Awesome. Now we can see if the movie and media industry experience a correlated rise in profits and settle this question whether "piracy" damages these industries once and for all.
Hollywood accounting reminds me of condominium developers and property developers that form a shell LLC for a single project, so that if something goes terribly wrong with the build quality and new-property-warranty lawsuits and such, the entity created for the project has no assets to give up when sued.
wouldn't it be more straight forward to just look at revenue. The weird Hollywood accounting doesn't really matter to the question of 'does piracy significantly affect purchases?.'
Sadly, people that cannot download the specific content they wanted will end up watching something else (probably of lesser quality) on a streaming service they already pay for. Indirectly confirming that less piracy equal more people watching legal content
The problem is that "the industry" is not a monolith. There are big players with multiple revenue streams that are insulated from the ups and downs of consumer sales. There are smaller players down to individual artists who are just trying to make a living.
A better gauge might be the condition of the industry at the lower tiers, all the way down to some musician just trying to sell a few albums to augment their income. It's possible that the "free" content available from the top tier players helps keep the lower tier players from getting ahead in the business.
I realize it's not a perfect analogy, but I'm thinking about Microsoft in the 1980s. They made their money from OEM licenses and enterprise sales, while the "free" copies of their software erased any chance of competing with them in the consumer market.
Had they done this deliberately to discourage competition, the police would have come knocking at their door.
At what point have people become so entitled that they think they should be able to consume all the content they want for free because they are slightly inconvenienced by price or availability.
If you don't feel like paying, don't watch it.
If you don't feel like finding out what service a show is on, don't watch it.
If you don't like the fact that you need to subscribe to multiple streaming networks to watch the shows you want to, don't subscribe and don't watch the shows. Having 5 streaming services to subscribe to is still infinitely better than cable.
If you think piracy "sticks it to the man", you'd do a better job by not watching a show and not talking about it. Pirating the Mandalorian and gushing about it to friends, family, and the internet just helps Disney.
Edit: Please downvote me, I enjoy finding out how many people consider media consumption a fundamental human right instead of the luxury good that it is.
Regardless, ask yourself how you'd feel if the film, video game, or book you pirate was made by a close friend. Would you tell them you pirated their product? And if so, why?
As a video game creator whose digital games cost nothing to copy and distribute, I can assure you that piracy directly affects my ability to continue making games.
Eh. We have subscriptions to 4 different video streaming services, and still sometimes download TV shows directly to ensure we can watch them e.g. on holiday in a different country without VPN backflips. Even more so if they have ad breaks (e.g. GoT on NowTV in UK); I don't mind paying, but I do mind ads. Not to mention higher quality due to bandwidth dropping lower at peak times, if the service can't keep up (I'm looking at you, NowTV).
I've bought Thief 2 & 3 and bunch of other games twice now, on original CDs / DVD and on Steam or GOG, and used No-CD cracks for the originals for convenience.
What you are doing isn't piracy though. You've paid for the content and are working around crappy DRM. That issue is entirely separate from the piracy itself.
Pirates love to conflate their activity with the noble pursuit of freeing the world from DRM. Maybe that is true for the people on the 'scene', but the countless millions of people torrenting their releases are doing it because they simply want something for free. Your actions are very much the exception.
My argument is far more cogent than any argument in favor of piracy. I can boil down every one one of those arguments, no matter how erudite, to "if I can get something for free, why shouldn't I".
>Regardless, ask yourself how you'd feel if the film, video game, or book you pirate was made by a close friend. Would you tell them you pirated their product? And if so, why?
Yes. They didn't create it to brag about how good their ratings were, and pirating their content doesn't mean they aren't getting anything from me, as you yourself mentioned.
>As a video game creator whose digital games cost nothing to copy and distribute, I can assure you that piracy directly affects my ability to continue making games
No, you can't assure me of that. You can say things but would be unable to provide any proof.
>"if I can get something for free, why shouldn't I"
Any time anyone buys something they've previously pirated, this argument falls apart. Not that it needs to wait until then, "why am I paying $20 to be advertised to" breaks it too.
> "if I can get something for free, why shouldn't I".
Convenience, pricing and social features. That's how Steam grew so big.
It takes much more effort to torrent something than to click "Add to cart" button in Steam. And even if the price is too high, one can always wait for a sale or a giveaway. Nor will a pirated copy give street cred in the form of achievements, "games owned" and "hours played".
The success of Steam, Netflix and Spotify has shown that there's plenty of money in the world, but you have to earn it by providing the best value.
Exactly, why shouldn't I? Therefore, I can and I will, simply because there are no real, direct consequences to doing so. This is best argument for piracy as you say, which it seems most people who pirate use.
