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Comment by adrianN | Hacker News Reader

Anybody who is not a techie.

Or anybody who thinks purchase of the hardware alone entitles them to the content advertised. Who hasn't heard, "Where's Word and Excel on my new laptop?" (not 1:1 but close enough)

To be fair, buying an antenna entitles you to any broadcasts you can pick up with it. And to a lot of people, that's "TV."

not really, people just willingly choose not to care about it... it's the same as with any other pirated goods, of course you know it couldn't possibly be the original, but it's easier to play dumb about it and hope it's a good deal...

I can go into a shop and buy a TV and watch TV for free, legally. Why shouldn't I assume that this other box that allows me to watch things is equally legal?

On the other side of things - why should you assume that this other box, which you can only get from a super sketchy online dealer and which gives you something for nothing that you're accustomed to having to pay for, is legit?

Because "is legit" is the default for stuff you buy out in the open. People naturally (and mostly correctly) assume that if you don't have to know a guy who knows a guy and you're not paying in unmarked bills with nonsequential serial numbers, it's legitimate.

Keep in mind that recognizing an online seller as "sketchy" requires a great deal of technical skill all by itself. To the average Joe, there's not much difference between eBay and Amazon. Hell, I just searched for "kodi" on Amazon and turned up a ton of stuff there advertising free movies and TV shows. Amazon! You want to tell me that the average person should see something sold on Amazon with Prime shipping that says you can use it to stream movies and TV for free, and understand that this is not legal?

It's even worse than that. There's literally signs on my street now advertising for a local company that sells Android sticks with Kodi preloaded and a bunch of piracy channels.

Are normal people supposed to expect companies that advertise out in the open like that to not be legitimate? And I mean... they sort of are, they can deliver what they're advertising, they'll come to your house and set it all up and even give you support. Most consumers wouldn't know (or likely even care much about) the difference.

Wow. I had the idea this was mostly a thing you'd find in the sketchier corners of eBay, and that at least to some extent you'd have to go looking for. But that's not so, which rather cuts my argument off at the knees.

I thought the same thing initially. I started writing something about Amazon Marketplace sellers, then had a "wait a minute..." thought and tried searching for "kodi." I was quite surprised!

There are large swathes of the population who have no idea what technology is. They see "box that you plug in to your TV to watch free movies" as a technological improvement, as in, some kind of breakthrough enabled the free delivery of movies. They're not likely to think about the economics of it unless it's pointed out to them. There's probably a decent number of people who bought this and had no idea it was illegal.

I can offer anecdote in support of this... a lot of anecdote. My mother's friends discovered that an HDMI cable and their various tablets could let them stream with these "Cool sites with all of this free stuff!".

It never even occurred to them that it was piracy. When they thought of "pirating" or "theft", a glossy site that their friends told them about, and that asked nothing of them wasn't it.

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