

The "other" side of file sharing - zemanel
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1071804/trivia

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latch
Ink is a really good movie - obviously subjective, but its a must see.

That point aside, there's something I just don't understand about some
pirates. Why do they insist on justifying stealing? I understand that, in this
case, its the owners of the art saying it worked out for them. Generally
though, just steal and shut up. Someone else (possibly an evil conglomerate)
owns the work and they have every right to discard your economic theories.
Sure, you can stick it to them, but, again, why justify it?

Is it because people don't think art should be owned?

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norswap
Saying piracy is theft is theoretically incorrect. Stealing something means
that it you takes something from someone who doesn't have it anymore. Digital
copy just doesn't work that way.

As for the question if it is good or bad, it's up to you. I'll just say that
to me at least, having thought long about it, intellectual property is a very
unnatural concept.

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lelele
Whilst I agree that no intellectual property whatsoever promotes progress, I
think that intellectual property protects the interests of people whose main
asset is their intellect. Think about someone who have spent years to develop
some innovative product: doesn't he/she deserve to make a profit from it? Or
is it better for some other people who are just smarter about business to make
gobs of money over the effort of somebody else?

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norswap
I think that lots of times, someone who is capable of making something
remarkable is someone worth having around. So often, things will work out that
way.

Actually, it already does : people invent things at companies, and the
companies then own the intellectual property.

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JoeCortopassi
Stealing is wrong in any form, but I have no sympathy for the losses major
studios and record labels have suffered due to online piracy. Illegal
downloading hasn't robbed the industry from profit, Avatar/Inception/The Dark
Knight box office sales have disproven that. What has ended, is the business
model of putting garbage inside a shiny mystery box that people have to pay
for the opportunity to peek inside. Gone are the days of cd's that have one
good song and fifteen filler tracks, movies that show their only worthwhile
parts during the trailer leaving the story begging for a plot. Forget you
Hollywood, I hope your industry suffers needlessly for years. The 'mystery
box' business model only works when people can't preview the garbage inside

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sliverstorm
_Illegal downloading hasn't robbed the industry from profit,
Avatar/Inception/The Dark Knight box office sales have disproven that._

So, you have the box office numbers from the parallel universe in which there
was no pirating to prove this claim?

Just because they didn't tank doesn't mean they didn't loose profit.

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taken11
So, you have the box office numbers from the parallel universe in which there
was no pirating to prove this claim?

Just because they didn't make more profit doesn't mean they lost profit due to
downloading.

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michael_dorfman
The fact that there are downloaders proves that there is demand for the items
in question. I find it difficult to imagine a price elasticity scenario
whereby not a single person among those downloaders would have paid a single
cent to the studios in order to fulfill the demand had the option to freely,
illegally download not been present.

Do you honestly think that DVD sales are not even _slightly_ affected by
pirating?

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taken11
I think DVD sales are affected by the fact that people watch films on computes
and not TVs, to attribute that to piracy is just wrong. The fact that people
download something proves only that there is a demand at cost 0, how this
translates into a demand for a physical item at a cost >0 is hard to tell and
sure not linear.

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michael_dorfman
I agree that it is not linear. But can you agree that it does translate to
_some_ demand at cost > 0?

If so, that demonstrates that piracy represents _some_ loss of potential
income for the studios.

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shrikant
This is in line with my pet theory on why Disney even bothered with a sequel
to the original Tron.

They claim Tron became a 'cult classic' and hence a sequel was a good idea.
It's a 1982 movie, how did it suddenly explode into popularity in the later
90s/early 2000s? The widespread file-sharing of the movie, of course.

I don't have a citation to back me up here (hence my 'pet theory'), but here's
your data point of one - I downloaded Tron from a 'shady' source a few years
back, and became part of the 'cult following' it has.

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ShardPhoenix
I'm surprised that this site, which is more sophisticated than most out there,
still has a relatively high proportion of people who think copyright violation
is "stealing".

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surki
I think "The Man from Earth" was also partially distributed through torrents.
At least that's what the wikipedia claims -
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_from_Earth>

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sliverstorm
Odds that the filmmakers made their production costs back before being ready
to claim they are happy it has been pirated...?

