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Comment by elyrly | Hacker News Reader

Popcorn Time fills a void the film industry has neglected. Unless major change is done developers will continue to challenge the legality of piracy.

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The void where people are willing to spend zero dollars to consume media? Damn, can't believe that got missed.

I bet some people would even spend five, perhaps as much as ten, dollars per month for infinite access to all movies ever created ever. With generosity like that they're practically god damned saints.

It's not about the price, it's about the timing. I don't like going to a cinema that much but I like discussing recent movies with friends (that live half a world away from me). I would pay the full cinema price (or at least a considerable percentage) for access on my computer. It's not about the price, it's about the product/market that just isn't legally available.

P.S.: Btw - I don't usually download movies and wait until they are released on GooglePlay/iTunes/Amazon. But you know what? From all of those back in Germany only iTunes was available and even then you had to be lucky to get good quality and original language instead of the German dub. There are countries outside of the US.

> I bet some people would even spend five, perhaps as much as ten, dollars per month for infinite access to all movies ever created ever.

Bring back sane copyright laws (Life + 70 years?) and we'll talk about what is and isn't reasonable. Copyright and laws are in a race against storage, bandwidth, and technology. I'm pretty confident technology is always going to win.

That's pretty soft moral justification for whatever infringing acts you're defending. You'll get no argument from me that copyright durations have gotten out of control, but that doesn't exactly give you fair cause to download Game of Thrones or whatever it is you want.

There are in fact acceptable levels of relativity in the morality of acts (otherwise we couldn't have laws), so yeah, it can certainly be fair cause.

Now, you may believe that this moral justification is nothing more than an argument and the real justification for pirating a show is "because I am greedy, screw the authors"; however, this applies almost exactly to media conglomerates and their pro-copyright lobbying and protectionist activities. So, all in all, this is a small but perfectly valid piece of the debate.

Yeah, well, in the case of Game of Thrones, it's quite an important work of art and it's priced out of reach for the vast majority of the public. Owning an important work of art could be argued to be a bit like having a monopoly on a utility. That might not sound compelling, but there the case for copyright protections isn't that compelling either. Copyright is supposed to be a beneficial exchange, where the public accept restrictions on their freedoms in order to encourage the creation of art. If the art created isn't being disseminated to the public, then what's the point? There's nothing moral about artificially propping up one particular business model.

hahaha

I can't imagine why people chuckle when someone cries, "You're infringing on my copyright!"

Copyright is an artificial construct, as antiquated as the buggy whip. Those who make their living around it should investigate other plans.

The set of people whose living is built around copyright includes all software developers. If it weren't for the GPL we wouldn't even have Linux as it exists today because the GPL is only possible because of copyright protection. Hell, the only reason the site upon which we are commenting exists is because of the financial incentives enabling the industry for which YC seeks to invest!

I'm quite happy with my career, but thanks for the suggestion.

This is the same crowd that gets out the torches and pitchforks when one website uses CSS that looks kinda like another website.

No, the void where the selection for movies you can rent is abysmal. The vast majority of films I want to watch never seem to end up on Amazon or iTunes. Or if they do, you can only buy them but not rent them. I just want to pay $4 and watch a film. Piracy let's me do that. The film industry doesn't.

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