# Privacy positioning — piracy objections & surveillance

How to answer **"this enables piracy"** from studios, press, or commenters — and
the **privacy / duty-to-consumers** frame behind TV Anarchy. Personal ethics +
GTM guidance, not legal advice.

---

## The objection

Major rightsholders and trade groups routinely argue that personal media tools,
peer distribution, or anything outside licensed streaming **facilitate copyright
infringement** and must be restricted.

That objection will land on TV Anarchy if the project gets attention — especially
with the press tagline *Napster for Netflix* (positioning, **not** one of the three
arguments below).

---

## Positioning model

| Layer | Role |
|-------|------|
| **Tagline** | *Napster for Netflix* — Netflix-like UX on a library you own |
| **Arg 1** | Surveillance asymmetry |
| **Arg 2** | Budget asymmetry (Netflix → Blockbuster → subscription stack) |
| **Arg 3** | Open source → unkillable |
| **Product fact** | What the software is (lead in press) |
| **What we build** | Local-first design (implementation, not a numbered arg) |

---

## Our response (structure)

Product fact first in press; then tagline + three arguments as depth allows.

### Product fact (always lead here in press)

TV Anarchy is **client software for a library on hardware you operate**. It does
not operate a public catalog, sell access, or run advertising. We market **watch +
library + custody**, not acquisition. Users are responsible for what they store
and play.

### Arg 1 — Surveillance asymmetry

The same industry that attacks personal media infrastructure often **builds and
sells granular behavioral surveillance** — advertising IDs, cross-site tracking,
purchase graphs, viewing histories tied to real identity — with minimal meaningful
consent and maximal data retention.

When that data is **subpoenaed, purchased, or breached**, it becomes input to
**state mass surveillance**: dragnet requests, movement and association inference,
political targeting. That is not hypothetical; it is documented across jurisdictions.

**Founder position:** As long as ad-tech and tracking data are treated as normal
business inventory — and are available to governments at scale — large media and
ad platforms are **failing a basic duty to consumers**. They profit from intimacy
with your life while externalizing the political risk. Critiquing home-library
software while operating surveillance capitalism is not a neutral safety stance;
it is **asymmetric power**.

### Arg 2 — Budget asymmetry (Netflix → Blockbuster → subscription stack)

**Founder position:** Netflix originally won by **undercutting** the rental
model — no late fees, flat monthly price, endless shelf (Christensen disruption
literature; consumer surplus in early DVD-by-mail). Blockbuster died. Consumers
were promised **cheaper, better** entertainment.

Then everyone caught up. Studios fragmented into **SVOD silos** (Disney+, Max,
Peacock, Apple TV+, …). Password crackdowns, ad tiers on paid plans, and repeated
**price hikes** reversed the bargain. Industry surveys now show **subscription
fatigue**, rising **stacked spend**, and churn — Americans averaging multiple
services and **~$77/month (~$924/year)** across subscriptions (Bango 2024); 42%
feel they have too many services (Simon-Kucher); consultants explicitly warn
streamers risk recreating **cable-bundle dynamics** they once disrupted.

Consumers are often **paying more than the cord they cut** — for less unity, more
account management, and libraries that rotate in and out. Critiquing personal
media infrastructure while operating a **re-bundled, price-inflated rental layer**
is a second asymmetric stance: you disrupted Blockbuster on budget, then rebuilt
the bill.

**TV Anarchy angle:** up-front storage + software beats **infinite recurring rent**
for households that already keep files. Not “free content” — **cost ownership**
and UX without twelve checkout flows.

### Arg 3 — Open source → unkillable (resilience asymmetry)

**Founder position:** Proprietary streaming is a **remote kill switch** — price
hikes, catalog rotation, account bans, company death, region blocks. One legal
letter to a vendor can end your UI. **Open source** inverts that: the software is
**forkable**, auditable, and continuable without the original maintainer. If TV
Anarchy is attacked, abandoned, or sued into hiding, the code and protocols
survive in public — operators keep running builds; the community forks. That is
**unkillable** in the sense that matters for infrastructure: no single company's
permission gate.

Scholarship frames this as **fork governance** and **sustainability** in OSS
(Nyman et al., TIM Review); EFF's **public interest internet** cases (e.g. CDDB
outliving corporate outrage) show open systems **outlasting** proprietary
products. Vendor-lock-in literature documents the opposite failure mode — SaaS
discontinuation and cloud exit costs when one party controls the binary.

**Honest limits:** Open source is not legal immunity (EFF documents copyright
exposure for developers). "Unkillable" means **no sole chokepoint**, not
**above the law**. TV Anarchy should ship under a license that preserves fork
and self-host rights (policy TBD in repo).

**TV Anarchy angle:** personal media stack should not die because a startup
pivots or a platform delists your client. Source available + local-first = stack
that survives its author.

