logoalt Hacker News

matheusmoreiratoday at 2:08 AM0 repliesview on HN

That's what always gets me. Pirates get a superior product while paying customers get garbage. Netflix streams obscenely compressed "high definition" content while pirates get blu-ray remuxes painstakingly sourced from multiple Blu-Rays in order to select the best frames. Music industry releases compressed, clipping, horribly mastered tracks while pirates pull out all the stops to rip old vynils with insane equipment in order to get clean high dynamic range sound. Pirates keep playing at full speed while the genuine copy's obfuscated denuvo VM slowly churns and kicks them our when it fails to phone home to the corporation's dead servers. Nintendo makes some token effort to sell the same Mario ROM to people for the tenth time while pirates get cycle accurate emulators, ROM hacks, translations, save states, cheats, network multiplayer, graphics filters, universal compatibility, perfect A/V synchronization, fast forward, slow motion, frame advance, tool assisted speedruns, debuggers, disassemblers, anything you can think of.

I feel like a total moron every single time I "purchase" these things. The industry doesn't give a shit, only pirates do. Pirates spent thousands and thousands of dollars and absurd amounts of effort sourcing, scanning and cleaning up old Star Wars films. You'd think these trillionaire corporations would be able to exceed a bunch of enthusiast "pirates" in performance, but they don't give a shit. In fact they go out of their way to make everything worse by failing to make works available, badly editing or even censoring whatever they put out there and locking it all down with obnoxious DRM.