I have upvoted you not because I completely agree but because I think the downvotes are unfair and promote some kind of unimind. My point of view: no one is entitled to anything and law should adjust to what is better for society as a whole. I personally don't own any pirated software, video or music. I usually download books and the few I find interesting and actually read I end buying. I think it's good for society to have some protection for creators. That said I do wonder if the nice streaming services we currently have and I happily pay would be available if piracy hadn't forced companies to innovate how to distribute their products.
I upvoted you. But these corporations do this to themselves with region locking and other DRM shenanigans. The only way for me to truly “own” some content is to pirate it.
>I enjoy finding out how many people consider media consumption a fundamental human right instead of the luxury good that it is.
Panem and Circensis.. Everyone considers food to be a fundamental human right- but entertainment, that is a great stabilizer of society and actually great for the environment. It costs nothing to copy it, and allows defacto to drug the masses with electric dreams.
One of the reasons, many nations actively sabotage anti-piracy efforts, while claiming to support them.
Citizen couch potatoe is the dream citizen of this lean, ecologic future tomorrow.
Let's not kid ourselves, finding a torrent for a movie or looking up which service it streams on are both the same level of easy.[] The issue is you have to subscribe to all those different services, which is what most people are probably not willing to do.
Now if a show or movie doesn't stream in your region or isn't otherwise easily online accessible, that's a different story. In that case it's on the industry to do better. When content is readily available on a streaming service, I don't think it's fair to point at the entertainment industry and say they have a problem to solve. In that case 'the problem' might actually be people wanting to watch movies and not pay for it.
More than once I’ve torrented a movie series because of hostile DRM. I used to play things on a Mac that was connected to a TV. DVDs wouldn’t play on an external screen.
Actively preventing me from viewing the content caused me to just torrent it, then after a few occurrences I stopped buying or renting DVDs.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.macworld.com/article/311641...
Heck, I've torrented movies and TV shows that are on streaming services I'm currently paying for. The main reason I do that is to get subtitles which aren't on the streaming services. Did you know that HBO, at least in the USA, has virtually no non-English subtitles on their streaming service? Even for HBO-original content that has been released on DVD/Blu-ray and thus does have subtitles for a large number of languages.
I'll admit to torrenting things I have total access to because the particular material that I already pay good money for doesn't run on the device on which I wish to view the paid for content. If your service doesn't stream to linux devices, and your customer is stuck in an airport hotel with only his linux laptop, either stop complaining about torrents or fix your service.
Probably referring to when something is available only in certain markets due to geoblocking. For example, one of the recent Star Treks was distributed in the US by CBS, and outside the US by Netflix.
1) Having to signup and manage accounts on every streaming service is not easy even if you forget about the money.
2) Most services are not global.
3) Even if they are in your area, they might not be complete. Last week I tried to rent a German movie on Amazon, but realized they only provide English subtitles if you live in the US.
If you're only seeing it once, sure. But if you want to watch it multiple times, you just have to find it once to get it the illicit way, and have to search "where to stream X" every time you want to watch the other, and it might change to something you don't have even in the middle of you watching the series, or even become unavailable entirely for awhile.
I almost exclusively use streaming services now, but it's still annoying to have to search what streaming service everything is currently on, and there are some older movies (been watching a lot of 80s movies I missed lately) in which there is no subscription service it's available, only pay $4+ to rent on Amazon Prime.
I would have agreed with you a few months ago but pirating is moving towards the easier path again. Google had done a pretty good job of letting you know what service something was on, but now something on, say, Amazon Prime Video but require a sub-subscription to whatever this IMDB nonsense is.
To me, the real issue is finding movies/tv shows where you cannot buy or rent them. Amazingly, it is still an issue in this world.
I would love to see The Bob Mathias Story from 1954. It was created by Allied Artists that has been bought and sold a few times ending up at ViacomCBS. Through many weeks of trying to find out if I could get a copy the best I could get was ViacomCBS sometimes allows it to be shown on TV.
I want to buy/rent a copy of movie that exists and cannot. How in 2020 can this happen?
This is not unilateral, and not the terminal answer. Due to the bundling going on right now, many shows are getting pushed behind absurd paywalls. For example, if I would like to watch Season 11 of RuPaul Drag Race, I would need to get a subscription to FuboTV, a "live sports and TV" service with 100+ standard cable channels. The best price they can do to include this content is $65 / mo. For a single show I care about!
After some checking around, I did find it for $20 / season on Amazon, which comes with the following license agreement:
> Offers and pricing for subscriptions (also referred to at times as memberships), the subscription services, the extent of available Subscription Digital Content, and the specific titles available through subscription services, may change over time and by location without notice (except as may be required by applicable law).
So... I can give them $20 for them to stream it to me for however long they'd like.
It is impossible to buy the series on DVD.
This is not an isolated incident. As with the late what.cd, at some point these torrent services also serve as an archive of secondary and rare work. This particular example does not fall into that category, but it is not hard to find others, such as the classic Max Headroom, that do (https://reelgood.com/show/max-headroom-1987).