### What we build (credibility — not a numbered arg)

TV Anarchy is architecturally biased toward **local-first** and **open** (when
released):

| Streaming / ad platform default | TV Anarchy default |
|--------------------------------|-------------------|
| Account + vendor-held viewing graph | Index on your machines |
| Ad ID / tracking pixels | No ad business model |
| Opaque recommendation cloud | Local catalog + optional friend editions |
| Path-level analytics | Net roadmap: **contentKey** observations only; paths forbidden |
| Vendor can revoke your app | **Forkable** source; self-host builds |
| Catalog disappears when license ends | Files on **your** disks remain playable |

We are not claiming legal immunity. We are claiming **design intent**: minimize
data that can be harvested later — by companies *or* states.

---

## Pull quotes (founder voice)

**Long (blog, newsletter):**

> Studios will say tools like this enable piracy. Meanwhile the streaming and ad
> stack they depend on normalizes tracking data that governments use for mass
> surveillance — and the same industry already proved it would undercut Blockbuster
> on price, then stack subscriptions until families pay more than ever. As long as
> that trade is treated as legitimate business, they are failing the people who
> pay them. I built TV Anarchy for a library I control, on disks I pay for once,
> without shipping my watch graph to a broker or my wallet to a dozen renewals.

**Medium (interview):**

> I'm not building a piracy service. I'm building home software for files on your
> server. The industry critique I'd ask back: why is it acceptable to sell
> fine-grained behavioral data that ends up in state dragnets, but unacceptable
> for someone to play video from their own disk without a license server in the
> loop?

**Short (comment / social):**

> Piracy accusations from ad-tracking empires ring hollow while viewing data feeds
> mass surveillance and streaming stacks cost more than the cable you cut. Open
> source so the stack can't be killed by one vendor — local library, local state.

---

## Press-safe variant (less polemical)

For journalists who will quote you literally:

> TV Anarchy is personal media-stack software, not a streaming replacement. On
> privacy: commercial platforms collect extensive viewing and behavioral data that
> routinely reaches government requests at scale. We think consumers deserve
> local-first alternatives that don't centralize that graph. Copyright enforcement
> and surveillance policy are separate conversations; conflating them mostly
> serves incumbents.

Use founder-voice quotes on **your** blog; use press-safe variant in **one-pager
follow-ups** if tone matters.

---

## FAQ linkage (quick answers)

### "Netflix was supposed to save money — why are we paying more?"

Early streaming **disrupted** video rental on **price and convenience** (flat fee,
no late fees). Fragmentation + price increases produced **subscription fatigue**
and total spend that rivals or exceeds old cable for many households (industry
surveys: Bango 2024, Simon-Kucher). Personal media on owned storage is a **budget
ownership** play — not zero cost, but no perpetual stack. See
[academic-research.md §9](./academic-research.md#9-streaming-economics-netflix-blockbuster-and-subscription-stacking).

### "Aren't you just enabling piracy?"

The app organizes and plays media on **your** infrastructure. We don't market
infringement. The privacy question I'd raise in return: platforms that monetize
tracking have a poor record of protecting viewers from **state data access** —
see FAQ and this doc for the full frame.

### "Why bring politics into a media app?"

Mass surveillance **is** infrastructure politics. If your TV habit is indexed in
a cloud you don't control, that index has buyers. Personal media software is one
way to shrink the attack surface.

### "Does TV Anarchy protect you from the law?"

**No.** It reduces **commercial** data collection by not being an ad business and
by keeping state on your machines. It does not grant rights to specific content.
Users remain responsible for compliance where they live.

---

## GTM guardrails

| Do | Don't |
|----|-------|
| Pair piracy answers with **local-first design** | Lead launches with "stick it to studios" |
| Use surveillance asymmetry on **founder blog / newsletter** | Put "fascist states" in press release boilerplate |
| Cite **documented** government data requests (transparency reports) | Make specific legal claims about user immunity |
| Emphasize **no ad ID, no vendor watch graph** | Claim TV Anarchy "solves piracy" |

**Mainstream press:** product fact + press-safe privacy paragraph.  
**Homelab / privacy communities:** full asymmetry argument OK.  
**HN:** technical appendix + short asymmetry; don't feed copyright flame war.

---

## Product hooks that support the argument

Use these as **evidence**, not slogans:

- No account server; no centralized viewing database to subpoena from *us* (there is no us).
- Net pillar: observations keyed by `contentKey`, paths explicitly forbidden in editions.
- `friends` vs `network` trust tiers — federation without exporting raw watchlogs.
- iOS bridge is LAN/home-scoped, not a multi-tenant cloud.

---

## When studios / press call

1. **Acknowledge** the question without endorsing infringement.
2. **Redirect** to product definition (home library client).
3. **Optional** — one sentence on surveillance asymmetry (press-safe).
4. **Offer** technical appendix + privacy architecture; decline debate on specific titles.
5. **Never** — instruct users how to obtain copyrighted material in an interview.

---

## Related

- [academic-research.md](./academic-research.md) — scholarly sources for surveillance/piracy arguments
- [faq.md](./faq.md) — public Q&A
- [gtm-strategy.md](./gtm-strategy.md) — channel tone
- [technical-appendix.md](./technical-appendix.md) — Net privacy invariants
- Engineering: [`../../pillars/net.md`](../../pillars/net.md), [`../../schema/net/README.md`](../../schema/net/README.md)

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*This document states founder ethics and messaging strategy. It is not legal counsel.*