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Comment by CodeMage | Hacker News Reader

Every single show or movie I wanted to watch over the last year has been an exclusive to some streaming service or other.

Amazon used to let me buy anything, and the Prime was there to entice me so I don't have to pay for individual catalog items, but that's not the case anymore.

Now I have a choice between:

1. paying for a crapton of streaming services so I can watch a handful of things I'd like

2. pirating

3. not watching most of the stuff I think I would like to watch

I'm not picking option 1 for what I hope are obvious reasons. I really don't want to pick option 2 because I empathize with people like you, who would be affected by that. For the moment, I'm picking option 3.

However, if you really want to "educate consumers", you might be more successful if you change your tone so it doesn't sound like aggressive victim-blaming. People like you and people like me are being screwed by a third group.

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I appreciate you not pirating. You are only being screwed if you think you are entitled to the entertainment. You are not.

You have an option to pay for the service as offered, steal it, or move on.

Entertainment abounds in our society and is readily available at little to no cost all around you via local theater, open mic nights, libraries, etc.

The connivence of having that entertainment pumped directly on demand to your home is a luxury that has a certain value to it.

Currently that luxury is available via paying for the service or stealing it. The theft is relatively low risk, even by hilariously paying for a services that help hide your theft. That's the number one reason these services are being stolen.

Whether people are "entitled" to enrich their lives with art/entertainment or not is an interesting question in this context.

We're living in a society where a huge number of people has experienced a good solution to the demand for that enrichment, and that good solution has been deliberately sabotaged so that a small, rich group of people could become even richer at the expense of everyone else.

Just like you argue people are not entitled to art and entertainment, so I would argue that those who deliberately restrict access to it in completely unnecessary ways are not entitled to the additional profits they squeeze out that way.

As for the comments about luxury of pumping the entertainment to our homes instead of enjoying it at little to no cost at the venues you mention, I'm reminded of Arthur Dent being told that the plans to demolish his house were on display all the time. Suffice it to say that your vision of how the majority of people live is very distorted.

"I'd like to steal things because I morally disagree with the rules to society that I am currently opting to live in. I could choose to move, address the change at a governmental level, or simply find my entertainment elsewhere but no. It is everyone else who is the problem. Therefore I take great offense to being labeled as a thief."

The first sentence is spot on. The rest is the distortion I was talking about. You demand empathy, but are unwilling to be empathetic yourself. In the end, you're the one opting out of discourse here, not the rest of us.

I'm saying when you steal you're a thief. If that ruffles your feathers, stop stealing.

It doesn't ruffle my feathers at all. I've done my share of piracy when I lived in countries where that was the only viable way to get my hands on the information, art, or entertainment that was otherwise unavailable to the vast majority of people living there. And no, I'm not ashamed of it, and it doesn't offend me if you decide to label me a thief or worse.

What I was trying to do is have a conversation with you about why people "steal" or whatever the correct word for this thing is. Just like there are reasons people steal in real life, there are reasons for this behavior, too. You can try to understand it, or you can keep throwing everyone in the same bin, slap a label on that bin, and feel morally superior.

One of those two will lead to improvement for everyone. One of those two is easy. I'll leave it an exercise for you to figure out which one is which.

If you're rich and disconnected enough to just drop everything and move over entertainment choices, I'm not sure you're in touch enough to have any kind of perspective on the people you're trying to convince.

There is an inherent classism to "piracy is stealing" arguments: by gating access to culture, it effectively says "poor people shouldn't be able to participate in culture, because they don't have enough money"

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