I'm not blaming you as you aren't the one to set them in the first place, but the goal posts keep moving!
Two decades post-Napster we finally have what everyone wanted all along: an easy, cheap way to watch almost every movie without leaving the couch / listen to almost every song from almost any device.
But now it's not good enough unless it's literally every piece of content from a single origin 0_0
> Two decades post-Napster we finally have what everyone wanted all along: an easy, cheap way to watch almost every movie without leaving the couch / listen to almost every song from almost any device.
That may be almost true for music, but is not remotely true for movies. Sure, recent releases are usually available on _some_ streaming service, but back catalog movies are often only available on DVD/Blue ray. The big streaming services are not great for movie catalogs (Netflix is much worse than it used to be). We have regressed from the Blockbuster days in that regard.
Don't we benefit from moving the goalposts its how literally every issue works. Only people who don't want to win settle for "reasonable goals" because in actuality the other side will happily shift the goal posts the other way until they have a decidedly one sided situation.
The content industry would prefer the all content is charged per view based on who is in the same room as the screen with differentiated costs based on market and even consumer. To enforce them they would prefer all computers be so locked down they are effectively paid for and maintained by you but owned by them with the right to reach over the wire and destroy your hardware if they find you are using it in a way they don't approve of. [1]
They also want veto right over roll out of any new tech that might change the amount of money they are apt to make. Example the VCR, netflix etc.
In return consumers want everything to be completely free with no ads with a great interface and Hatch to be launched into space with no space suit.
We can probably settle in between on something like compulsory licensing like radio play so that any service can offer any video and the creators always get paid. Let copyright holders set the rate but offer the same to all parties
[1] In case you didn't catch it, during a Senate Judiciary committee hearing this week on copyright abuse, the chairman -- that'd be Sen. Hatch -- endorsed technology that would twice warn a computer user about illegal online behavior, "then destroy their computer."
I could have been clearer but the url DOES include the date therein. I just wanted to illustrate the absurdity of the content industries positions which are regularly full of complete nonsense. I think Hatch's positions might just be peak crazy though.
Amen. I pay for at least a dozen services and still have dozens of shows and movies from the past decade that I can't get. >10x going further back. Many are only available on the grey secondhand market. For example: Combat!
I'll start considering rights holders arguments when they're not capriciously gating or scalping on content, and are not limiting their content to their service du jour. The music industry has solved about 60-80% of this problem depending on what you like. The movie and series side has regressed to become worse and more expensive than blockbuster was. Shame!
> but now it's not good enough unless it's literally every piece of content from a single origin
subscribing to 3 different streaming services has no benefit for the customer. there's no reason to pay for essentially the same thing 3 times just because some studios decided to have fun with movie rights
That's totally fair, and the other replies mentioning how movies are actually not all that available right now make a valid point.
This year I've been signing up for whatever has the movie I want to watch at the moment and then terminating right away so I'm never really subscribed to anything and have a time constraint to max out the other content on the service over the next 30 days.
I mentioned this elsewhere in the thread, but it's frustrating paying for a subscription to a streaming service when there's no guarantee the content - unless it's original content created by that service - will always be there.
We're seeing more and more content getting split up and requiring more and more separate subscriptions as time goes on.
You're kind of wanting it both ways, to some extent.
I mean, I'm annoyed that Netflix had a bunch of Marvel movies, but not all of them. I'm annoyed that I used to watch them on Netflix all the time and now they're gone.
On the other hand, it's because Disney+ exists, and there's no reason for Disney+ to ever remove them (preasumably), since they own the rights to them so there's no licensing deals to work with. That means that they should be there "forever".
Likewise, I don't want to also have to pay for CBS All Access to watch the latest Trek, but, if I do, it does mean that I don't have to worry about Star Trek: Discovery disappearing down the road.
The only way for things to be there "forever" is to be streaming from the company that owns the copyright, and more and more such companies are setting up their streaming services and can then guarantee that "foreverness", but that comes at costs for them, and thus costs for us. It's unfortunate, but it feels as though it's either one or the other.
Right, that's my point, and the fundamental quandry at play the entire time streaming has been an option. For a brief moment, most content was consolidated on just a few select services and most people found it more affordable than cable services.
Now, in order to guarantee that we always have access to content, we're ultimately being asked to pay for more services at a total cost that looks more like the cable fees we didn't enjoy paying to begin with. We cut cords because of cost, and now that savings is almost gone and we're back to square one.
I don't have an answer and it's not an easy question to solve, I'm just saying that that's the point of frustration for a lot of people.
Edit: In some sense, what we have now - and seem to continue expanding upon - is worse than before. We used to be able to find it all on one cable provider with one UI, now we have to pay the same amount that many people found to be "too much" and have to deal with countless different UIs.
