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Well, will the Amazon Instant Video be possible to archive and playable without DRM support and offline? If not it's not the same product. Is it available to me (Norway)? No, so it's not the same product.

I think pricing is a separate, but related concern. I paid ~17 USD to watch Gravity in theatres once, but I'm not sure I'd be willing to pay anything to watch "the Wolf of Wallstreet". I might watch it for free, though. So in this case, if I were to pirate WoWst -- that wouldn't be a lost sale. It'd be free marketing (if I recommend it to others), or well, nothing I guess. Not a lost sale, because buying wasn't considered.

The thing is, people have different tastes, and for someone that's a die-hard De Caprio fan, WoWst might be worth $20. I might be willing to buy some film others think is crap etc. Now, had I watched an unlicensed copy of WoWst and thought it was ok, I'd probably recommend it to someone who really liked Leo -- even if I wouldn't consider it a great movie. And if did consider it a great movie I certainly would.

I think we're seeing (and have been seeing) a disturbing shift around the ideas of laws with regards to content: anti-piracy (anti-usability ;) groups seem to argue that people want to steal, and only enforcement keeps them from stealing. This disregards the idea that laws are a form of consensus -- there's not a law enforcement department in the world that can work without citizen support. Laws that are regarded as unfair and unwarranted will be broken.

I feel that in general arguing piracy kills music and film, is like arguing libraries kills books.



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