from Hacker News

Why I get my entertainment via BitTorrent

by luminarious on 5/12/11, 8:05 AM with 186 comments

• by billpg on 5/12/11, 11:24 AM

  As someone with money who enjoys a lot of American TV, I'm not really interested in excuses why these services are not available worldwide.

  Quit making excuses and make it happen. The torrenters don't seem to have any trouble building a global distribution network, and they are hiding from the law while simultaneously kicking your butt.

  If you don't want to make it happen, quit whining about losing money. I have money and you have TV shows, so let's make a deal.

• by Nate75Sanders on 5/12/11, 8:36 AM

  I try to explain this type of thing to people who are ardently anti-piracy:

  You can never, ever, expect people to miss out on the culture that's happening during their lives.

  If money, or geography, or whatever is preventing it, they'll still do the best they can to make sure they don't miss anything.

• by StudyAnimal on 5/12/11, 8:59 AM

  As an English speaker in Germany I was particularly interested in using things like iTunes (which is available here) to access TV.

  What do you know, it is exclusively German language content. And it is also only released when it airs in Germany rather than when it first airs in the US or the UK.

  Where is the logic there? If I wanted to get German language TV when it airs on TV, I would just watch TV.

  The whole system doesn't make sense.

• by yason on 5/12/11, 9:20 AM

  And that's why the European counterparts of MAFIAA shouldn't be able to appeal to lost sales in many of these countries because don't have any fucking sales to lose.

  I've long advocated a fair-use rule that where a copyrighted work in some format isn't readily for sale in some geographical area, then people in that area should have the legal right to produce a copy of it in that format for themselves. The format is relevant because if people want CDs or uncompressed FLAC albums but they can only buy a lousy DRM-ridden 128Kbit/s MP3 instead, it shouldn't count.

  Same goes with old music or films: if nobody's selling, people have the legal right to copy. If the copyright holder decides to start selling again, the legal right to copy goes away. Then the longevity of a copyright would matter much less.

• by ThomPete on 5/12/11, 9:19 AM

  There is no need to rationalize why you use Bittorrent, there is no argument to win and nothing to defend.

  It's not stealing, it's not not stealing it's just a fact that people will continue to use bittorrents as long as there is too much friction to get it legally.

  Bittorrent will be around as long as the content owners insist on localizing copyright and not offering their content to a globally oriented customer base.

• by mahrain on 5/12/11, 8:44 AM

  Same goes for Holland, this, and TV is very unreliable and a year behind the USA. Plus movies are usually released a few months after the USA.

• by markokocic on 5/12/11, 10:36 AM

  Well, this is just rationalizing.

  Stealing something (or obtaining it illegally) just because someone doesn't want to sell it to you (or give it to you for free) is still stealing (or obtaining it illegally), regardless of the fact that you want it so bad.

  As long as you own something, you have the right to choose if you want to sell it to some country, give it for free or do whatever else.

• by rb2k_ on 5/12/11, 12:44 PM

  I recently found an interesting DNS based service that will allow you to access some of them:

  http://blog.marc-seeger.de/2011/04/07/hulu-and-iplayer-outsi...

  The advantage over a VPN-based solution is that there is no need to route all of your traffic over the VPN. Most of the time they only redirect the geo-location stuff and once you receive the videostream URL, that transfer will go over your 'regular' connection. It also allows you to just put their DNS servers into your router and your Apple TV / Wii / iPad ... will automatically use the service.

  Security wise, they might be able to redirect any domain resolution to their servers, but they still won't be able to fake the SSL certificates. As long as you're using IMAPS/HTTPS/*S you should be fine I guess.

• by felxh on 5/12/11, 11:16 AM

  And even if some of these services are available in your country you might get screwed. For instance I once bought a music album on iTunes. A few weeks later a friend of mine sends me a link on grooveshark to a song from the same artist. I've never heard the song before but to my surprise it is supposed to be on the same album I own. I do a little research and find out that the album sold in US iTunes store contains two extra bonus tracks! I check to see if there is another version of the same album in my 'local' iTunes store, but no, it appears these two bonus tracks are only available in the US

• by martey on 5/12/11, 8:58 AM

  I don't think that the services mentioned want to exclude non-Americans. All of them deal with music or video, both of which require country-specific licensing.

• by warseph on 5/12/11, 1:47 PM

  Same thing happens in Argentina, I tried some times to buy certain games online, but for some weird reason for digital content, the purchased is limited to the US and Mexico. Why does this limitation even exist for digital content?

• by wyclif on 5/12/11, 8:34 AM

  Some of these (I'm looking at you, BBC iPlayer) aren't even available in the USA.

• by ajkessler on 5/12/11, 9:35 AM

  I'm going to guess that a lot of the reason these services aren't available in a lot of other countries is not that they don't want your money, but rather that your governments either have ridiculous regulations to navigate, or there are concerns about their ability to protect intellectual property rights.

• by vitolds on 5/12/11, 11:21 AM

  I would also add to this list audible.com which restricts certain books to US only. I am a platinum subscriber to audible, however, I couldn't get my hands on Stephen King's Under The Dome. So I got it from the thepiratebay pretty much on the next day. I did buy other King's books on audible though.

• by luminarious on 5/12/11, 12:11 PM

  Note that a large number of these are apps stores. I can imagine the licencing fees or whatnot being the showstoppers for audio/video, but what on earth is so difficult about selling applications?

• by rakkhi on 5/12/11, 11:35 AM

  I bought the Apple TV2 in the UK, was so excited to fire it up and switch on Netflix and Hulu and Justin.tv. #researchfail

• by jlgosse on 5/12/11, 1:34 PM

  Last I checked, Estonia can use Android Market. Although maybe that's one of the "new" additions?

• by AlexC04 on 5/12/11, 11:11 AM

  Why not start just one of those ? Seems like an opportunity.

• by oemera on 5/12/11, 10:41 AM

  Wait. This is YCombinator right? Why on earth does no-one create a startup to make buying digital copies easier wherever you live? Why is that so hard?