[Louis Rossmann] Piracy is COMPLETELY justified: Louis tries NetFlix and remembers why

I mean yeah it's selfish, but it is definitely righting a huge injustice:

There is literally no customer centric way to watch these shows, or most modern media at all. Where can I literally buy shows that I can then resell. Where can I get a subscription service that's focused on giving me the best content possible and not trying to squeeze value out of me by influencing what I watch or selling my metrics or up selling me to a bigger plan after killing the previous plan or any number of other dark practices. Where can I buy DRM free offline files of these shows so I can watch them on an airplane on my own hardware without Internet?

It's fucked up that there is literally no way for people to buy their entertainment and not be fucked over more for trying to do it the legal way and spending money. And piracy needs to exist as a breaking point to stop these companies from getting even worse.

If you are a gullible consumer whose devices are always connected to the internet, you don't notice you're getting a worse service. Unfortunately, way too many people are falling for this.

Luckily, at least PC gamers are largely outspoken about DRM and there are pretty popular platforms that cater to them. But console games and media (other than some e-books)? No end of DRM in sight.
- at least PC gamers are largely outspoken about DRM and there are pretty popular platforms that cater to them
  
  I fear the day that's no longer the case. Feels like gaming is becoming more "proprietary platform first" with every year.
  
  The Steam Deck has helped bring it to light. I loved the Hitman games, for example, but I won't buy the studio's 007 game if that has the same always-online-singleplayer shite.
- Steam is full of DRM and people still worship Valve. If people actually gave a shit about DRM, they wouldn't accept that bs. They would force publishers to release DRM-free games on GOG.
  
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  The good that steam does for linux currently outweighs the DRM issue present in steam. It why they are catching less heat than others for it.
  
  I don't use Steam, but I think the sentiment was that Steam's DRM is less anti-consumer.
  
  It is but they also allow crap like Denuvo on there. But I always buy on GOG if I can. Having access to my own copy of a game wins out every time.
Hence why the people on the internet needs to reject people coming here to profit.

There's no middle ground in trying to keep the internet good and having it be a platform to hock stuff.

We should go back to the roots. Promote collaboration and be hostile to those people trying to manufacture scarcity online
- I'm not against platforms, if they actually compete on features and not content.
  
  This somewhat works for music. Spotify, Apple Music, Deezer, YT music all have pretty much the same catalog.
  
  Why are you OK with platforms?
  
  Giving that all of them have shown you that the end state is to reduce the features and quality of content while making you pay more and more for this stuff.
  
  We had the perfect opportunity. We had a new thing to shape and mold for future generations. Instead We let the people in who ruined every other thing we enjoyed. What I can't understand is how people thought they could let them in and also think it would somehow be different.
  
  The right move is to do everything possible to make the internet anti profitable. The minute anyone. Tries we should copy and share it to infinity. Crack all the software. Treat everything the way NFTs were treated. Move the needle back to what we started with a space for hobbyist and enthusiast to create and share information without the endless pursuit of profit enshitifying every space we enjoy
- I get the spirit of that, but actual creators (not executives and investors) still need money. We can't fully rid the internet of monetizable platforms without harming them.
  
  For sure. We all need money. But I'm not willing to accept all the stuff that comes with it. Which is why I believe there isn't a middle ground. I think what the internet could be and evolve into is much greater than some creator making money by exploiting its spaces.
  
  But also, they can make money in what I'm proposing. What I'm saying is it shouldn't be a place where that is the creators main motivation for being here.
  
  These creators end up with the same behaviors as any Spotify, twitter, Facebook executive. There are inherent barriers with modern online creators that work against the good internet we all want. Its insidious and not as evident as it is with the bigger players. But they are all the same.
I've been buying movies and series on Bluray, which I can rip and resell. Not every show has a physical release, but the most popular do and you do not have to watch every show there is.
- It's not about percentages or watching everything. It's about I want to watch what I want to watch, and usually that's the opposite of the popular stuff.
  
  Also let's be real if we have to resort to going out physically to buy plastic disks that I'll just immediately throw away after ripping, something is still drastically wrong.