Not to distract from the bigger piracy issues, but I've found JustWatch.com and their mobile app to be a quick way to figure out where a given show or movie is available. No relation to them, just a satisfied user.
Yes and no. The initial setup isn’t obvious and the way the components work together is not easily found and understood.
However with a decent How-To you can end up with something very impressive.
A Slack alert can notify you of an automated download of a movie off someone’s top list or a TV series that has started screening again and has been downloaded.
Automated piracy is impressive.
Cost isn't an issue for me (I pay for a bunch of these services already) - I much prefer the alternative where I can open up Plex and find everything I want there in one place. Shows shift from service to service as licenses expire, etc...it's a huge pain in the ass as a consumer.
But for me, there's no guarantee that Apple TV will be around forever, or always be contracted to have the same content. With something like Plex, my library is always my library and I don't have to worry about content disappearing.
I wish there was a service where I could donate money to the animators, composers, writers, etc for a movie. I want to pay them directly for their work. Trickle down be damned.
Could also be nice if there was some sort of system where the people who actually worked on the film could decide who really deserves the money.
Hardly, piracy exists because people can't resist getting something for free when the consequences are non-existent. It's fundamentally a moral issue, but practitioners are dexterous at avoiding that line of thinking.
Exactly this, people complain about how many different services there are...
Most of them individually have more content than you can watch in a lifetime.
What about the concept of, picking the shows you have access to watch?
If the service barely has anything you watch, what happens if you don't get access to it?
People compare this all to cable, the problem with cable is you couldn't just pay $10 and get something. You payed $10 for a cable box, then you payed $30 for standard definition, then you added 20 dollars here and there for packages and HD, and a fee for mobile viewing.
Now you can pay $30 for one or two services and get access to more content than people were paying hundreds for!
But then the complaint becomes "yes but I can't watch literally everything"?
i don't want to watch everything. i watch about one hour of tv per day. maybe a movie once a week.
i have a very specific list of things i do want to see. favourite shows, certain actors, prefered genres. but what i want to see is spread over half a dozen services.
for $30 i get a lot of content that i don't want, and with every additional service i get more content that i don't want. and yet i'd have to spend more than $100 just to get 40 hours of the content that i do want.
you are effectively suggesting that i should not be picky and just watch what i am offered.
if i needed more content than i can watch in my lifetime, i could just watch youtube for free.
"Everything" doesn't refer to every show in existence...
You want a 5 course dinner with items from 5 restaurants.
You don't want to eat everything on each restaurant's menu... but you want to eat "everything", * you want a plate of everyone's content*
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I'm saying you're allowed to want that, but if you can't afford it don't blame the restaurants for not huddling under one roof and making this imaginary buffet with "everything" under one roof.
We had that setup and it sucked worse than this, this new paradigm works better for people who understand the concept of... not getting everything you want?
It's like people don't get the concept of not getting to watch something because you can't afford it or something.
You're free to pirate it, really it's no skin off my back. I'm not even judging you (unless you try and give it some lame validation other than "I didn't want to pay for it" or in some cases "It's not available to pay for")
But then don't pretend it's the studios fault! It's literally easier (and cheaper, and more flexible) than ever to pay for access to their shows.
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A little over 10 years ago a $200 cable bill wasn't unheard of after regional fees, per set top box fees, HD channel fees,
special packages for movies.. and it wasn't until last year these fees even had to be disclosed up front, so after a sketchy sales call you'd wait a few weeks for it to all get set up, then get your first bill and start a developing a new skill: negotiating your cable bill. And good luck canceling it if you needs changed
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There's this strange sense of entitlement people have that lets them overlook how much better the current situation is because they just need be able to watch everything they have a whim to watch.
I mean your response of "you want me to just watch what I'm offered?!?!" is so funny to me.
I mean yes? If by "offered" you mean what you paid for then yes lol. Sometimes I want to watch a show but it's not on a service I have and I don't fond any value in that service so I just... find another show to watch!
Is that really so mindblowing?
I don't see it as oppression, I don't see it as something so fundamentally unfair, I think "good thing there's these cheap services I have that have so much content I don't think I'll ever not find another show".
Now people who couldn't afford cable packages can get more content than they did before for less, on more flexible payment terms, with more flexible access, it really is a good thing if you can get over the fact sometimes you just might have to give up some gratification...
i didn't have your experience, but then i only lived a few years in the US, so i didn't really have much opportunity to familiarise myself with the options.
in my home country cable was available for a decent price without hidden fees because such trickery is illegal there.
for the restaurant: food courts do exist, and they can have surprisingly high quality food, so yes, it is possible to create a market where everyone can pick and choose.
sure, for you the current situation may be an improvement. and if you are satisfied with that, that's fine.
i am not satisfied because i know we can do better.
Food courts exist and often have very lower quality food at higher prices than individual restaurants because it turns out the overhead of having everything under one roof, and having to compete with redundant choices, takes away from the bottom line.
