[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