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No, it's just stealing stuff. I'm a shameless pirate, but stop pretending that this is some noble resistance. The reality is that its a luxury someone is selling for a price, and we don't want to pay the price, so we steal it. You could always just not consume it. That would be the noble move.

They're assholes so I just don't give a fuck.
- That logic would be valid... Two centuries ago.
  
  These gigantic companies lobbied your government to change how fair use and, most importantly, intellectual property laws worked.
  
  Disney took classic stories in the public domain and made bank on top of them - and used this same money to prevent you from ever doing the same with their content.
  
  So they abused their size to change the dynamic here.
  
  Maybe, just maybe, that "justifies" it for some content, but certainly does not justify it for all, or even most, content. I know I'm not out pirating old Disney shit that should be open to all for free. And just looking at what's popular on trackers, this seems pretty common. So even if nothing had changed most, if not all, of the content that is pirated would be protected.
  
  Again, they're shit, and I don't care. But why not admit what you are doing? Why try to justify it? Just accepted it for what it is: you're a dirty pirate happy to steal from them because they are shit.
  
  People are saying it is morally justified to pirate which is the same conclusion your seemed to have reached. Nobody is saying it is legally justified.
  
  It might just be a definition thing, but I doubt it, considering how pretty much every argument I've gone across is implying I said it was wrong. I view it as a neutral thing, but not justified. We're talking about illegally taking luxury things because we don't want to pay the price. If we were talking about no one getting hurt to take something you need, 100% justified. But we are talking about taking something you just want. I have no moral qualms about doing it, but I don't claim to be justified in doing so.
  
  Like I think it would be justified if it were for some piece of software that you really need but can't afford, or would really make your life much easier. But for watching old Seinfeld episodes, or getting a new video game on release, it's not.
- It's not stealing, it's unauthorised redistribution. They don't lose anything from piracy, except for potential customers, which is a pretty intangiable concept. Don't think it's even remotely as bad as going into a tech store and taking all their DVR's, or even literal piracy by chasing down another boat with guns and taking their cargo.
  
  Don’t think it’s even remotely as bad as going into a tech store and taking all their DVR’s,
  
  We're getting into the pedantic weeds, but I never said nor implied it was this bad. I don't even think it's bad at all, as I said elsewhere, it's chaotic neutral. it's just trying to paint it as justified is ridiculous.
  
  We want something, we aren't willing to pay the price to the person who actually owns it, and because no one gets hurt, we don't have moral qualms taking it. But at the end of the day we are illegally taking something just because we want it. There's no "justified" in that at all.
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- sharing is literally not stealing

I'm not a proud pirate, but I'll never be a proud data harvest free-for-all resource. there is no glamour to any of this, but I will patiently await a reasonable offering. in the music industry it also worked. as well as the video game industry. you can easily buy honest drm free games

New games are just annoying to pirate, old games and ROMs sure. Music I buy all the time but I also pirate all the time, every artist I buy music from and see live I probably first pirated.
- I'd argue new AAA games are more annoying to buy.
  
  The one modern-ish game I bought was Max Payne 3 and oh my god the fucking rockstar launcher. It needs to run in the background, it needs constant forced updates for nothing (i have very slow aussie internet) and it runs like shit. Not to mention the launcher bugged out and I lost my save half way through due to some cloud shit bug.
  
  After buying like 300 games on steam It's first game that triggered the thought, I actually regret buying this game through official channels. The paid experience is genuinely worse than the pirate copy.
  
  Oh yeah I have Steam but any other launcher or management software would be strong motivation to pirate. I'll buy new AAA games for the one reason that they're mostly shitty on launch and are constantly updated to fix issues, and it's easier to just update through Steam than constantly pirate and install it. Or things like Tears of the Kingdom where I don't even have the console to run it on.

It's more like Civil Disobedience on account that Copyright is an entirelly artificial construct (the idea that you can't copy - not take, just copy, with your own resources - something is pretty anti-natura, which is especially obvious in the more traditional domains like storytelling) and even the one reasonable rationalle for it - that it incentivises creation in a way that enriches society - has been entirelly nullified by making the entering of copyrighted works into the Public Domain take longer in average from the time of creation than the lifespan of the longuest living human ever: it mainly enriches a tiny fraction of people, not society as a whole, even though the costs of compliance are bourne by society as a whole.

