Forget about paid vs ads vs free for a moment. One is a technology that lets people all over the world share many types of files, legal and illegal, versus two US-only services with a limited selection of TV and movies.
I fail to see how this is a meaningful statistic in any way. How many "users" does FTP have versus Netflix?
I pay for video games and I pay for music (my entire library for both is all paid for) but I pirate movies because it's impossible for me to watch them with ease, I'm in England and don't know of any service that lets me pay to stream movies on my PC :(
I don't get it. Since when is "They don't provide it in the format I want it" a valid excuse for piracy. (Ethical discussions of piracy aside)
If you want to download it because that is the format/medium you prefer then download it (from bit torrent or whatever) and then afterwards go and pay for it by buying the DVD even if you never watch it.
(If you are going to pirate and claim it's ethical, you need a more reasoned argument for it's validity)
(Perhaps technically a grey area yes, but you are saying you are willing to pay, so why not pay?)
Perhaps even better would be to download it, and then send a letter + payment to the studio and explain that you wanted to pay for their excellent film but also wanted to download it for convenience. If enough people did this it might encourage them to provide the service you want.
oh it's not a valid excuse for piracy, piracy is always wrong but it's an explanation of why I pirate. I do buy films and TV shows when I can (I paid $80 for a boxset of The Wire last week (excellent show btw)) but often I can't find the films I want in store so my choice is to either go without or pirate. I have no problem paying, but the availability is a problem. If there were a service that I could pay for and stream movies when I wanted to and they were available I'd have no problem paying for and using.
For example, last week I wanted to watch the latest Season of Dexter which had just finished, I'd have had no problem paying for it but I couldn't, it's not available, so I pirated it.
Because the price of the DVD reflects a whole different set of cost than digital distribution, and doesn't provide any incentive to the movie industry to do get with the programme and license their movies to digital media distribution hubs like netflix. I;m tired of seeing the same old movies touted on netflix streaming as 'new' simply because the movie industry cannot figure out a licensing arrangement...
Perhaps even better would be to download it, and then send a letter + payment to the studio and explain that you wanted to pay for their excellent film but also wanted to download it for convenience. If enough people did this it might encourage them to provide the service you want.
I doubt it. It's clear that the only thing the studios respond to is their bottom line. There is simply no way Netflix streaming, Spotify, etc would exist if it weren't for piracy. We'd still be buying high-margin CDs and DVDs.
Saying "Your product wasn't available in the format that I wanted, so I torrented it and gave you this money to compensate you" is hardly going to convince them to change their ways. They might sue you though: there's lots of money in that.
I occasionally torrent movies and TV shows, but I have a Blockbuster account and I always check them out once they're legally available months later and return them unwatched, since I've already seen them. That way I figure the content producers still get a paper trail of paid demand or ratings or something.
If they were available on demand, DRM-free NOW so that I could watch them when and where I want, I would happily just pay for them and not go through all this bullshit.
Surely if you put ethical discussions aside, then wanting a movie in a particular format is a valid excuse for getting them in that way? Sure, he could then choose to pay them, but what about ease-of-use.
Also, at what point did he claim that it was ethical?
Users are deciding between all of these services? I think it's more like the smart savy (and not so ethical/less well off, if you will) users use all of these services while the better off don't care to shell out the money and not deal with the hassle or just don't even know about the alternative.
This is a silly comparison in the first place, BitTorrent isn't just used for television shows/mainstream movies. Of course it's going to have more users...
> What I meant is, it's not ethically wrong per se; it's only considered bad because it's bad for the economy in the long run.
Not really. It's ethically wrong because the creators and distributors of the content want to charge money for it and by pirating you're refusing to pay for it. If they wanted you to dance for it, or send a photo of you wearing a hat, it would still be ethically wrong to pirate it and there'd be no effect on the economy.
The creators / owners of copyright have only artificial, legal ways of making you pay for the content. There is no moral or ethical reason to pay for the content. It's equivalent to saying You read my post and replied to it without my permission. I want you to send me a photo of you wearing a hat, with a sign saying "I'm really sorry". They have no real claim to that.
This depends on how much you believe in moral-relativity. There is a concept of ownership and rights (sometimes legally defined) associated with IP. Disregarding those rights can be seen as unethical. There is no precedence in our culture saying that you have the right to disallow comments on your IP, which is why your example is not considered unethical.
To take your example to an extreme, is it unethical to trespass on someone's property? Is it unethical to look at someone's property from the street? Our concept of ownership would suggest that the former is unethical, the latter is not, but is that just because we have artificial ideas of ownership?
My ethical system includes IP ownership. I think it is unethical to use GPL code without releasing the source, for example.
I have heard that it's different in other countries, but the system in the USA is pretty clear that IP is a legal construct, and is only used as an incentive, not an inherent right. Article I, Section 8, Clause 8: http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/constitution_trans...
Just because US law defines IP as an incentive not an inherent right doesn't mean that culturally it's only a incentive.
You have poorly defined what "ethical" means. So far the only clarification you have made is that legal and ethical are too different things. Some people disagree and define "ethical" as "law-abiding" which means that copyright infringement is unethical.
To be clear, I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm just saying that there is a degree of relativism to your statement. Just because you don't think that copyright infringement is unethical doesn't mean that people who do are wrong.
I'm not really a proponent of moral-relativism but ultimately I have to accepted that ethics are a human construct and as such disagreement will arise over its precise definition. For example, I think eating meat is unethical but most people don't. Does that make me wrong?
