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

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

#581

Post by emeril »

Arainach wrote: post #464
Semaphor wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My experience is that the learning curve for piracy has increased quite a bit. IIUC you need some private tracker to reliably source things, something that takes time and connections most people don't have. Only if you want rare and older stuff (and even then, only sometimes). Anything mainstream, a public tracker is more than enough.

Are content owner letters/lawsuits still a thing? Piracy was cool(tm) when I was a broke high school student, but now that I have assets worth being sued over (and now that if my ISP cut me off I couldn't just move to a different apartment at a moment's notice) I'll just pay for the Bluray or for a month of Hulu or whatever, it's far simpler. I have a significant legitimate media library (>1TB), I have the Plex/Kodi…

you just need to pay a few dollars for a foreign seedbox that is expressly designed for this purpose

you can then just set the seedbox as a source in kodi, I can even add torrents while sitting on my couch on my phone with the mobile interface

I have shared accounts to a variety of streaming services that I pay for but I largely prefer using kodi as it's a much more pleasant experience

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

#582

Post by 6gvONxR4sf7o »

IIsi50MHz wrote: post #579
6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rentals and a la cart are pretty much always more convenient these days. At my adult income level, $3 for a movie that's not on the services I'm subscribed to hits a reasonable spot in terms of convenience vs price. Anyone who ignores the a la cart option to justify "piracy is just convenience" isn't being honest with themselves.

For some people I know, myself included, that would be ~$84USD/mo., if all taken a la cart. This whole thread has me semi-considering the flag, as an alternative to starting umpteen more subscriptions.

You don’t have to to it all a la cart. Subscribe to one or two, and then supplement with a la cart.

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

#583

Post by emeril »

palata wrote: post #569
lrvick wrote: post #556

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can buy seedboxes and VPNs with cash-purchased bitcoin.

Right. But if you only buy a seedbox and connect to it from your home IP, then it does not matter that you paid with bitcoins, right? If you connect to it through a VPN, then that's a second level of indirection, but still you must trust the VPN. Because even if you paid with bitcoins, the VPN knows your home IP and it knows that you connect to a seedbox.

I've been using a seedbox for years

I think the risk of not using a vpn to access it is pretty much zero as these seedboxes are deliberately designed to essentially eliminate this issue (i.e., business in one country, hardware is another, likely minimal logs)

I've never heard of anyone getting in trouble using a seedbox - likely because there's enough much lower hanging fruit to prosecute

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

#584

Post by lrvick »

palata wrote: post #569
lrvick wrote: post #556

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can buy seedboxes and VPNs with cash-purchased bitcoin.

Right. But if you only buy a seedbox and connect to it from your home IP, then it does not matter that you paid with bitcoins, right? If you connect to it through a VPN, then that's a second level of indirection, but still you must trust the VPN. Because even if you paid with bitcoins, the VPN knows your home IP and it knows that you connect to a seedbox.

A VPN service would have no way of knowing the box you are connecting to is a seed box. Particularly if you connect over a different IP than you seed from.

Piracy is a local tort at worst, and not a crime. Certainly not something that can compel mandatory IP disclosure from multiple foreign entities at the same time for a US copyright claimant targeting an individual.

Even then if access to said seedbox is shared with multiple people they would need to prove who actually executed the choice to seed which files. Now you need a court order to get the FBI to travel to another country to use a hotplug device to seize the entire machine with memory in tact and do forensics.

If you do not do any logging then only recent files could be claimed if at all.

That much work to prosecute someone over their two most recently downloaded movies at worst? Never going to happen, and it never has.

There are exactly 0 cases of foreign seedboxes being seized over copyright claims.

I am not a lawyer and do not currently operate any seedboxes so take this as you choose.

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

#585

Post by ergocoder »

xen2xen1 wrote: post #493
hocuspocus wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In this day of age, piracy has increased risk with malware that mines bitcoin or locks your disk for ransom, so the risk is much higher and effectively lowers the benefit. I don't think that's true at all, rather the opposite in fact. Piracy feels much safer now than it was 20 years ago.