It's about not obbeying unfair laws in a way that doesn't harm anybody and only damages the interests of those whose gain comes entirelly from the unfairness of said laws: so not selfless like a Robin Hood situation, but also not the pure selfishness of trying to get more than others.

It kinda is though.

in a pretty limited, cultural archival and dissemination point of view, mayyyyyyyyybe.

the vast majority just want free entertainment.
- No, they want easily accessible entertainment for a reasonable price.
  
  Currently I'm supposed to pay 3-4 services at 10-15€ to get a somewhat reasonable library. There's up to 60€, each month. For a collection of services, that I'm realistically using maybe 2h a day. That's completely unreasonable.
  
  And if you see, that especially Netflix seems to spend 90% of that money on extremely low quality crap, this price tag seems even less reasonable.
  
  This. Why would I go through that whole rigamaroll when I can go to one site and it has everything, often with robust search that’ll actually find what I’m looking for when I misspell Benjamin Cucumberpatch’s name.
  
  *Benadryl Cucumberpatch
  
  What are your thoughts on borrowing DVDs from a local library?
  
  It's interesting that even though technology advances and public options could evolve with them, people are still expected to jump through archaic hoops. Even if there needs to be a quota for lending, that could be handled digitally too.
  
  The way media companies act today, if libraries weren't already a thing, they would not allow them to be invented.
  
  Agreed, we definitely could not make libraries today if they were not already around.
  
  There aren't any in my area.
  
  Oh. Well that's a bummer.
  
  How much would you be willing to pay for your entertainment? Historically 1$/hour isn’t a bad deal. Games used to cost double that on average. Movies have always been 5-10$ per hour if adjusted for inflation. A book is cheaper (say, 20$ for maybe 60h of reading), but an audiobook is around that 1$/hour you’re complaining about.
  
  If you’re really complaining about how you cannot afford to be entertained, I’d surmise it’s a salary problem where the minimum wage hasn’t followed inflation almost everywhere on earth, and not the price of entertainment itself.
  
  My issue with streaming isn’t a cost but a categorization. Even if I subscribe to five services there always seems to be two problems; 1. how do I find shit to watch and on what service, and 2. there always seem to have that elusive content that I haven’t subscribed to and would take me ten minutes to add all my information which honestly is just a blocker. I want TV to be more like music is right now (from a UX), even if I have to pay extra for that convenience.
  
  I'm absolutely able to pay 100€ a month, for me personally it's not a salary problem.
  
  But I'm comparing streaming to public access TV here in Germany, which is currently 18€ per month and household and somehow manages to produce something like 20 TV channels, 50 radio stations, tons of podcasts, top notch news coverage, pensions for thousands of old journalists and doing all of that within the famously efficient German bureaucracy. So, how exactly is Netflix spending its money? Especially if you keep in mind that they can distribute most of their self-produced content worldwide.
  
  I know your question is rhetorical, but they are paying it on the owners' salaries.
  
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  Or you could act like you have a spine and don't accept every abuse companies throw at you.
  
  I'm absolutely ready to pay for entertainment, but not that much for such a bad experience. Either I pirate at least some of my content, or I simply don't watch it. It's that easy.
  
  Companies have to understand that the free market works both ways. If you don't deliver, I won't pay.
  
  It's interesting how "acting like a grown up" here entails to submitting to the demands of corporations and rejecting the reality that they don't have absolute control, no matter how much they want to.
  
  Are you going to tell me a poor minimum wage worker is the spoiled immature one, compared to a media executive?
  
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  So you just wanted to do some vague moralizing without thinking of what that would imply? Alright then.
  
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  What do you mean, "at it again". If you don't want me to make inferences about what you said, you want me to just stick exactly to your words and forget my own understanding of the world, what is left to do but call it but vague moralizing?
  
