Item — HN Reader

"Piracy" is inconvenient. It takes knowledge, effort, time and money as well as computing power, storage and network bandwidth to participate in the ratio economies of private torrent trackers. It gets to the point it looks like an enthusiast operation run by people who want the best possible version of everything.

What's truly sad is how so many people find this preferable to paying for the official services. It speaks volumes to the quality of their streaming services. A huge number of people don't even have the choice to pay for the content to begin with: many of the of companies that complain about copyright infringement don't even offer their services outside of the United States. They ignore entire markets and complain when people find a way via unofficial means. It's really hard to feel any sympathy for the copyright industry.

2 comments

There are some users, such as myself, who find the legal streaming sites intolerable for technical reasons if not ethical reasons. But I think the vast majority of users prefer the legal options when they're available, which is the part the media industry keeps on fucking up.

If they were better at their jobs, better at delivering to consumers what consumers want, they wouldn't have to worry about DRM, piracy, control of consumer behavior or any of this nonsense.

Completely agree with you. If their services were good enough, I doubt they would even need copyright protection to make money. The fact they can't match the quality of a bunch of underground sites despite being a multi-billion dollar industry is a sign the industry is relying on artificial scarcity to have any chance of competing in the marketplace.

> What's truly sad is how so many people find this preferable to paying for the official services. It speaks volumes to the quality of their streaming services.

I was even pirating shows I had access for free on Amazon prime... that just tells you how bad the platforms are, it's not about money.