this post was submitted on 03 Feb 2025
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I would still pirate. I like to have the files instead of proprietary apps
What if they gave you the files, with an easy download button ( with rate limits on downloads per user to avoid mass abuse )? Then, Netflix is basically providing a debrid service, which many people who pirate already pay more than 5$ for. Your VPN for torrenting is likely more than 5$. It's already trivially easy to rip a movie off a website ( even with DRM ), so this is not a real content control loss for them.
If they offered a service like GOG for movies I think it would be worth it. I don't have much time for movies though so I actually will buy several films a year on UHD Blu-ray. I only really pirate films that are either out of print or not available in my country on disc.
Funilly enough as somebody who has been using the Internet since being a working class teen in a poor European nation in the early 90s and thus knowing all about pirating, GoG is what made me stop pirating games (and even after they came up with GoG Galaxy I still kept downloading offline installers, plus my purchases in Steam have always been pretty limited in comparison to those in GoG exactly because in Steam my access to install a game can be removed at any time) whilst things like Netflix never stopped my pirating of Movies and TV-Series exactly because it was a streaming service which I would have to pay forever to maintain access to the Films and Series I liked rather than a Film and Series store were I could buy to keep (and, adding to this, during the peak period of VHS tapes and DVDs I actually did buy a lot of physical media).
Anecdotal, I know, but it's funny that my behaviour over the years almost perfect matches what you describe.
I want to like GoG but their Linux support can be pretty awful at times. It took over a week for X4 to update the Linux version on GoG compared to steam that in the end I refunded it and bought on steam. Also proton is pretty nice to have.
Same tbh. I like having a hard data copy of the things I enjoy, and have pride in my offline music library, which has been neatly filed with all the proper metadata tagged on. Now I can boot up Audacious (Linux) or MusicBee (Windows) and pick the genre I'm feeling that day. Or I can go out for a walk with one of the iPods I've restored and leave my phone at home.