So I'd say you're over thinking the analogy, but actually that's the perfect representation of what's wrong with cable.
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Not to mention, my comment isn't just saying "it's good because it's better than cable", that's just focusing on an aside lol.
My comment is "it's good period as you're (god forbid) willing to watch something else once in a while, or pay for it." Hell like I said I don't care if you pirate it just again don't pretend the studio made you by not making a bespoke service with everything you want.
People often confuse raw sales with revenue, even Bollywood revenue the pails in comparison to American revenue
That being the case a simple comparison of "I paid less elsewhere" doesn't represent the reality of things. You were either paying for less overall content, or paying for a lot of content produced and heavily funded by the US payment structure and much more cheaply licensed to your country.
The complication being of course, if it was values at that pricing locally then the shows wouldn't exist.
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And it's not like the US was alone in their cable situation so I'm very surprised to hear it was better else aside from the fees. The fees were problematic, but by it's very nature cable involves hardware and often has termed contracts
I've lived in multiple other countries (I wasn't born in the US) and 10 years ago I find it very hard to believed any country has cable (or even worse satellite) TV at "decent price" without the "pay us more for HD" and bundled packages mess unless there was just straight up a barely any content compared to the kinds of packages I'm talking about.
> 2. fig. The appropriation and reproduction of an invention or work of another for one's own profit, without authority; infringement of the rights conferred by a patent or copyright.
> 1771: Luckombe Hist. Print. 76 “They..would suffer by this act of piracy, since it was likely to prove a very bad edition.”
> 1808: Med. Jrnl. XIX. 520 “He is charged with `Literary Piracy', and an `unprincipled suppression of the source from whence he drew his information'.”
> 1855: Brewster Newton I. iv. 71 “With the view of securing his invention of the telescope from foreign piracy.”
IMO, one of the struggles of the rapid advance of technology in the modern era is that many genuinely new moral situations are coming up. Everybody tries to figure out what should happen in these situations based on somewhat sloppy application of old laws that are arguably no longer relevant and analogies to things that seem related but don't really represent the new situation.
So exactly what should happen with regard to consumption of digital content that's expensive to produce but basically free to distribute? I'm not really sure, nothing that's been done yet seems quite right.
Old-school pay big $$$ to own a copy doesn't seem to work very well, when most of the money is going to fatcat corporations that don't add any value, and "own" in the context of digital services that get turned off or moved on a whim doesn't seem very good.
Piracy channels work great for the end-user, but nobody knows how to get money to the artist and producer when distributing through these channels.
Subscription services seem kind of okay. At least until they either split into hundreds of them and you end up paying even more, or it consolidates into a couple of big ones who exert the same forces, especially regarding effective censorship for lack of willingness to take a chance on something risky, as the old guard did.
It's not really a success. Nobody thinks of music piracy as more serious because of the word. If anything, they think of nautical piracy as less serious, because music piracy is the phenomenon they're familiar with.
The only pirates around today in common culture are the Somalis who took Captain Phillips and Jack Sparrow. Barely anyone thinks about the former, so a handsome lovable rogue with a penchant for loving rum and being silly is what you get. If anything, that makes piracy sound glamorous.
The media companies have done an end run around the very foundation of how computers work in an attempt to keep from changing their 20th century business model.
All digital data is a copy. It's fundamental to how computers work. That is terribly inconvenient for a business model that prefers to sell physical objects, but as computer science doesn't allow for that, they instead chose to reframe the issue in moral terms ("You wouldn't download a car!") and use tremendous lobbying power to force that view into law.
Reasonable people can argue about creators being paid for their work and how digital distribution plays into that, but don't try to take modern technology/physical reality and impose your more convenient business model on it and on everyone else.
People going to prison for copying movies is disgusting and immoral.
I'm an app developer. I implemented all of the tricks I know to make it as difficult as it gets for the paid versions of my apps to be pirated. And I also try to detect if the user is using adblockers to make so that they can't use my free apps without seeing the ads. But I'm not at all against the user being able to bypass my security measures. Nobody is stealing from me by not GIVING ME MONEY THEY OTHERWISE WOULD NOT HAVE GIVEN ME. I'm not entitled to anything. If someone has the knowledge to bypass my security tricks, good on him. He have one less bill to pay. I grew up very poor, and I still live on a 3rd world country. I do not remember to have paid for any software in my life, so I won't be a hypocrite. To compare making a copy of an intangible thing to stealing something "real", like a cookie from someone elses jar is absurd. If 10 million people make 100 million copies of one of my apps, I'm not being robbed of anything. If one guy takes for himself an Iphone I bought yesterday, he is in fact robbing me of my resources. Not earning possible hypothetical future income does not equate to stealing realized gains of the past. Copyright law as it stands today is an incongruent reliq of a time when technology did not allow for things to have no associated costs of reproduction.
