[Aurornis]

Some times I read these mental gymnastics comments about piracy being easier and wonder if these people have actually tried to learn how to use something like an Apple TV.

I think the services part they really dislike is just the part where your credit card gets charged when you click the buy or rent button. Doing all of the piracy stuff with VPNs and navigating torrent sites and getting a setup where you can play files on your TV is an order of magnitude more work.

[matheusmoreira]

> I think the services part they really dislike is just the part where your credit card gets charged when you click the buy or rent button.

You think wrong. My Steam account has 300+ games on it. I pay for several streaming services. I have a physical media collection that even includes a copy of windows vista, to my eternal regret.

> Doing all of the piracy stuff with VPNs and navigating torrent sites and getting a setup where you can play files on your TV is an order of magnitude more work.

And yet that's what you have to do if you don't want to pay to get total garbage in return for your money.

The pirates compete with each other to release the best encodes, to the point they mix multiple Blu-Rays together into an ultimate release because some region somehow received a better version of some scene or whatever. Normal files you get to play using mpv.

Netflix ships horribly compressed nonsense where color gradients are so full of artifacts it hurts my eyes. Highly dynamic segments are painful to watch. Amazingly enough it's still the least bad option, the other services have even worse quality and a borderline unusable video player software to boot.

Service isn't just about ease, it's also about quality. If you want quality, piracy isn't just easier, it's almost always the best option, if not the only option. It's sad that the copyright industry can't seem to match what's essentially a bunch of amateurs but what can you do?

[Aurornis]

If you don’t mind paying for things and your only concern is the quality, then presumably you pay for the source material and then also download the best quality pirated version you can find, right?

That would satisfy both of your claims: That you don’t mind paying for things and you only do piracy to seek out the highest quality.

If you selectively choose not to pay for things where you can get away with it (e.g. not Steam games) then this claim doesn’t hold the slightest amount of water.

[matheusmoreira]

> presumably you pay for the source material

I do. Multiple times, even.

[Aurornis]

Okay great. Then can you acknowledge that when everyone else is talking about piracy, none of us are talking about you?

You are the 0.001% of pirates, but you make assertions here like all pirates are high minded people who are secretly actually paying for the content and are only interested in some extra video quality. That describes such a vanishingly small number of pirates that it’s meaningless in the broader discussion about piracy.

[matheusmoreira]

I acknowledge nothing. Especially not those made up numbers.

[bitwize]

No, he's still a pirate.

If he doesn't like what the distributor releases, he shouldn't watch the movie or show at all. Paying for a legitimate copy does not grant you infinite legal or moral use of the work, only permission to view the version of the work provided under terms set by the OWNER of the work.

[inigyou]

If that's what you actually believe, it's either because you have financial ties to the owners, or you are in the authority-obeying Kohlberg stage. There is no simple universal answer to whether piracy is moral. It is easy to argue that giving money to rich corporations who fuck everything up is worse than not giving them money.

[nearlyepic]

Here’s an idea: some suit in an office somewhere doesn’t get to dictate how I engage with art. My moral obligation ends where the people who made the movie get paid.

[matheusmoreira]

Nobody cares about the owner's "terms".

The whole point of this thread is the fact the owners keep getting outcompeted by a bunch of pirates precisely because of those idiotic "terms" nobody really cares about. The more "terms" they add, the more their product sucks. No one wants to read a dozen pages of legal boilerplate just to have a shitty experience watching some film. Thanks to piracy, they don't have to.

Literal rent seeking monopolists don't get to preach about morals either. Knock copyright duration all the way back to 20 years and maybe the monopoly becomes tolerable enough for us to listen to the plight of creators.

[matkoniecz]

> but you make assertions here like all pirates are high minded people who are secretly actually paying for the content and are only interested in some extra video quality

you are replying to comment "I do. Multiple times, even."

Not a native speaker, but as far as I know in English "I" in this context refers to a single person, specifically someone writing this referring to themselves.

If anything you made assertions referring to general population and it is quote easy to guess that "Some times I read these mental gymnastics comments about piracy being easier and wonder if these people have actually tried to learn how to use something like an Apple TV." will have nonrepresentation on HN.

> when everyone else is talking about piracy, none of us are talking about you?

piracy-related laws often miss exemptions for cases like this

[nradov]

I would be happy to pay to buy or rent a single show or movie. The problem is that a lot of that content is only available with a monthly subscription. Screw that, those monthly bills eat you alive. I hear that the For All Mankind series is pretty good but there's no way I'm signing up for Apple TV just to watch that. So I'll skip it and watch something else.

[bitwize]

And that's the appropriate response to have. If you don't want to pay according to the copyright owner's terms, then you don't watch the show. Not liking the copyright owner's terms for watching the show does not give you the right to steal it.

Yes, I know copyright infringement is not stealing per the technical legal definition. But splitting those hairs is like splitting hairs between pedophiles and ephebophiles: anyone doing it is very likely just telling on themselves as the exact sort of criminal under discussion.

[inigyou]

Where do rights come from?

[vermilingua]

Sometimes I read these mental gymnastics comments about being leashed to half a dozen providers for “convenience” and wonder if these people have actually tried to learn how to use something like a NAS.

