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Comment by foota | Hacker News Reader

I imagine you'd see a lot more casual piracy if it were trivial to copy, i.e., people just sending the videos to their friends.

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For every person torrenting there’s multiple getting movies off friends on USB sticks and stuff.

One member of my family does the torrenting for a dozen others in my family, and I know plenty of others that work like that.

I personally do a mix of paying for content and pirating. I’m 100% happy to pay for content if I can, but with geoblocking and platform restrictions and all the other bullshittery, it’s legitimately impossible for me to legally buy half (or more) of the content I’m actually interested in, so I pirate it, and I don’t feel bad for doing so in the slightest.

I also regularly have to pirate things I already own thanks to DRM that doesn’t work on my devices, missing subtitles, etc.

The entire industry is broken and it’s their own fault.

Not sure if applicable to your region but have you given movieseverywhere a shot?

Do you mean Disney Movies Anywhere? That’s a US exclusive, like just about all content these days.

https://moviesanywhere.com/

This website, it's not Disney specific, but that sucks. It would mostly be the convenient solution to this problem. If you have a movie on iTunes or Play, it unlocks in the other, and vice-versa.

Mostly so.

With some interesting exceptions, luckily. You can watch Star Trek: Discovery on Netflix in 32 countries, including most of Europe, but not in the US (there it's an exclusive on CBS or something like that).

Pirating is already casual. But situation is much worse.

I can have russian voiceover from 4-5 studios on the next day after popular TV series aired. They even go this far, as to put full time commercials of not so legal online casino web sites. I dont even need to torrent, to watch any tv show next day after air. There is android apps that will allow to watch any show via http or torrent. There is pirate websites with payed and free access. And as I said earlier fulltime commercials of online casinos, that sponsor pirate translations.

This situation is very bad for any commercial tv show services in ex USSR territory. No low regional prices can battle 0 price.

The argument above was that the lowest level of Widevine is sufficient to prevent casual piracy (through that channel), and I agree: It's a lot easier to just torrent a clean version than to dump an encrypted Netflix stream, run some side-channel attack on Widevine (for which the PoC code doesn't seem to be public), then decrypt the dump.

> I imagine you'd see a lot more casual piracy if it were trivial to copy, i.e., people just sending the videos to their friends.

Then just put enough of DRM for that not to happens. The fact that it's working through an app is more than enough. Most people have trouble even getting videos out of Youtube and doesn't know you can find apps to do that.

People share password much more than they share video files too.

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