These aren't new arguments, really... but when I steal a cookie from the cookie jar, there's one less cookie in the cookie jar. When I steal a movie on a torrent site, the copyright owner didn't lose a copy of the movie.
One can argue that it represents an economic loss insofar as the person who stole it isn't going to buy a copy now, but a response you often hear to that is relatively few who pirate content would have paid for the content if piracy were unavailable.
What if you sneak into a movie theater to sit in a near-empty auditorium for a 2pm Tuesday matinee. Nobody has "lost" anything, as in your cookie jar example. Does that make it OK?
I have actually long-wondered how theaters would fare if they pro-rated seats based on demand. Charging just a dollar or two for a Tuesday matinee seat otherwise expected to be empty would certainly drive ticket sales, and with them concession sales. What does the theater have to lose?
Totally agree that matinee prices are not low enough to match demand. I defended the MoviePass business model vigorously, see my comment history. (with that said, they do have to reimburse studios for each ticket sold, so the theater doesn't have full discretion)
But that's totally irrelevant to this conversation. If the theater is charging $5, or $2, you still can't just sneak in the back door without paying.
I hope that you would agree that if you sneak into a movie theater to sit in a near-empty auditorium for a 2pm Tuesday matinee, then it's something very, very different from theft?
Like, people can argue if it's as bad as theft or not as bad than theft (I would definitely argue that it's substantially less bad than theft, but I know that some people would disagree), but no matter what, such an action is not theft, it's something else.
> Is this the right thing to do? Is this something you should be doing?
People have said it better than me, but in short: Disney and friends have legally stolen public domain from all of us and erected a barrier between us and our human right to access to our culture. I therefore consider it my moral right to take back what should be mine - I may not have the means to buy the laws that would make it legal, but I have the technical means to do it and therefore I do.
So yes, I consider it the right thing to do. Civil disobedience, if you will.
I do listen to music, and lots of it. I have a YouTube Red subscription (or whatever Google has decided to rename it this week), mostly for supporting small creators on Youtube (when they don't have a Patreon / I don't watch enough of their stuff to fit them in on Patreon). So basically all music from major labels I listen to, I do through Youtube (or Youtube Music, when I remember to open the right app up). But that's a small fraction of my listening habits.
Mostly I like stuff from small, independent artists - a lot of which I've discovered through Youtube, and a lot of those Youtube videos were probably copyright infringement (unauthorized uploads). If I listen to something more than a few times, I buy it on Bandcamp- last month I spent over $100 on Bandcamp purchases.
For creators I really love, as mentioned earlier, I fund them directly on Patreon. This adds up to over another $100/month.
If I dropped the YouTube Red subscription - which is, due to their comically low revenue share, practically indistinguishable from piracy for artists in economic terms - I don't think I'd be in a meaningfully different position, ethically, if I chose to continue consuming music from major labels without a license.
On the other hand, if I stopped buying things on Bandcamp and instead listened to music from small artists through YouTube Red, I'd feel awful, and I'd consider that to be rather unethical, even though I'd have a license.
You called it "taking something you know you're not supposed to take", and the thread has been responding to the "taking something" part alone.
Whether or not I believe it's the right thing to do seems like it'd depend on how much respect I have for copyright law, and whether any harm it causes is sufficiently abhorrent to me according to my personal ethics.
The economic argument is part of assessing the harm it causes.
You're absolutely right- this is an ethical issue. Perhaps it's a moral imperative to not pay massive conglomerates for a "license" to view content, or perhaps it's just a good idea to not support the privatization of culture. Personally, I won't judge you if you decide to pay off Disney to stay out of legal trouble, but...you know you're doing something wrong, right? Same if you're supporting Spotify's exploitative business model, even if you try to justify it by pointing at the scraps actual artists get.
Oh, you mean you're trying to say unauthorized copying is unethical? Oh, darn it, scratch that. Sorry!
If you weren't going to buy it anyway, yes it's absolutely the right thing to do. Your utility increases, nobody elses decreases. Total utility increases therefore it is ethical.
Even if we could agree on what constitutes fairness wherein exactly lies the utility value of fairness?
Scenario A) 5000 people paid and enjoyed it
Scenario B) 4500 people paid and enjoyed it 50000 people enjoyed it without paying.
We can pretend that the percentage lost is equally taken from all people that participated in the production but it beggars belief to imagine bobby the grip got paid less because you pirated Indiana Jones. The reality is that the funds earned from the creative efforts aren't divided like friends sharing a Pizza gains and losses overwhelmingly hit the pockets of those whose interests in the matter are directorial or financial.
Ultimately creative work already enjoy such a ridiculously slanted treatment with insane punishments, public resources invested in policing, and terms that perfect enforcement would yield such a very small increase in utility for companies focused on creative work and much less for those actually engaged in it that it isn't worth the decrease in utility gained by more free distribution of creative works.
