Convenience, I'd imagine. Not everybody wants to deal with ads or self-hosting.

I also know someone that subs to a pirate streaming site that they use for learning English. It has a solid library but also has dual subtitles on everything and categories based on vocabulary difficulty and accents. It's cheaper than a single legit subscription, but has way more value (both the language stuff and the massive pirated library).

When they remove access to content I paid for... Fuck em.

If buyin' ain't owning, piracy ain't stealin'

I have no problem paying for such things.

But when the distributors block access, and tell me buying ain't owning by removing access to what I've paid for, well fuck 'em.

I agree with you.

But we had a situation where consumers were happy and were paying for content, piracy dropped off, and it was insanely profitable for Netflix.

Then everyone got greedy and stuck their dicks in the pie and ruined it, and this is the backlash.

If you buy content digitally, it gets pulled from your library without your consent or recourse. If you steam you're paying more and more for less.

What we had was good, now none of my friends talk about TV shows because it starts with "hey, did you watch X, it's on paramount?" "No", "oh, nevermind".

It's a tragedy of the commons - as an economics problem it matters, sure, but copyright is an artificial monopoly, not a human right. We could provide these more efficiently with public funding of the arts or crowdfunds, without the need to make up imaginary property with imaginary ethics.

But if you want to sign up for a bunch of subscriptions because some might trickle down to the writers, be my guest.

I think most people would agree that artists should be fairly paid for their work. But when greedy, profiteering corporations are the ones commissioning and profiting from art, then IMO we have a moral duty to fuck with their exploitative business model.

And art should be accessible to everyone, not just the wealthy. There's a reason that piracy almost died out completely and then came back with a vengeance. People don't mind paying a reasonable price for art, the prices and accessibility of art has just become unfeasible.

I don't disagree, but isn't there something to be said for denying people access to the popular culture based on their ability to pay for it?

People need to expect to pay reasonable prices on a reasonable basis for art and entertainment, and pretending everyone should be cool with fifty different streaming services and never owning anything again is its own sort of immorality and lack of ethics.

People also should be able to pay the artist directly and not some billion dollar company who continue to try to squeeze the artists and limit creativeness all in servitude to the almighty dollar (or any other currency)

Gabe said it best! "The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. It's by giving those people a service that's better than what they're receiving from the pirates."

It's so funny to me that we have to circumvent the site's paywall in order to read an article about pirating.