way.