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Comment by mminer237 | Hacker News Reader

It may not be everyone, but there are a number of pirates who would buy a subscription to a legal streaming service if illegal streaming was not as easily available.

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Look at Spotify, iTunes, YouTube and Netflix. Laws don’t stop piracy, good legal options stop piracy. The reason people pirated music wasn’t because the piracy sites were great, it’s because music companies wanted to charge ridiculous prices for something they would broadcast on the radio for free.

Music companies don't broadcast music on the radio for free, they charge radio companies certain amounts per play depending on the reach of that radio station.

Obviously if you release something for free like Spotify or YouTube, few people will mess with torrents for it; but that also makes artists a lot less money. You'll never stop piracy. But laws can reduce it. And some probably-impossible-to-know portion of that reduction will pay for the legal option. 99% of people will never download qBitTorrent. It's a small portion that will even get PopcornTime. It's easy to get disconnected as more technically-inclined people, but you have to remember that most people that pirate things just Google "stream avengers endgame free" and click through the links until they find a site that works. If that gets too hard, plenty will just give up and buy the DVD or whatever.

I've yet to read a really good large-sample study on this. I believe you're right, I just want to know the percentage of people. So far piracy is being treated as a scapegoat for unreached sales.

It sounds like something that's nearly impossible to study.

You can't ask people. Very few people will admit "I pirated this because I didn't feel like paying for it like I normally would." People always find ways to justify their actions, so every response would just be some variation of "I pirated this because the legal options are too inconvenient that I normally wouldn't bother so I didn't hurt anyone."

And you never will be able to totally eliminate piracy nor will you be able to definitively attribute gains or losses to changes in piracy. Maybe the quality of the content changed, maybe the economy had a downturn, maybe an advertising campaign was really effective, etc.

There's probably more truth to it when turned around: there are a number of pirates who would buy content, if it would be easily accessible.

This is a self-inflicted wound by media companies, and they are attempting to solve the issue by sending people to prison, instead of taking the money people are ready to spend on their content.

This is so true.

Want to watch show X? Oh, you need Amazon prime. Show Y? Netflix. Show Z? HBO Max. Live sports? You need some BS cable package that costs a ridiculous amount.

Media companies get all mad about IP and yet create walled gardens everywhere. They get no sympathy from me.

I'm not saying media companies are perfect, moral angels. But I don't think people should pretend that piracy is some act of justice either.

Personally, my issue is more with DRM. I considered buying a few Blu-rays, but I have little use for a bunch of copyrigh-protected plastic, and circumventing the DRM on it might be a hassle, plus drives cost quite a bit.

I just want some GoG-like store for movies. Have sales like Steam, price competition, keep what you buy, "complete your collection" bundles, etc.

THis could really work with federation: each rightholder sets up their own shop on a common marketplace. Transfer encryption keys. Maybe even use torrents for distribution? But final files should have no DRM.

Providing DRM-free downloads would probably kill the studio's long-tail revenue streams. Once people have a copy of the content in a format that's going to be indefinitely forward-portable, they will never buy another copy again.

Not even for "higher" quality versions. I have an AVI of my LotR movies ripped from DVDs from whenever people bought DVDs and ripped AVIs. The quality is still very good, even played on a 4K TV. I've never sat thinking, "I wish I had the 4k Bluray remaster" while watching it.

Yeah, god, DRM. Sometimes I'll buy an ebook to support the author and then pirate it anyway just so I can have a proper DRM-free version that will run on my ebook reader.

I think the inverse is more accurate. Services like spotify have very significantly reduced music piracy. If a reasonably priced legal alternative exists, people will tend to use it. Piracy only thrives at large scale when content is too difficult or expensive to access legally.

Right. Obviously, you can't value every stream as a loss of of face value price.

But its not 0% of face value either.

And a lot of piracy battle is to ensure the movie/tv industry does get "Napstered." Napster annihilated the public's perception of the value of songs because even my tech illiterate mother could pirate.

Right now my mom pays for netflix and cable. But if a pirate streaming service was as easy to find and use as netflix is, she'd start using it. So the current laws and enforcement do protect a lot of value now.

The converse relationship seems well represented by some recent digital music access like iTunes and Spotify. Many would-be customers turn to piracy when piracy is _more_ convenient than legitimate alternatives. I think movies and tv shows have become more accessible through legitimate channels, but the fragmentation of the streaming platforms certainly limits future convenience.

I see people calling for an all-in-one service for movies & TV shows, but that isn't likely to happen since the licensing and pay distribution for those work on a much different scale than music. A big reason is that in most cases at least 100x the amount of people will work on any professional video broadcast media as compared to a music album. It will continue to hinder consumer convenience, and the only halfway solution is the stream hardware giants giving you a unified interface to pick any piece of content you want and then display where it's available.

Interesting. Perhaps the studios should quadruple the price of streaming to recoup their losses.

But of course that would send even more to piracy....

It makes you wonder if Steve Jobs was correct that people that pirate (songs, Napster back in the day) would be willing to pay for music if it was easy (iTunes) and cheap ($0.99).

I'm not sure if I agree but it is an interesting foil.

> It makes you wonder if Steve Jobs was correct that people that pirate (songs, Napster back in the day) would be willing to pay for music if it was easy (iTunes) and cheap ($0.99). I'm not sure if I agree but it is an interesting foil.

Steve literally proceeded to launch a software app store that had DRM out of the wazoo, so even he didn't believe it.

Good point. Although certainly the labels insisted on this.

Jobs convinced the music tracks studios to let him sell DRM free tracks on iTunes, so it seems to me like he believed it. I don't know if iTunes music is still DRM free, though.

But even it weren't, content creators unwillingness to let Apple sell DRM free media is not evidence that Jobs agrees with them.

[1] https://www.computerworld.com/article/2541387/itunes-starts-... [2] https://www.macworld.com/article/1138000/drm-faq.html

Obviously there's some balance in pricing stuff. Selling all your movies for $1 a pop may kill most piracy, but it will kill your movie studio too. Selling streams for $500 per person will price most people out, regardless of whether piracy exists or not. Piracy hurts profits regardless of pricing. iTunes did not make up for the death of CDs at all. Digital sales have never even made up a third of what physical sales used to be: https://www.riaa.com/u-s-sales-database/

Personally, I don't think consumers have a right to tell creators, "You have to sell that to me for $x or I will take it without paying." Companies certainly aren't good, but they're not typically stupid either. They're not going to price things to a point where people can't afford them. I think pirates just lie to themselves a lot to justify their actions.

If legal streaming services were not profiling the crap out of me and what I do in their platforms, I would have stayed with them. I had a subscription with pretty much every single service available in my country, but back to Kodi[1], seed boxes, and private trackers I went.

Not to mention the Draconian DRM. I can play 4K games at 60fps on Linux, but I cannot play a 4K film from Netflix or listen to music from TIDAL with certain browsers. Fuck that.

[1] https://kodi.tv/

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