  People can "act like a grown up and accept not having everything always"... or they can pirate. You can not like that, but that is an objective possibility that they have in our world. Just as you don't seem to be moved by the idea that poorer people want entertainment too, I'm not particularly morally shaken by massive media companies like Netflix not getting as much money as they possibly could. Especially when people cannot afford it, why does it matter if they still watch it or not? Netflix can't lose money that it would never get to begin with.
  
  I could say that this sort of moralizing seems to come from the assumption that the market is fair and just but you are probably gonna whine at me that "I never said it was", and if that's how you want to go about this conversation I don't think there's much a point in continuing. You said what you said, I said what I said and that's it.
- Right now, I pirate mostly because I can't afford paying for my entertainment (like the vast majority of people where I live). But even if I had disposable income, I would not pay for some media because I don't want to spend money and be restricted more than if I didn't. I would not mind spending money for DRM-less copies. And even if this wasn't possible, I would rather pay for the piece and then pirate it DRM-less to truly own it (like I already did with some games when I was better-off).
- Sorta.
  
  At a very narrow per-tree level it's indeed about a selfish desire of the pirate.
  
  At a broader forest-wide level it's about the available choices having been artificially narrowed by legislation that creates a monopoly on copying. As seen more in the gaming world (mainly with GoG, Steam and indie titles) and even streaming video a few years ago, even with artificially narrow choices by law if the competition is still broad enough to provide lots of options at good prices, far fewer individuals will engage in Piracy, though as we see with streaming video, the artificial monopoly legislation ends up being sooner or later leveraged to narrow the available choices and Piracy flourishes in response.
  
  It's not by chance that the very same individuals who have simpletion takes on just about every subject (not saying you, just some commenters here) also seem have the simpleton "piracy is bad because the law says so" take when commenting on this.
  
  It's not the pirates that are Robin hood in this analogy, it's the support network enabling piracy.
- There's definitely people only looking for free content, but others like me pay a fair amount of money for the services needed to get going a Plex server, for example. I pay for a VPN to stream outside my network, I pay for JDownloader, a MediaFire account, a Plex subscription, etc...
  
  It's cheaper to just stick to Netflix and their horrible catalog and practices than to run my server the way I do, but it's not just about the money.

Hollywood put billions into the next generation disc, blu-ray, and you would still pay extra at Blockbuster for being late if it wasn't for piracy.

While piracy isn't without problem it is the closest we get to "supply and demand". Piracy balances the scale.

At some level it happens due to people wanting stuff for free... but if it's the consequence of that is that works are preserved and disseminated, that's more valuable for our culture than when companies vault them and lose them, or when they never release them at all, like Warner has been doing lately.

One might say that these companies have all the right to make these works unavailable, but this is clearly a situation where the "proper" is more detrimental than the "clandestine". After all, the way these companies handle it, when the ridiculously excessive copyright length is over and the works are supposed to cease their artificial monopoly and be returned to the Public Domain from which everyone takes inspiration, there might be nothing left. A DVD is unlikely to last 100 years.

This is not a matter of life and death but culture has its value.

Most people don't have the understanding to fully appreciate the consequences of the current system of "free" services. That's why it's the job of governments to put robust consumer protections in place. The Europeans have been making some moves in the right direction, lately. Unfortunately, they also increasingly have been veering towards totalitarianism in their moves to enforce mandatory trusted certificates, weakening of encryption and other hare-brained schemes.
- If by "free" services you mean ad-driven internet services, I don't think this is as much a consequence of those, rather than the growing power of media companies and their influence over the law and technological development. They were fiercely against piracy since ever, their attempt to vilify VHS and cassete tapes comes to mind, but now copyright law is stricter than ever, digital ownership has been eroded into nearly non-existence through absurd one-sided License Agreements and devices increasingly act as if storefronts of the manufacturers rather than as a tools purchased by the customer.
  
  This is not because there aren't enough people paying, but because the media companies are never satisfied. Loads of people subscribed to streaming but it isn't ever enough, it doesn't guarantee that their quality and collections will remain as good.

Exactly. The bottom line is it’s still stealing. Do it all you want but don’t pretend you’re some hero, steal it with a smile on your face.

It's illegal but not immoral, is the argument. Those two are a Venn diagram.