Being used by SaaS business owners who would have a fit about evil users if someone posted an app that allowed people to use their service for free. The hypocrisy that tech deserves to be paid but writers and musicians and filmmakers don't is disgraceful. Excuses about publishers being involved or SaaS having stronger protections against unauthorized use than reading or watching or listening don't cut it.
You can want an infinite library of content for free, but know that you are quite literally denying the creators of that library payment each time you enjoy their work for free. Having the skills to pick a lock doesn't authorize you to take away your neighbors livelihood.
I'm not sure how you came to the conclusion that people believe "tech deserves to be paid but writers and musicians and filmmakers don't".. people release cracked software all the time, I'm sure a lot of HN readers has used a cracked version of Windows, or Photoshop, paid .apk file, an AAA title, you name it..
There's also plenty of evidence to suggest that these industries more often than not benefit from the increased publicity the unauthorized content brings.
It's far more common to see upvoted hacks for bypassing content access controls here on HN. Tools for unauthorized access to software are generally either explicitly described as for research only or flagged to oblivion here.
> There's also plenty of evidence to suggest that these industries more often than not benefit from the increased publicity the unauthorized content brings
Seriously? Talk to the people whose songs and films and games are being pirated. The idea that they benefit from it, statistically speaking, is pure nonsense and the exceptions to that rule are so far from the norm as to be the most extreme of cherry picking examples.
I'm not sure what kind of software cracks you'd expect to see upvoted here? I've seen articles about torrent sites upvoted very frequently, the same torrent sites we use to download paid software. I also remember reading an interesting article about how Adobe benefitted from young people using their cracked software because it helped establish a market dominance that strongly encouraged companies to buy Adobe software because that's what people know (even if they never paid for it).
The reason you often see websites that bypass article paywalls shared here is because pretty much all these publishers violate people's privacy (something a lot of HN readers care deeply about), their websites are extremely annoying with regard to autoplaying videos, asking for silly permissions such as microphone, redirecting to other articles if you scroll too far, and well, it's a lot easier to bypass these paywalls since they give free access to crawlers (a concept a lot of HN readers disagree with). Not to mention that more than half the content posted on HN benefit from websites like outline.com.
As for the benefits of piracy, I suggest you simply Google 'benefits of piracy' and read all the studies yourself. I also suggest you take a moment to consider that not all content is available in all countries at the same time. In fact, many countries often have to wait weeks for the content to become legally available in their country (when I was younger I even had to wait years for some series). I'd say it's safe to assume that without piracy then you can expect about half the online discussion to disappear. Not to mention that a lot of people who pirate content often obtained access to this content legally as well. For instance, I might download an MP3 of a song I also listen to with my Spotify subscription, or that I listened to a hundred times on YouTube.. Or download a movie that I previously watched at the cinema, or begin to pay for content I previously thought I would never pay for as a result of the pirated content growing on me. It's also important not to forget that the quality of the pirated content is often a lot inferior (unless you wait a long time), meaning those who choose to watch in 420p-like quality rather than paying for 4k-like quality would be extremely unlikely to pay for it (assuming it's even an option for them).
Coming from 10+ years in the game industry, articles on the benefits of software piracy are very rarely written by people who make the software that is being pirated. Those articles are more commonly written by people who like benefiting from the use of pirated software and want to justify their actions. I get it, you like getting free software and movies. Don't forget that you are quite literally taking the fruits of someone else's labors for free, labors that if you had done yourself as a business you would not feel it would be cool for others to take from you for free.
I have seen my paid Unity plugin pop up on torrent sites like kickasstorrents, x1337x.ws, etc. It didn't affect my feelings towards piracy at all. Throughout my life, myself and the people I've been surrounded with, have always been too young to pay for content in the first place, or mixed piracy with various forms of contributions (word of mouth, online discussions, previously/later paid, bundled into subscription services, or consumed in other legal manners.. the work I pirated and never contributed to (other than momentarily increasing the seed count) is work that I would've never paid for in the first place). I think people blame piracy because they don't understand the benefits, or because it's so easy to blame piracy as opposed to admitting shortcomings with regard to the quality of the work and/or poor marketing.
You can want an infinite library of content for free, but know that you are quite literally denying the creators of that library payment each time you enjoy their work for free. Having the skills to pick a lock doesn't authorize you to take away your neighbors livelihood.