Limewire and Kazaa weren't safe?

They were relatively safe.

In 2000, bad actors couldn't do much with your computer. They could get your computer infected with virus for fun, but that was about it.

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

#587

Post by CubsFan1060 »

sowbug wrote: post #508
CubsFan1060 wrote: post #19

As I've gotten older, I think my morals have gotten more defined. I no longer think that piracy is acceptable. Someone spends time and money to produce something, and I think they get the right to sell it however they like. My choice, of course, is to pay for the content, or just not to consume it. I don't believe I have an inherent right to consume any content I want for free. The counter argument is usually that a…

I'm curious whether you use an ad blocker. The same reasoning could apply: the website has posted a price (some of your time, attention, and compute resources), and the choice is whether to pay the price or not engage in the transaction.

I do use an ad blocker, but more as an 'early warning system'. I generally use it less as a way to get around ads, and more as a way to understand how many there are, and avoid those sites.

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

#588

Post by shrimp_emoji »

uconnectlol wrote: post #586

[flagged]

Value extraction gone too far : p

Why make it good, when it's more profitable for it to be addictive?

Why let you buy stuff, when it's more profitable to let you rent it?

People complain about the tedious anarchy of streaming services now, but even the scenario where you have one, huge hegemon like Netflix is fundamentally a rip-off: you're paying indefinitely to lease some content, that you can only consume in a certain way with connectivity, with compression artifacts. That may be worth it to you (the discoverability you otherwise wouldn't want to research, the storage hardware you're too lazy to set up), but, the economics are still a rip-off on paper.

You can just buy the content, but in a super inconvenient way: you can't buy DRM-free digital episode files like you can with music thanks to the MPAA's diligent lobbying. (Funnily, the only music I pirate is discographies, since those are the things that are hard to buy on Amazon while torrents offer them in a single bundle. And the specified bitrate is a nice, but for me unnecessary, bonus. For individual songs or albums, I buy them.) I pirate all shows or movies. I didn't even know Netflix is capped to 720p on Linux without going through hoops for the last 3 years since I haven't been using Netflix for at least that long.

And then you have more bullshit that platforms like Netflix or YouTube spring on you (hey, new UI to guide your consumption in a way beneficial to us!).

My relationship with web content now resembles a bank heist: get in, get the stuff, and get out -- ASAP. The less time spent interacting with the rent-seeking platform the content is being served on, the better.

>I still remember that day when I downloaded a highly acclaimed AAA video game to discover it has web shit in the menu, and accordingly the entire UI would freeze when waiting for a response from the server.

That wasn't Doom Eternal, was it? ;D https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33914579

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

#589

Post by uconnectlol »

shrimp_emoji wrote: post #588
uconnectlol wrote: post #586

[flagged]

Value extraction gone too far : p Why make it good, when it's more profitable for it to be addictive? Why let you buy stuff, when it's more profitable to let you rent it? People complain about the tedious anarchy of streaming services now, but even the scenario where you have one, huge hegemon like Netflix is fundamentally a rip-off: you're paying indefinitely to lease some content, that you can only consume in a cer…

Netflix is a generic spam word like Fortnite or Monster to me and I have no idea what it looks like.

> My relationship with web content now resembles a bank heist: get in, get the stuff, and get out -- ASAP.

Correct. Some blockchains are working to automate this. For better or worse (blockchain devs are just basically glorified webdevs so it will probably suck lol).

I just don't get why something like Freenet has not become mainstream 15 years ago and everything in the media acquisition process could then be fully automated and free of legal consequences. Like, that one guy who has that obscure album I want can just host it himself anonymously forever and more likely do it because he really wants people to find out about it. Also this whole thing where I have to hear people complain about deplatforming every day would not exist.

I think the game was Red Alert 3. Don't even get me started with games where you have to make accounts (or that need an account even despite being steam only (or that need to link both of those accounts with some shaky wizard)).

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