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by matthewhammond 1630 days ago
The problem is that the definition of 'unavailable' or 'unviable' can quickly expand to include more or less anything. Have to wait a week for the film to be available in your area? It's not available on your chosen streaming service? The file costs a dollar more than you want to pay or doesn't come with the full set of download rights you want? People use all of these and more as excuses for pirating. If a programme owner wants to charge $10 a month to view their one show that's their right, and audiences have a wide range of free or cheaper alternatives to choose from if they don't want to pay it.

Unsurprisingly, HN being full of people who've got rich off Web 2.0 tech that profits from the spread of piracy and its resulting products (ultra cheap streaming at the expense of artists and creators), plus enjoyed tons of cheap/free digital goods and entertainment over the years, has a hive mind that considers all this perfectly ok

1 comments

A film is just a bag of bytes. Consider we live in an age where:

- 20+MBit connections are the norm in the Western world

- there are no border checks or national firewalls to impede the flow of information worldwide (barring tyrannical regimes)

- the cost of making a copy and sending it out to anywhere around the world approximately = free

- we've had 20+ years to work on the service problem of piracy, to reach an acceptable equilibrium

It seems outrageous that we have fractured streaming services, no true digital ownership (even to match what we had for decades with VHS and optical discs), that restricting download rights is even a thing (I got my bag of bytes and paid for it, what is it to you what program or hardware I use to play it?), or that we have to wait at all for a film to be released in all geographies (I don't care that I'm in the Philippines - I already speak English and can't be bothered to wait for the official dubbing) if the bytes can come streaming down the pipe in less than a second.

I'm not entitled. I do have high expectations because we live in the goddamn future and copyright cartels are LARPing a world of digital cavemen. Like hell I'm gonna be content with that.

Call me um nitpicking, but files under CC (creative commons) is: 'no true digital ownership' ? No! [smashes-forehead] ^^

hint: i thought there was a finer drawn li...

> REM://youtube.com/watch?v=WpU7Hxf8iBw