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Comment by lovich | Hacker News Reader

I pay for things I could steal as well, because I like to support those companies. However what we have here is an entire industry working towards setting up their offerings as a worse product than free. Not just more expensive than free, but an objectively worse product, and they've acommplished this in part by eroding consumer rights.

You might expect some people to take an extremely principled stance but it would be unreasonable to expect the majority of society to do so when the companies themselves are operating as unprincipled entities.

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The choice isn't between stealing and paying for it. Choosing something else is the principled stand.

There's plenty of good media out there to support without stealing. I'd rather grab an eBook from the library (they get paid) or buy a random indie album on Bandcamp than spend time on media published by people who don't respect their customers.

Oh please. So individuals have to play by a rigged and ever-changing set of rules laid down by media conglomerate lobbyists and copyright lawyers, or they’re unprincipled? By that logic everyone would still be buying CD’s with malware from brick and mortar stores because Sony makes more money that way than with iTunes or Spotify. The media landscape today didn’t just happen, it’s the result of a tension between different forces, and you don’t want to see what it looks like if one group lets go. Pirates were the first digital distributors, most not out of selfish desire to get something for free, which was proven by the overwhelming support for legal digital distribution.

Art doesn't have competition in many cases. There is no alternative good to "Gone in the Wind", it is a unique product with a monoply on it due to copyright.

Many of these companies, and Disney especially,have done their best to prevent works from falling into the public domain when they make a lot of money off of deriviations of public domain works

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