Fuck fairness if it results in a net negative utility for society I'm not interested in promoting a schoolyard notion of fairness at the expense of society.
>Is this the right thing to do? Is this something you should be doing? Is this something you feel you have the right to do?
Some philosophers (like Max Stirner) would argue that not only are those questions irrelevant, but that their whole basis (morality and right) are categories which become real and exert their influence only due to our own reification of them. That is to say, to someone unconvinced of morality (and in particular what other people say about morality), and further unconvinced by the legitimacy of the state and its opposition to the individual, the questions would be laughable if only it weren't so tragic that to many they extert their control over us and we let them.
I like that. I saw a cookie jar and I took one. I didn't bake them myself, and it's not my fault they stole your recipe and gave the cookies away for free.
Heh, your example completely skips the fact that someone went out and bought the ingredients, bought an oven, spent the time to prepare the dough, spent money on the electricity to bake the dough, spent the time to take it from the oven, bought a jar, put the artwork on the jar, rented a café, and finally placed the jar with the cookies on the display.
So.... the smartass "just took a cookie" the hard worker just spent time and money for everything else ;)
I don't understand how all the people here, who all want to be the next Bill Gates and make a ton of money selling software, services, or Juiceros, think it's "ok" to steal content. (The same content that they probably deny they watch because it's not hip enough.)
Thinking about your comment is bringing up a number of interesting threads of thought.
Bill Gates made a ton of money and wasn't necessarily following either law or moral guidelines to do so.
The success enjoyed by Bill Gates was hard earned. Success is a destination at the end of a journey that is too hard for a lot of people.
Bill Gates' software is some of the most pirated software ever.
Bill Gates is one of the richest people ever.
Can anyone become anywhere near that scale of rich without being morally or ethically bankrupt?
What crime 'piracy' in comparison to the business practices of the highly successful / profitable / rich?
I don't know the answer to those questions, and I don't pass judgement as it's subjective, but they're the places my mind went in relation to your comment.
Stealing has a specific meaning. It is nonsensical to describe failure to follow copyright law stealing. Nobody calls exceeding the speed limit stealing velocity nor jaywalking "stealing the street".
Rich people convinced other rich people that it would be a good idea to let rich people decide which bits I'm allowed to transmit to you in order to maximize the revenue of people who for the most part are in the business of licensing creative work not actually doing it.
With zero chances of influencing the law on this or most other issues I can either choose to be a slave to it or not.
Only slaves and cowards obey their masters even when they aren't being watched.
I jaywalk too when its safe to do so. "Find me in New York for this quarter!"
I am a tv producer. Stealing is if I invest years of blood, sweat, and capital into a project with the paradigm that in a free market exchange you can pay in some form to view it or not and happily find some alternative way to enjoy your time. Nobody is forcing you to watch what I make and you won’t die if you don’t watch it.
The creators like myself you valorize don’t exist in a vacuum. If distributors who finance the projects upfront with risk capital don’t get paid then there is nobody to pay me for making content and thus content does not get made. Financing the speculative production of a movie or tv series is inherently high risk.
Let me flip the script a little michaelmrose. What do you do for your money and why should you not have to do it for me for free?
>you can pay in some form to view it or not and happily find some alternative way to enjoy your time. Nobody is forcing you to watch what I make and you won’t die if you don’t watch it.
That's kind of the point. Whether I pirate your work and watch it or I watch paint dry for an hour doesn't affect your bottom line, because you weren't going to get my money either way.
TV budgets are higher than ever even while piracy is easier than ever before. The only thing that could possibly kill tv would be jacking up the costs enough to keep users from enjoying them legally. I myself pay for hulu and netflix and I figure that contributes sufficiently to the shows I enjoy.
It really doesn't matter what I do. My employment is an arrangement for services rendered same as yours. At the absurd limit where nobody paid for anything and absolutely everyone pirated everything nobody would be forcing you to work for free. Your employer in that scenario would have totally and wholly failed to secure an arrangement with customers to voluntarily transfer their money to your employers pockets and thus justify their existence. You wouldn't work for free you would just do something else.
In reality if its really easy to pay and even mildly frustrating to pirate it seems like a reasonable balance of paying customers and freeloaders is apt to make you all healthy and wealthy.
1a : the act of stealing specifically : the felonious taking and removing of personal property with intent to deprive the rightful owner of it
Much like violating copyright isn't similar in nature to commandeering ships on the high seas its not much similar to the taking of real property in that the owner isn't deprived of anything and in fact is wholly unaffected and absent from the transaction.
Actual property is the necessary resolution of the inherently rivalrous nature of property while Copyright is mandate that I limit what data I transmit to another party so as to avoid transmitting any patterns of bits that could reasonably be argued to be owned by any entity on the premise that this limitation will create an intangible good that can serve as an incentive to encourage creators to trade in it.
