[mojo74]

This is the first year I have cancelled all my subs. Used to be a TPB regular around the time it took off. Years later I tried to go legit and have had subs with all the major streamers (netflix, disney, amazon etc) But the way you get squeezed year on year for what was standard before e.g. 4K or no ads to be gradually offered worse terms and degraded output quality just bites after a while. I can't justify spending €20-30 per month on what isn't the best quality available for the content on offer.

[ravenstine]

Plus I've found "legit" to be a moving goal post. One day a show is on one platform, the next it's on another, or it becomes unavailable except for [insert random foreign country here]. Even HD is a ripoff sometimes when half the episode comes in all compressed looking. They'll blame my bandwidth except I have no problem streaming an episode without adaptive compression over Bittorrent.

People can say what they want about piracy, but it continues to be what I consider a necessity against culturally important media being further tainted by rent seekers looking to make another buck in any way they can.

[lobf]

Yeah, I was a pirate as a kid. I said “give me a place where I can pay to have legal access to everything and I will.”

Then Netflix came along and introduced streaming. I was happy. It began to fragment a bit, I could live with that.

Now it’s 10 different platforms with rotating content, I need a 3rd party website to know where and when to watch a particular thing, it’s a mess.

Not only that, unlike with cable they make it difficult to record the content they’re serving me so I can watch later myself.

I am now a pirate again.

[jonnylynch1974]

I've went through the exact same cycle. Also, a year ago I thought I'd gift my elderly dad a Netflix subscription for a year. Just because it was easy for him to use on the TV. When I seen the price and checked the TV shows and movies on it I realised how much stuff was NOT on it! Anyway - I bought a NAS instead and start running a plex server. Everyone's a winner!

[gk--]

i feel like this is an important piece. even if you want to do the "right thing", is it really supporting these platforms that horse-trade content in huge multi-billion dollar deals just so they can increase their userbase with the intent to jam more ads down their throat? have any of these platforms _improved_ the experience for the average creator? they're poison, it almost makes it feel more righteous to steal.

[rkomorn]

You can stop doing the right thing without doing the wrong thing.

[WarOnPrivacy]

> Used to be a TPB regular around the time it took off. Years later I tried to go legit

I still pay for subs but never utilize them because piracy is a superior experience.

[justaman123]

Yeah all the streaming services have gotten so bad and they are adding ads and they are lowering quality and they are getting too expensive. Arghgg I say

[threethirtytwo]

I mean in the end this is still theft. Someone spent time and effort working on this. And you took a shit on that effort because it was inconvenient not to. Like the creators of said content you stole would not approve of what you did.

I totally get it. I'm a thief as well. But I guess the difference is, I don't need to rationalize everything into some sort of twisted sense justice. I steal because I don't care what the creator thinks.

[2muchcoffeeman]

I truly feel old when we are rehashing the same thing that happened when TPB, Limewire etc were taking off.

Down to the arguments being made why this is “theft”. I also can’t believe that the arguments by the general pop have shifted to support multi billion dollar companies and their narrative.

[marysol5]

Just because people do buy the product the legitimate way, and provide the creators with revenue, doesn't negate that /you/ are committing a theft.

A loss of a sale, is still a loss of a sale. It's vastly different to /not/ selling something.

[account42]

There is nothing to negate because there was never a theft in the first place. Consult the laws of your country before making wild assertions and ask a lawyer if you cannot understand them yourself.

[threethirtytwo]

It’s like saying the death penalty isn’t murder because the law says it’s not.

I guess in your mind hitler isn’t a mass murderer because what he was doing was technically legal under his regime. To each their own if that’s how you want to logically frame your moral logic.

Personally imo, if I create something and that something is MY work of art and what I put my own blood sweat and tears into, and I want it to be inconvenient to watch because that’s my prerogative, that doesn’t give you the fucking right to watch it. I don’t want someone like you watching it.

[2muchcoffeeman]

Wow. Bringing up murder and hitler when talking about piracy. Some parts of the internet are truly eternal.

None of this is new. None of your ideas are unique. Stop attempting to draw moral equivalency to theft or anything else.

Back in the glory days of piracy, profits from entertainment kept going up? You know why? Those pirates were almost certainly not going to pay in the first place. No one lost money. It was university students, high schoolers, plain old poor people that were pirating.

Making it hard to watch your movie didn’t raise revenue, we all just did something else. Because we had no money.

[futune]

Seems like the opposite to me. We don't like theft because the victim loses something. If stealing a car spawned a new car for you while the "victim" kept his, would it be a problem? So I don't really get the murder analogy. It's more like if the government had defined some act as murder even though nobody died.

[hulitu]

> I mean in the end this is still theft.

Claiming you have 4k resolution when you upscale (damn, those DS9 episodes looked really terrible on Netflix) and claiming sound quality when you have none, is still theft.

[nickthegreek]

For DS9, the best quality "available" is probably the Vertag 1080p AI upscale release. Kinda wild.

[threethirtytwo]

it is. It's like if you're son or daughter was really just a piece of shit human being and I murdered your child.... It's still murder. No amount of excuses can justify it.