I think the part they really dislike is the undermining of the moral superiority they claim by donating their money to corporations that contribute ~nothing to the actual evolution of culture. Inventing strawmans about how difficult it is to click one button in Jellyseer and have a max-quality, buffering free copy of what you want to watch in perpetuity is an order of magnitude more work than renting a poor-quality subset of the media that publishers consider it profitable to provide.

[Aurornis]

> I think the part they really dislike is the undermining of the moral superiority they claim by donating their money to corporations that contribute ~nothing to the actual evolution of culture.

My local farmers and grocery stores contribute ~nothing to actual evolution of culture. I still think they deserve to get paid for what they do. I don’t think this is as smart of a point as you thought it was.

Regardless, the content can’t both be worthless and worth pirating at the same time.

This boils down to “I want free stuff but I want to feel morally superior about it”

[defrost]

> the content can’t both be worthless and worth pirating at the same time.

More commonly, at least in Australia which at various times has had record level piracy, content can be worth _something_ and also not worth "that much" and hence worth pirating.

This has been seen with games - once charged in Australia significantly more than in Europe or the US. Game piracy was rife and didn't really drop in volume until Australian game prices fell more in line with elsewhere.

With the coming of Netflix TV and movie piracy dropped a lot - as prices rose and sheer number of providers rose making it impossible to see whatever caught your eye all on the one source subscription, piracy volume in AU increased again.

This boils down to "We'll pay for stuff .. but only so far".

[Aurornis]

You’re moving the goalposts from “contributing nothing” to “actually it’s valuable but I don’t want to pay that much but I also don’t want to not watch it”

This is still a silly argument. If the price of something is higher than you want to pay, that doesn’t justify taking it.

This has come all the way back to supporting what I said above: The only service problem is that people don’t like the part where it charges their credit card. Piracy lets them skip that part.

[defrost]

> You’re moving the goalposts

Nope. I'm a first time commentator in this subthread I'm stating a position held in one part of the world.

Maybe it'd require moving your "goalposts" to get there .. but I'm not moving anything, just pointing out exactly how the ground has lain here for decades.

[vermilingua]

I never said the content was worthless, I said the distributors are worthless. If I can get the same content, at a higher quality, more efficiently and cheaper (free) through piracy than legal means, the distributors are by definition not providing value.

I absolutely pay for physical media, for which a much higher share of revenue goes to the actual creators of content than the leeches who extract rent from it.

This is exactly why Steam has and continues to dominate the gaming market, they made it easier than piracy, and didn’t fall victim to the terminal-stage capitalism that has turned every previously decent streaming platform into hot garbage.

[etdznots]

you bought a smart tv maybe you got a dumb tv and then plugged in a dongle? Or maybe you bought a smart tv and also purchased another home media device thingy and you gotta remember to switch to w the apple tv for this thingy. you signed in to it you created dozens ? Hundreds? Of accounts to watch all the content you want, try to figure out what plan you need to watch the content? Will you subscribe for a bit and cancel later ah ok siri set a reminder to cancel the subscriotion ill take care of that. Wait oops i went on vacation and netflix is mad that im. Not watching from home do i need a different plan? How do these amazon prime video channel subscriptions work how many do i have?

All that instead of a jellyfin server and a single search? It’s all gymnastics just different gymnastics

[matkoniecz]

> Doing all of the piracy stuff with VPNs and navigating torrent sites and getting a setup where you can play files on your TV is an order of magnitude more work.

Not really, decent chunk of my MP3 collection is abandoned media not sold literally anywhere at all. Or was never published in public in the first place.

> if these people have actually tried to learn how to use something like an Apple TV

no, as I am not interested in Apple's walled garden, and so far I have not used any of their devices or products

(OK, I used Mac for about one hour helping neighbor to fix their printer, and I tested Mac-specific bug on website for hour or two)

> I think the services part they really dislike is just the part where your credit card gets charged when you click the buy or rent button.

Not in my case, I regularly try to buy MP3 that are in my collection already but I have not paid for them.

It costs me mostly in time to find them and create accounts and pay for them and deal with various hoops. Far more than it costs me in actual payments.

[mopsi]

  > Doing all of the piracy stuff with VPNs and navigating torrent sites and getting a setup where you can play files on your TV is an order of magnitude more work.

It's not 2003 anymore. If "navigating torrent sites" is your idea of piracy, then you should certainly check out the so-called arr-stack of software that searches online sources for wishlisted items, downloads them, equips with metadata and subtitles, and presents for viewing or listening without any user input, based on predefined preferences.

Apple TV and other commercial offerings are a steaming pile of shit in comparison and I can't imagine people like the CEO of Apple watching stuff off Apple TV and not a proper arr-stack setup. It's like eating McDonald's every for every meal when a chef is readily available. Why would you do this to yourself.

With Apple TV, you can't even do something as mundane was fixing translation errors in subtitles before you show a movie to a friend. You're stuck with what some cheap outsourced translation service came up with. It reduces the owner of the library to a passive mouthbreather who has virtually no control over their experience; can't choose which cut of the movie to see; can't replace an ugly poster with a nicer one; can't edit movie description to remove spoilers; and so on and on. In essence, you're watching someone else's library, and that someone has not put much effort into proper curation to present every item from the best possible side.