It is illegal and immoral. It steals the rightful intellectual property of directors and developers who are only trying to make a living. If you want to be a thief so badly, then rob a federal bank.
It is illegal and immoral. It steals the rightful intellectual property of directors and developers who are only trying to make a living. If you want to be a thief so badly, then rob a federal bank.
I 100% support the writers strike and I want them to make more money. I don’t pirate content to avoid paying; I do it because the studios make it so damn hard to get their content legitimately.
As Gabe Newell said, “Piracy isn’t a price issue, it’s a service issue.” I would love to pay for the content but I’m not going to manage 15 different services to do so. Not to mention geoblocking and region specific content make it impossible to get some content even if you pay for every service. Nope, I’ll just download it all and enjoy it all in one place; the fact that it’s free is just a nice sideffect. If there was a paid service that did the same I would happily pay for it. As it is I haven’t pirated a single videogame since I started using Steam over a decade ago because I can just get everything I want there.
Not to mention the potential privacy issues that come with registering for so many of these services, which often also bank on selling user data.
This is what the OG Netflix was. It solved the delivery issue Gabe has so famously talked about. I stopped pirating when Netflix launched and used it for years. Then every company had to splinter out their own streaming service taking a reasonable monthly fee back to cable prices and a fragmented ecosystem. I’ve gone back to solving the delivery issue with a $60 a year VPN and piracy. Am I proud about it? Absolutely not. Am I going to continue until there is a better answer? 100%. We’ve gone SIGNIFICANTLY backwards from where Netflix started.
And yes, I get I can subscribe to services here and there then drop them but that still comes back to the delivery issue. I have to actively manage services and make sure I cancel them when I don’t need them anymore. This is a huge inconvenience and not something I have a desire to try and manage. Give me back my OG Netflix dammit!
I buy and rip Blu-rays. I also buy digital content on Movies Anywhere from time to time. Streaming exclusive shows are hard, but usually I just don’t watch them as much because of it.