I'm just using "ethical" to contrast things that would be wrong no matter what the law says. Breaking the law is unethical - that's why we don't need a "Rule 1: Don't break the rules." Stealing would be unethical even if there were no law. But copying something without the author's permission isn't unethical except when the law says so.
Ah, I see what you mean but I disagree with your premise - I think that IP is an ethical gray area and that copyright infringement can be unethical absent the law/economics. I think it would be unethical for a programmer in a country that doesn't recognize the GPL to use GPL'd code in a proprietary product, for example, because they would be going against the expressed [reasonable] wishes of the content creator.
Culturally, filesharing is everywhere (as was sharing of videos, CDs and books before it), so approaching the question from that angle is not going to be useful to a stance favoring very strong copyrights.
I am not trying to take a stance for strong copyright. My stance is that there are (or can be) non-artificial ethical reasons to not commit copyright infringement.
> Is it unethical to look at someone's property from the street?
Not per se, but:
It's unethical to invade other people's privacy.
If you had a telescope with a special vision ray that could see behind walls, it would be unethical to use it to see inside people's homes and bedrooms.
If you'd said in advance that I had to do that before replying, then sure you'd have a point. You can't apply the condition after, I can't give you a DVD for free and then demand payment after you've watched it if there wasn't a prior agreement.
Thanks for the edit, I was not looking forward to a huge debate over this topic since it's been discussed to death. We all have our own opinions on what's ethical in this area, it's all very gray.
Yup, at a Diggnation meetup/big party a couple of years ago, Alex Albrecht asked the audience (kindof not expecting a real response): "So, how many of you get your music from P2P?" The audience exploded - like 80% of them raised their hands and yelled "Me! I do!" So he was shocked, but laughed it off and followed up with "So how many of you suckers actually pay for music on like iTunes or Amazon?" And the audience went nuts again, it was pretty much the same response. It took him a few minutes to wrap his head around that :-)
Global market vs. north american centric services. Also, there's obviously a lot more going on in the entire bittorrent ecosystem than just video. Considering the respective market sizes, i'm surprised bittorent's total reach isn't 50x.
Bittorrent Inc. wasn't trying to make any of those points though, they were just trying to say hey look at how huge our reach is! Except that reach will be considerably diminished as soon as you're taking money (or charging it) to promote some content to your users.
Personally, I think P2P is a non-issue in the future of content delivery. Bandwidth is cheap and getting cheaper and torrents provide a significantly lower performance and less reliable channel than hosted servers. I am loathe to use torrents even to pirate content, I'll be damned if I want to pay for it and let you abuse my outbound too.
And yet in the U.S. Netflix consumes over twice the bandwidth that Bittorrent does. So either Netflix users use the service a lot more or they download bigger files.
Is Bittorrent perhaps including in its statistics all the programs that use their protocol to distribute software updates? IIRC, both Steam and World of Warcraft use Bittorrent behind the scenes.
In countries like Germany or France, films are simply doubled. Elsewhere, they are subtitled. However, very few cinemas outside English-speaking countries (none that I know of) actually show the film with no doubles or subtitles (as it's meant to be watched if you speak the language).
here in Switzerland, most Cinemas still show the movies in their original languages plus subtitles. That's perfect. I don't mind the subtitles at all in case of english movies and I'm really dependent on them in all other cases (French, Spanish, Japanese mostly)
I'm talking about the home video offerings (DVDs, Apple's iTunes store) which often only provide the dubbed versions.
Same goes for games by the way, but there, thankfully, there's Steam which actually allows me to play the games in the original language.
If I paid 20$ for every episode or movie or show I've ever watched, I'd be in a huge financial crisis -- I would not gladly put myself in that position.
People pay about that much for usenet servers (giganews, etc).
I'm not the kind of person who spends all his time watching TV shows, but if I was, I probably wouldn't mind paying that much for it.
But that would be out of convenience, not out of a moral obligation.
I've paid for some steam games, but I still download games from bittorrent (even games that are available on steam).
I've paid for some games because I wanted to support the developers, and I'm not just talking about indie games here. I paid for Valve games (HL2 series) because I felt they deserve it. I felt like they were nice guys.
I'm pretty much the same. I watch one show at the end of the day to relax, but I get them all from bittorrent because they're not available here. A few might be available on digital tv, but for €5 per episode or so. They're usually also a season behind, so I've already seen the episode.
That said, I wouldn't mind paying $10-20 per month so that I don't have to both with downloading and tracking what I have and haven't seen. Also, the majority of the people that I know that use BT for movies/shows would pay that.
That's a completely useless statistic. What's the trend here? Intuitively, the fact that Netflix and Hulu have around half the users of BT seems like good news for streaming providers, since BT's been around for a lot longer.
What is amazing is a service that has comparable numbers of users and bandwidth to the bittorrent network. A river half the size of the Amazon is still a mighty river.
Most people don't know what bittorrent is, and even if they know, they wouldn't know how to use it. And even if they knew that, they couldn't tell legit content from viruses.
I buy games on Steam because downloading and installing is a double-click. There are a lot of (admittedly easy) steps when you pirate things, like mounting the ISO and browsing to the crack folder, and re-mounting every time you want to play.
Here's the key: you stop selling content, and you start selling something else.
It sounds very zen, but it's Steve Jobs' opinion:
> "We're going to fight illegal downloading by competing with it," said Jobs. "We're not going to sue it. We're not going to ignore it. We're going to compete with it."
I fail to see how this is a meaningful statistic in any way. How many "users" does FTP have versus Netflix?