Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why I'm a Pirate

ploum.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 527 posts

Re: Why I'm a Pirate

#51

Post by adrianN »

WA wrote: post #35
drewblaisdell wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I started making enough money to buy everything I was consuming, I put an end to my piracy habit for some time. I had Netflix, used Rhapsody (then Spotify), bought season passes on iTunes (I used iPlayer a couple times but being in the US I had to use Tor to get around the region filter to watch a Louis Theroux documentaries, I guess that's "piracy"). I stopped when I realized that while I could afford it, all o…

I was in the movie theatre three weeks ago and paid almost 10€ for the ticket only to be forced to watch - I kid you not - 30 minutes of commercials + another 20 minutes of movie trailers before the movie even started. And when you reserve a ticket, you are forced to be there 30 minutes before the movie begins, otherwise they released the seats. That was a waste of 50+30 minutes of my time, which was more than half o…

You should find a smaller cinema then. In my experience only huge ventures like Cinestar can afford to behave so badly to their customers, whereas independent cinemas have excellent service (and sometimes are even cheaper!).

Re: Why I'm a Pirate

#52

Post by fauigerzigerk »

cturner wrote: post #39
gavinballard wrote: post #16

This is a series of pretty poor arguments. The author seems to be looking for reasons to justify their own piracy and conflates anger at the approach of the "copyright industry" with infringement upon peoples' rights. One of the final lines of the article, in particular, is jarring: "If I'm a pirate, it's not to have some cheap music. It is because the time has come for you to fuck off." It's fine to be angry about t…

> It might make you feel better about it, but it really > doesn't change the fact that you're stealing something > of value Copyright infringement is not stealing. Separately, the person who worked hard to produce whatever you're buying is reaping a fraction of a percentage point of whatever you're spending, and that's only if the distributor hasn't found a way to screw them out of that entirely (or else they've been…

If authors aren't getting their fair share of the proceeds, wouldn't that be a perfect opportunity for a competing media company to enter the market and crush all existing publishers?

Re: Why I'm a Pirate

#53

Post by adaml_623 »

From my point of view the content that the artivle is talking about is the equivalent of candy.

By pirating this content you are the same as a child stealing candy. The analogy is obviously imperfect because a shop owner is directly damaged by the physical theft but my point is that a child does not need sweets. And 'pirates' do not need bland tv shows distracting them from so many other things in this world that are more deserving of time.

'Pirates' just seem to be sadder version of consumers who don't even help the economy. Little black holes taking and giving nothing back.

I feel sadness that these people try to justify their activities and ally themselves with the SOPA protests.

Re: Why I'm a Pirate

#54

Post by frobozz »

patd wrote: post #23
citricsquid wrote: post #8

This is such bullshit, I really wish I could downvote this sort of post. If you don't agree with the methods used by companies to sell their products DON'T then take it anyway, you're showing people WANT the product but aren't willing to pay, so what's the best solution? Make it harder to pirate / try to block pirating. This guy and everyone else who refuses to just not consume media they can't get on terms they and…

I believe ploum still lives in France and in France when you buy a usb sticks, blank CDs and hard drives, you have to pay a "private copy tax" that can be in the tens of euros. So even if he ignores it, he is still paying them money because media companies can't adjust or accept that they're doing it wrong.

I feel that these taxes worsen the problem. If, every time I bought blank media, the record companies got a cut, then you bet I'd not buy any music, but copy it instead. I would see it as a right that I had paid for.

Re: Why I'm a Pirate

#55

Post by [deleted] »

planb wrote: post #20

A lot of his arguments are centered around the music industry, but guess what: You can get a high quality, DRM free song with just one click for about $1 today. This makes his whole blog post sound like an uninformed, whiny rant.

[deleted]

Re: Why I'm a Pirate

#56

Post by wladimir »

tomp wrote: post #47
cturner wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It might make you feel better about it, but it really > doesn't change the fact that you're stealing something > of value Copyright infringement is not stealing. Separately, the person who worked hard to produce whatever you're buying is reaping a fraction of a percentage point of whatever you're spending, and that's only if the distributor hasn't found a way to screw them out of that entirely (or else they've been…

> Copyright infringement is not stealing. I assume there will be counter-arguments/downvotes, so to elaborate on this point using my own arguments: If you steal something from me, I don't have it (as in "steal a car"), so you're putting me in a worse-off position. If you copy/pirate something that is mine (properly copy, with attribution, and not out of context), I am not worse-off (possibly even better-off, as I get…

Exactly.

A prostitute performs a personal service for you. Not paying directly hurts him/her.

When copying information on the other hand, nothing happens, you don't feel it when your information is copied. (yes, you can say it does indirectly through some convoluted story, but that's always debatable)

The future economy will be more about directly personalized experiences and services that cannot be copied, or are much less interesting when copied, instead of trivial fan-outs of information. It is all about scarcity. Better to let that sink in than try to preserve what is already lost, at the cost of freedom.

