Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

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What's a pirate's utopia? (programming.dev)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

17 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Let's say an app came out that allowed pirating without consequences; that it connected every user to a fast, anonymous network, and users could donate anonymously to content creators and/or uploaders.

Piracy were so normal that even your grandma could just search "ahoy movie name", be directed to a third party store, download and install the "Ahoy App" and start watching movies and TV shows like on Popcorn Time or listen to music like on Napster and Spotify. It reached mainstream popularity and had download numbers like WhatsApp or TikTok.

Is this something we would want? Would the entertainment industry survive?

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago (3 children)

My utopia would just be a single reasonable paid service that provided everything. I pirate because its simply more convenient than 20 subscriptions.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

exactly. I have not pirated games in a long time because steam is at that perfect balance for me. With a few exceptions of course

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

For me, too, mostly. There are edge cases:

Things I know I want to have a copy of, that are unavailable outside of streaming. Favorite movies.
Things that are unavailable to me, because of regional locks. This most frequently happens with books, oddly; books that were never released in the US, and second-hand copies are hen's teeth. But also out of print (but not yet public domain) books, or books that have been withdrawn because of controversy. You can get a copy of Mein Kampf, but not It Happened on Mulberry Street SMH.
Things I've bought before, sometimes on multiple different media (LP, tape, CD) that I feel as if I've paid my dues and don't want to buy again.

But yeah, mostly it's that streaming services are the movie studios, and you'd need to subscribe to at least 4 to cover the majority of new content. This overlaps a lot with my first point, about wanting to have an offline, in-perpetuity copy.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Is this expectation unreasonable? If consumers look for a monopolized service then won't that service attempt to exploit the users? Just thinking out loud. I don't know what the solution is.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Unreasonable? Depends on what you consider reasonable. Yes absolutely they would try to exploit the users, in which case we go back to piracy. Perhaps a better solution would be federated content providers with some sort of combined (reasonable) fee determined by the providers collectively. We get one system to subscribe to, and pay one fee.