Yeah and I hate pirating. Don't get me wrong, I do it, but only because Disney+ isn't available in Cyprus while I'm traveling or what have you. I make triple what would put me in the 1% in Canada. I can easily afford to pay for content. It's only UX issue for me, not a resource constraint. I'm happy to fund creators, but please just make things easy, transparent, reliable, and high quality.
I can't count the number of times I've tried to pay for something legitimately only to have to resort to piracy because of one flaw or another. Disney (and similar) should be hosting weekly Ask HN posts to fix their cyber issues they're so obvious.
There's no reason to need to take a "moral" stance here. Our rights as consumers to have and hold things without third-party DRM are being systematically ignored, and we are being forced into a bullshit rental model where no one provider holds everything you want. Piracy solves this problem.
You should be proud to pirate, proud of sticking it to the assholes that want to control us and our entertainment, proud of wounding an industry that tries to wriggle out of compensating the real artists as much as it can through shifty accounting, predatory contracts. and laughably low royalties payouts.