(edit: why do I say future? It is already the present for many of us)

Re: Why I'm a Pirate

#57

Post by andrewingram »

TamDenholm wrote: post #7

I used to be this guy, i would pirate software, music, tv shows, films, games etc. I did it mainly because it was easy. Innovation has changed my ways, not completely, but mostly. I no longer pirate music, ive paid for spotify for over 2 years now, i get music wherever i want on any device and its great, i wish they had metallica and acdc but theres youtube for that. I no longer pirate software, linux got good at "ju…

Interestingly, I still pirate shows that are available on iPlayer. Simply because the iPlayer experience is inferior to pirating it. Why? Well, let's see...

* iPlayer runs through Flash, it has to because of DRM (the iPhone version gets around this I think). I use a relatively recent Macbook Pro and the playback performance is dreadful. Even on my beasty iMac the HD versions of shows were stuttery at best, so I was forced to use the SD version. Normally I'm quite happy downloading and watching an SD broadcast of a show in full-screen, but in iPlayer the quality of the upscaling is so bad that it's distracting.

* Shows are quite often available on torrent sites before they're available through iPlayer (discounting watching content as it airs), this is especially true of HD content.

* Despite living in London, my internet connection simply isn't reliable enough to handle streaming without occasional buffering, even with SD. So my preferred approach is to download a show rather than stream it. I've generally found that downloading into iPlayer Desktop is slower than using a torrent site. As well as the fact that VLC doesn't eat my CPU like Adobe Air does.

By comparison, I'm a happy customer of Spotify, and I'm more than happy to pay for a video equivalent. I've tried Netflix now that it's out here, but the Silverlight player is as bad as Flash when it comes to CPU usage. The quality of the Netflix streams is pretty poor too, I've yet to manage to get it enable streaming in HD.

Re: Why I'm a Pirate

#58

Post by stefanve »

I like to pay for my stuff, most software I use is either OSS or I payed for it. I have tucked a way in the attic over 500 CD's. I didn't buy any CD in the last 8 years or so. I used to download all the music I liked (but I still go to concerts). Than emusic came along and I used that, until lots of labels stopped using it and it became more expensive. Now I'm a happy Spotify user. So I didn't download music in the last 4 years or so. The only thing that is left is movies and TV-series I download a lot (and still go to the movies). I tried Jaman but there is not allot of quality content (I did get 3 credits free but never used it since movies I liked where not available in my country).

I would pay 50~100 euro per month for a all you can eat package providing that episodes are available with in a week of first broadcast (not in my country but global) and movies are available with in a month after showing in the theater. I asked around (yes very scientific) and most people would to that to.

So I have this money to give to the industry (max 1200 euro per year) but there is no service to give the money to. You could say go rend a movie (if you still can find such a place) but I refuse to pay 5 euro for a sloppy movie (the best movies I see in the theater any ways). You could say buy the movie but I'm not willing to pay 20 euro for a single Blu-ray. If tomorrow I could not download movies and TV-series any more I still wouldn't do that). In almost every other industry products follow demand but apparently the entertainment industry thinks they are above basic free market economics.

Re: Why I'm a Pirate

#59

Post by JumpCrisscross »

rythie wrote: post #38

"I launch a search and I click. In less than 10 minutes, I've a full movie on my disk. In 20, I've the complete discography of an artist." When I hear about stuff like this, along with people's multi-terabyte arrays of content, I wonder if they actually listen/watch much of it. Movie/Record companies are worrying that this all got "stolen" but if it was never viewed was it actually "stolen"?

That's interesting - if I pirate a song but never hear it, did I violate the gestalt of IP protection?

Almost purely philosophical as answering in the negative would inherently cripple the enforceability of copyright laws. But interesting nevertheless given the party line is the IP grants a purchaser a licence to consume the content.

Re: Why I'm a Pirate

#60

Post by tomp »

tjogin wrote: post #18
rmc wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They might say "you could never get every movie/album/piece of software in one place like that! It would be an organizational nightmare!" Given no other option, however, they will be forced to innovate. Heheh, and yet The Pirate Bay (and lots of others), have a single site with lots of things. It might be a nightmare, but not only can it exist, but it does exist. I am always amazed that the pirate/P2P swarm essential…

The problem of music piracy is mostly solved, largely because of iPod/iTunes and Spotify and others. And it was, indeed, solved by making the legal services as good or better as the illegal ones. Sure there are some music piracy left, but only a fraction of the piracy during the Napster heydays. The problem that does persist (if it's a problem at all) is that the perceived value of recorded music has dropped, other f…

> The problem of music piracy is mostly solved, largely because of iPod/iTunes and Spotify and others.

You wish! Maybe for the US, UK and Germany, but I live in Slovenia, an EU, very highly developed (in terms of internet/mobile coverage and bandwidth) country, but since there's only 2 million of us, no one bothers to try to sell us things.

Thank god I have friends in the UK that can buy music for me. However, after reading this post, I think I won't buy it any more, until it becomes user friendly.

Post reply on HN