by philipallstar 14 hours ago
> They all had their chance. They blew it.
This is so silly. It's like saying "Sweet manufacturers all had the chance to sell the same sweets, and they blew it. So I just nick most sweets." Just say "I don't like paying for things and can get away with this, and my ethics only work in public or when I'm forced to obey them." And then we're done.
Are you saying I wouldn’t steal a car, or a handbag, or a television, or a dvd? So piracy is a crime?
Are you really making that argument in 2025? You must be very young.
Bittorrent didn’t become popular because no one wanted to pay for things. In fact people stopped when Netflix was good. I stopped, all my friends stopped. It was no longer a mainstream thing. We even put up with a few price hikes. Then 1 service became whatever and people started torrenting and streaming sites started popping up.
Everyone was willing to pay for convenience. No ones wants to pay even more for in convenience.
You’ll note music piracy is not really a thing anymore. Thanks Spotify.
Sweets have a cost, and constitute a straightforward loss to someone if stolen. Digital copies of a file are clearly different.
There's plenty of valid arguments against piracy, but equating it to zero-sum material theft is not one of the strong ones.
This argument has always confused me. Yes, it's true that a digital copy of a video can be duplicated endlessly in a way a physical item cannot. But... so?
It's an item available for purchase at a price. If you take it without paying that price then the seller is out money they would otherwise have received. If everyone pirated Netflix's output then they would have to shut down, just the same as a grocery store would if everyone stole their produce. The only reason that doesn't happen is because piracy is a minority activity.
Seriously how old are some of the people responding? An entire generation already went through this.
Bootleg DVDs, pirated files were common place. I could literally go out whenever and spend change on a VCD. Or a friend would have a copy of whatever movie on their HD. I’d go to anime screenings where people would bring their RAID arrays full of fan subbed anime. Music was pirated all over the place. Digital players just made music piracy more common. Everyone used BitTorrent. Everyone. People got sued. ISPs used to send out letters saying “we think you’re torrenting. Please stop or we’ll cancel your service”.
You know what didn’t happen? The entertainment industry didn’t collapse. You know why? Because none of these people were never going to spend money on entertainment. You know what I did if I couldn’t afford to see a movie or get a new CD in college? Something else.
When Netflix started streaming, they fixed all this. We all stopped BitTorrenting because Netflix was easier. They know how to fix it and they fixed it for a while. Sell us convenience. But I’m not paying and managing 5 subscriptions.
Personally, I can pay for media, so I believe it's ethical that I do. If someone in my position chooses not to pay, there's a pretty solid argument that the media company is out money they could have had otherwise.
However, not everyone who pirates something was ever going to buy it in the first place. A huge portion of the world lives in sufficiently deep poverty that the option was either: have the thing for free or not have it at all. These folks don't represent lost sales.
Luckily though, "price" is not the same thing as "cost". If they watch for free, it doesn't cost us anything.
Just out of curiosity, how certain are you that "piracy is a minority activity"?
I agree overall, but it is a lot different when each further thievery requires no additional work (since you're not streaming from them). It'd be more like paying someone each time you walk in your door, for the lifetime of the door. In this case they can also take the door off anytime they want, put ads on it, or do pretty much whatever they want.