If congress contrary to the rest of our interests grants you sole ownership of the color red I wont be a thief if I opt to paint my house that color.
Really this is a tired subject having been debated endlessly since the 70s. Anyone still using it is apt to have staked out their position and decided they care more about the emotional import of the word thief than reasoned argument.
Bill Gates is your example? One of the worst examples you could have chosen, because he both engaged in piracy and was one of the top "victims" of piracy all the while he was becoming the richest man in the country.
What would people consider the ideal realistic system?
Something fair to content creators, distributors, and consumers.
I, personally, would like to be able to purchase one time "unlimited" licenses (like buying a book or a DVD) that can be easily validated by the publisher's web API and enable non-subscription content to be served by netflix/hulu/amazon/etc.
To enable (for example) streaming an amazon show through netflix. Presumably, streaming providers would (assuming the cost on an individual movie/series basis would be too small to be practical as a single payment made by me at time of consumption) include low-cost "Bring your own content" add-ons to subscriptions that would cover distribution costs through aggregate balances between providers.
The fundamental thing to realize is that there are two kinds of people: those who want to have access to everything and those who want to own things. Most people are probably somewhere between the two.
You really don't need to get very creative, as the solutions already exist for music: Bandcamp and Spotify. Streaming services provide access to all music, as long as you keep paying. Bandcamp is pretty much perfect for buying the music you want.
I'm mostly in the second group, and if everything would be on Bandcamp I would end up buying a lot more. Top quality, hassle-free, DRM-free, for a reasonable price, with generous previews. Payment unlocks a download link, and an optional account allows you to maintain a collection. Everybody wins.
Music not being on Bandcamp is the easiest way to make me reconsider a purchase, and only offering it through streaming services is the easiest way to unlock piracy as a potential option in that consideration.
Other people like a streaming service, and both can and should exist in the same universe.
You'll never kill piracy, but it's very easy to be better. Just give the customer what they want. It doesn't have to be free. The industry should stop wasting so much time and money fighting illegal solutions to a problem they actively keep causing. It is much simpler and cheaper to just fix it.
Rights holders get paid sane cost per use that diminish over time and are rather opaque because of distributors flat rates.
Distributors compete on service quality not library. If I need 2, or more service subscriptions, including my isp, that's too many for me and I will actively seek out solutions that provide better functionality without paying a tax for worse service.
It is very strange that we have to emulate physical goods with music and videos. The underlying technology would allow copying with a marginal cost of zero. The problem of course is how to feed the artists and all the other people in the industry if we give out the content for free.
One thing that I believe doesn't work is a "culture flatrate" where you pay a fee and can access what you want. In the end, this is not much different from having a tax, and having the state pay the artists. And I really don't want the state to decide what is art and what not.
What I really think we have to do long term, and I'm totally serious, is to move to a post-capitalist society, and get rid of money and the requirement to do wage labor. I'm convinced there are many pressing problems - climate change, rising inequality, the fact that many people are overworked despite productivity increases - that we cannot easily solve in our current society. It's like our political system has collected too much technical debt.
I know, Joel Spolsky says you should never do a total rewrite, and I think this applies even more for your whole society :-) but I believe strongly we're in for a serious refactoring and core replacement. And the content industry is only one small symptome of that.
It's not so much "emulating" physical goods as it is trying to capture separate costs that physical goods link intrinsically and (mostly) effectively.
With physical media (paper books, boards games, records, film, etc) the cost of creating+distributing copies is so high that it meets or exceeds the cost of creating (or, curating/funding an environment/projects that enables the creation of) the original work. Creation and distribution of physical copies is challenging and profitable enough that creators can be paid by a portion of the profits from distribution.
In contrast, copying + distributing digital media is so phenomenally easy and egalitarian that there is very little opportunity to add value and create profit. So the method of paying creators that is essentially "built in" to physical media does not exist for digital media.
Some of the streaming music services do something like this. They scan your local music library and unlock those tracks to stream regardless of your subscription accesses. I used Google Music for this a while back.
Mp3.com That was attempted back in the day with CDs. It did not end well.
"To make the service easy to use, MP3.com did not require users to load their own music into the virtual lockers. Rather, a user merely had to insert a copy of the music into the CD-ROM drive of a computer, at which point MP3.com would verify that the person had possession of a CD, then the company would automatically put a copy of the music into the person's virtual locker."
"However, the lawsuit by the record companies asserted that MP3.com had violated copyrights by creating the digital database of albums to which they held the copyrights. In April, U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff ruled that MP3.com had infringed companies' copyrights."
"In the ensuing months, MP3.com reached settlements with four of the record companies, including Sony Music, Time Warner, EMI Group and Bertelsmann. Details of the settlements were not made public, but analysts estimated the company paid $20-million to each company."
Universal media access should be a thing. The government could demand access to entire digital catalogs, compensate and resell to front-end streaming providers.
