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Comment by illuminate | Hacker News Reader

You can rant about "entitlement" all you wish, but the way to getting people to stop pirating content is to provide an alternative method of distribution than the one currently in place.

Steam, iTunes, Netflix, and perhaps one day HBO branching off into their own content publishing business.

A season's worth Game of Thrones Blu-Rays costs what, $50?

To access a year's worth of premium cable content would cost ~$1000 to ~$1500.

"I don't know the statistics but I'd have to guess at least 80% of nerds like us pirate content every single week, and nobody wants to think of themselves as an asshole. Rationalize however you need to."

This is pretty much the antithesis of rationalizing. You're fine with the system in place. Others are dissatisfied with piracy and want to support the creators without the "luxury" of dropping more than a thousand bucks a year for the one or two great shows worth watching on television.

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A season's worth of GoT Blu-Rays costs $50 1-2 years after the series has been released on HBO. Content is much more lucrative during its initial release window; it has a very definite time-value.

People aren't complaining and breaking the law to get access to GoT Blu-Rays (well, actually, yeah some of them are). They're doing it to get access to GoT episodes that aren't available anywhere but on pay TV, because HBO uses them as an incentive to get people to subscribe to pay TV, which, when you think about it, is the only way pay TV could possibly ever work.

You know, I made some socks for you to buy, to subsidize the production and distribution of my artisan bleu cheese. My cheese startup failed, you filthy pagan pirates, because you failed to buy my socks!

Come on. We're supposed to just suck it up when someone offers us something for sale? You're kidding, that's not how markets work. If HBO does something stupid, they get penalized for it in the market.

Beyond that, the debate here is about DRM. Institutionalizing DRM (legal mandates, DMCA style legal penalties for "reverse engineering") probably causes more damage to society as a whole than allowing some smaller monetary amount of piracy. Clamping down on the civil rights of the populace as a whole in order to prevent a tiny fraction of the populace from violating already outrageous laws on "intellectual property" really isn't a good idea. Stupid laws and stupid enforcement of stupid laws make people disrespect the law and law enforcement.

The DMCA does not criminalize reverse engineering; my field is based in large part on routine reverse engineering of all sorts of software. While there is some grey area and certainly some overreach in the DMCA anti-circumvention mechanism, what it essentially criminalizes is an attempt to build a business on devices that circumvent content protection.

As a sometimes-reverser, I'm ambivalent about this. I wouldn't howl if anti-circumvention was eliminated (it won't be, but still). I'll howl with all the other security researchers when it's abused to stifle research and disclosure of security flaws (for the overwhelming most part, it isn't, but still).

I don't understand your sock/cheese metaphor at all. People can in fact bundle socks and cheese. Nobody would in reality stick up for you if you stole the socks to avoid the cheese. But nobody does bundle socks and cheese, because that's moronic. It is manifestly not moronic to bundle Game Of Thrones with ESPN.

(I posted this a month ago)

How do you know, if you are that you are indeed breaking DRM vs just doing complicated stuff with a firmware?

It seems obvious if there's PKI in there somewhere. But aside that, how do you tell the difference?

Might I add that the old proposed "Broadcast Flag" would have been a bit in the HDTV stream to signal no_copy. Changing that bit would have broken the DMCA.

BnetD managed to violate the DMCA merely by being unable to emulate the authorization layer.

https://www.eff.org/cases/blizzard-v-bnetd

Oddities like that render "intellectual property" useless. Since copyright (in the USA) lasts for life-of-author + 70 years, or 90 years for corporate authorship, you can't tell on the face of some information whether it is "property" or not. You need to know when/if the author died.

Stop me if I'm wrong, I haven't had cable for a long time. We only watched Discovery and Food Network, and not even very much of those. We now get more Mythbusters and more cheesy cartoon series from Netflix or Denver Public Library.

ESPN is a sports network, right? "Game of Thrones" is a swords-and-sorcery type thing with a lot of sex, right (I've only read 20 pages of the first book). I don't see how that makes it "manifestly not moronic" to bundle the two. I personally might take a look a GoT, but you'd have to pay me to watch the manifest stupidity of ESPN. So, I personally don't see the immoronicity of bundling ESPN and "Game of Thrones".

But that was my point with socks and cheese: market places don't take into account whatever imaginary linkage I might assign or what Immoral MegaCorp assigns to bundling HBO and ESPN. What vone person values as "manifestly moronic" another sees as "manifestly awesome".

As near as I can tell, you're trying to argue that legislating some linkage via DRM makes that linkage valuable to the free market, when in fact, it does not, any more than my linking socks to cheese makes that linkage valuable.

The marginal cost to the cable provider of providing you with HBO versus ESPN+HBO is nil. Bundling makes perfect sense.

You might complain about cross-subsidization, but you are both payee and payer in that bargain.

If you could get only HBO, it would cost a lot more than what it costs on top of a cable subscription.

It's like two people buying a newspaper with two section. Person A only wants section A and person B only wants section B. They each complain about subsidizing the other section. They see the 50 cent cost and say "I would only pay 25 cents if I was only paying for the half I wanted!" But the costs to the provider for only providing you with one section is exactly the same. If they only gave each person just what they wanted, each person would pay, to a first approximation, 50 cents for getting one section.

"The marginal cost to the cable provider of providing you with HBO versus ESPN+HBO is nil. Bundling makes perfect sense."

To the provider. The customer is directly paying for Disney/ESPN/Fox and whatever else is on basic cable. I don't want to subsidize any of that crap, no matter how cheap it's being offered to me.

'tptacek claimed that bundling makes perfect sense. And it does, for the same reason that newspapers don't charge extra for the sports section.

Bundling happens in every industry with high fixed costs and low marginal costs.

I don't want to subsidize any of that crap

You are in a shared market.

CNN makes around $250 million a year from cable subscribers. Let's say 100 million households with cable just to make the math easy. So each is paying $2.50 for CNN.

Now, let's say all those households got to choose yes/no on whether they got CNN, and half those houses don't watch any CNN and half of them watch CNN regularly. They wouldn't be paying $2.50 each. They would, to a first approximation, be paying $5 each, because built-in to CNN's pricing to the cable companies was the fact that only half their customers watched it, and it doesn't cost the cable company any extra to provide it to those people who don't want it.

To a smaller degree, this is what happens if you shop at one store in a mall. You are "subsidizing" the other stores in the mall because they have joined forces to reduce their shared, fixed costs. But those other stores are also "subsidizing" you.

"They wouldn't be paying $2.50 each. They would, to a first approximation, be paying $5 each, because built-in to CNN's pricing to the cable companies was the fact that only half their customers watched it, and it doesn't cost the cable company any extra to provide it to those people who don't want it."

And why should this concern me?

"A season's worth of GoT Blu-Rays costs $50 1-2 years after the series has been released on HBO. Content is much more lucrative during its initial release window; it has a very definite time-value."

So weigh the cost for monthly fees accordingly to the value-add and factor in for the lack of subsidization.

> "...the way to getting people to stop pirating content is to provide an alternative method of distribution... Steam, iTunes, Netflix..."

I agree with your point to an extent. The thing is that they're not exactly viable alternatives yet. Each service you mentioned operates off the same distribution model, each with their own custom DRM that sandboxes the user from leaving that platform.

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