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Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

I think it has limited truth.

Everyone I know who used to pirate music, now just subscribes to Spotify or whatever. So definitely not the case there.

On the other hand, not one person I know who used to pirate Photoshop, has ever then personally paid for it once they started making money. (Their employer often did, though.)

Movies/TV are somewhere in the middle. I think a lot of people pirate because the content they want to watch is spread out among so many services that need separate subscriptions. You can't pay for all of them all the time when you go for months without touching some of them, but constantly canceling and resubscribing is madness.

Also dealing with the nonsense that Netflix won't display high-quality resolution on all external displays, etc.

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>On the other hand, not one person I know who used to pirate Photoshop, has ever then personally paid for it once they started making money. (Their employer often did, though.)

Hi! Nice to meet you. With the much derided (on HN) monthly plan, I have been paying for Photoshop (and its cohorts) for my own personal use without an employer paying for it. I even have a paid for version of Office. In fact, I no longer have any software illicitly obtained. It's either a fully paid version or something offered for free. Why? Because I can afford it in direct counter to your argument.

I'm not sure that's true. I think that large software packages like photoshop have become way more available for people to pay for with subscriptions. I never paid for it and never would pay thousands of dollars for it, but now it is included in a $30 a month subscription from Adobe that I got mostly for Acrobat.

The only practical way for a high school student to get photoshop was to pirate it when I was a kid. My parents weren't going to shell out thousands of dollars for something like photoshop or autocad.

Speaking for myself, I don't use Photoshop often enough for $30 / month to be worth it. I wouldn't have been able to justify thousands of dollars either, but if I could pay a couple of hundred for a perpetual license with an upgrade discount when new versions come out that would get my business.

Just sign up and pay the fee when you need it. Cancel it when you don't.

From the perspective of most artists, piracy and Spotify aren't much different.

Well, they also still bought CD's they liked back then. Usually their favourite bands, or whatever. Even in the Napster/LimeWire days when everyone was doing it they always still seemed to buy their favourite artist's new CD's when they came out.

> Everyone I know who used to pirate music, now just subscribes to Spotify or whatever. So definitely not the case there.

Sure, people can ascend through income classes, but there’s always a new cohort of broke young people. I imagine young adults today are pirating plenty as well.

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