[pirate-Loo6uoDu]

I'm not complaining about the costs associated with this. I'm living well within my means. If I was concerned about the money I could probably spend more of my time to find the content on sketchy streaming sites like putlocker.

I'm not sure why so many of the replies in this article are trying to interpret my post as some kind of call for help.

My point was that piracy is a service problem.

[Mo3]

Again.. You are obviously free to do whatever you want, but hoarding data and then associating the source of the data with the cost of your data hoarding is totally illogical.

Your personal expenses for hoarding data, or the practice of hoarding data, have nil correlation to piracy itself.

To add to this at this point,

> Streaming services still have significant service problems that need to be addressed.

This connection is irrational as well - the name "streaming services" already implies that content is being streamed for viewing and not downloaded for storage.

If you are under a different assumption, or concerning other issues with streaming services, yes, piracy might be a service problem, but on the other hand, there are options available to actually buy and download content that you can also store.

Really, these associations you are seeing are incredibly irrational and this might be a contributing factor to people assuming this would be a call for help. I do not assume it is, data hoarding is not necessarily a problem in itself, but that doesn't make your invalid associations any more valid.

[pirate-Loo6uoDu]

>Your personal expenses for hoarding data have nil correlation to piracy itself.

Yes, that's true. My point was that I'm already spending a lot of money to pirate, and that I would be spending that money to support the creators if something like steam existed. Not once did I say or even imply I was unhappy with that situation, not once did I imply that you needed to spend that kind of money in order to pirate.

I simply said that I spend a lot of money on piracy, and that there's a significant service problem with streaming services. The implication one could draw from that is that if the service problems were improved I'd be giving the money to the creators, instead of spending it on hard drives.

Instead some people seem to think this is some kind of an attack on piracy as being too expensive. Which is a reasonable mistake to make under the circumstances, if I could edit the post to clarify I would. I'd just appreciate it if you weren't so... aggressively misunderstanding. The reality is that I do a lot of other data-archival stuff on that server as well, and have made no claims about piracy being expensive.

> This connection is irrational as well - the name "streaming services" already implies that content is being streamed for viewing and not downloaded for storage.

Since you seem to care about rationality, try giving this a read: https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/A_Human%27s_Guide_to_Words

[Mo3]

> My point was that I'm already spending a lot of money to pirate

… okay then. Let’s leave it at that.

[ryandrake]

> This connection is irrational as well - the name "streaming services" already implies that content is being streamed for viewing and not downloaded for storage.

I remember all the way back to the late 90s, when we were already ridiculing the people who thought "streaming" was some radical new concept that was different/better than downloading. I remember a VC or some other exec hotshot coming to visit a startup I was involved in, insisting he was interested in investing in media streaming, not media downloading. Everyone on the eng team just held their chuckles until he left. There's really no technical difference between streaming and downloading, besides that streaming has an extra deletion step. It's all just transferring bits from one computer to another. "Streaming" is just downloading dressed up in a business suit.