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

Not at all. I do the same thing, and the key is to cancel the subscription immediately upon signing up. You keep the one month you've already paid for, and don't need to worry about recurring cost.

Nowadays it's fairly automated

I don't typically condone piracy because I think it's important to compensate writers/actors/artists, but I do feel angry about the state of things. Physical media is looking relatively good in many cases. Discs are a hassle but at least then you know what you have after a glance at the shelf; there have been several times I bought something a la cart on Amazon / Apple / Vudu and only later realized it was actually available on a streaming service I was subbed to. Even if I'm willing to pay up (and we usually keep 2-3 subs at a time), the UX of checking each platform to see if something is available is absurd.

There's also the issue of content just randomly disappearing off streaming services for no good reason. Even big-budget, big-name shows like Westworld have now fallen prey to this. Big parts of our culture can just get thrown in the bin if some MBA decides it's what's needed to squeeze a few more pennies out of their bottom line? To me, that is unacceptable. The cultural preservation angle is the best thing about piracy IMO.

Even with all the madness, some content doesn't seem available anywhere for any price. I recently tried to track down The Abyss (1989), a scifi classic by James Cameron. It's currently not on any digital platform and the physical discs appear to be out of print. The only way to watch this movie seems to be piracy or buying a second-hand disc on eBay.

I've started buying from ebooks.com exclusively, because they tell me it's DRM-free EPUB and PDF.

I end up paying a big premium in practice over Kindle DRM and discounted paperbacks, but I'm doing my part to convince publishers to offer DRM-free.

I want to be back to piracy. Not specifically for money, but for quality subtitles :

I want translations that are close to the original content, not an adaptation that nearly destroys its meaning.

Until a decade ago, Japanese right owners were hardly interested in broadcasting content in my area. Fansub teams would provide subs for content as long as it wasn't licensed. (it was in order to make it available, but most of them didn't want to compete with companies who would actually develop the content). This resulted in a range of subs, each with a different trades-off between pure translations and adaptation. If you got a subtitle from a team that offered a close translation, you had much more meaning, but you had to understand a bit of what was going on.

We also had the opportunity to make the shows a bit of our own by discussing about its meaning and by reflecting on it, in order to write the subtitles. The we could compare subtitles and what each team understood.

Now most commercial services destroy that meaning. They take the show away : you're just a consumer/viewer without a say (don't forget to purchase a shirt to make the show your own) They adapt it with a lot of approximations, and remove the quirks and rudeness to make it ok for the most viewers. (yes, shonen characters are rude, you can ride a mamachari and it's not just a bicycle on which you're an angry cyclist, -kun / -chan / -dono have a meaning, ...)

I no longer enjoy to watch anime with commercial services, that's just bland. They just want to do a western show with a Japanese show. And since I used to be in a fansub team with the 'as long as it wasn't licensed' clause, I and don't approve of piracy, so I just no longer watch this content as much as I could. (now US shows like South Parks feel more mature)

I find it a shame that governments went all over the place to find dichotomies to break down public services on behalf of free competition (operating train isn't maintaining rails, selling power isn't maintaining lines and power plants,...), but that you can't just purchase a license for movie and its subtitles separately.