If they are not willing to pay for it, then they have no right to enjoy it. In the end, it always boils down to pirates being spoiled. People never pirate to make ends meet. There is no digital content that is essential to anyone's life. People pirate because they want to be entertained but they don't want to pay for it.
I would very much like to watch US TV shows. Preferably on a computer, since I don't have a TV (but on TV would be a good effort too!) Unfortunately, somebody has decided that I am not allowed to.
If try to buy Hulu Plus, I am greeted with a nice message telling me to fuck off back to where I came from. Same with Netflix. Hell, I can't even watch a 2 minute clip of the Daily Show without resorting to browser gymnastics.
So I pirate US TV shows. Mercilessly. I can't see a downside. If the piracy has no effect on their profit margins, then we continue to get great TV content. If they go bankrupt, then some people who I violently despise lose their jobs. It's win/win!
Why do you feel entitled to it in the first place? It isn't your god given right to watch community in hd at the drop of a hat. If the old gaurd isn't providing what you want then don't buy their stuff. Use your money to invest in services that ARE paving the way to the future. If the profit margins on the industry are as large as people say, it should be a race to the bottom, just like you see with artists self distributing these days.
I may be wrong, but most of the reasons that I can't watch community in HD At the drop of a hat is because our gov. can't figure out a deal with the US gov. on rights.
I would gladly pay double the price for Netflix Canada if the service was as good as it is in the states. I don't mind paying for something if it provides me a good service, but it doesn't. Netflix canada is a steaming pile.
So, "Use your money to invest in services that ARE paving the way to the future." is impossible because if big companies like Netflix can't even do it, no amount of money is going to help the situation.
EDIT: Turns out it's canada's fault, not the us's when it comes to why we don't get hulu/netflix/etc.
I'm feel the same as you. I pay 30 a month for espnplayer.com to watch NCAA football games for my college. I mean my wife thinks I'm nuts but there is a legal way to watch these games so I pay for it. Now I can't seem to find something like this for a lot of other things I enjoy. My wife has to resort to going around the web to get access to shows she enjoyed in the US. Now I understand that some channels in Canada both the rights to most of those things (As for the NCAA games they don't seem to broadcast them here at all) and are not implementing web streaming services for them which is dumb.
To me this - the market is not meeting the demand - is the single best argument.
If something is available legally and at a reasonable price (by which I mean not only available second hand for £100 as a collectable, rather than "99p for an MP3, that's outrageous" etc...) I either buy it or accept I won't have it.
If it's not available I have no real issue with getting it illegally.
Frankly if the media companies adopted day and date releases worldwide for content and worked to make their back catalogues widely available through convenient means (by which iTunes, Amazon, Netflix and so on count) a lot of the best arguments in favour of piracy dry up.
> If something is available legally and at a reasonable price (by which I mean not only available second hand for £100 as a collectable, rather than "99p for an MP3, that's outrageous" etc...) I either buy it or accept I won't have it.
You are assuming the world is full of honorable people like yourself. Unfortunately, that's not the world we live in. In the words of Scott Adams:
"The least effective system ever invented is something called the honor system. The theory guiding this system is that people are not huge weasels."
I'm not necessarily suggesting that it's workable as a solution for the whole industry, more that for those who wish to "combat piracy", if you strip away the objections that honest people have, you have a better chance of making your case.
Content creators have rights around their content. One of those rights is how it is distributed, and who gets to use it. Pirating a TV show because you feel it should be available in your country is no different from say violating the GPL. Often GPL'ed software is misguided and would serve everyone better under a different license, but it still remains the author's right to choose the GPL.
Why do you seek out and watch the content made by people you violently despise?
I think part of the reason people pirate foreign TV shows is because all their friends are doing it.
People are always telling me "OMG, You have to watch this new US TV show".
When I explain that I don't really like piracy I get some very strange looks.
I think people often overestimate how many people are willing to consider ethics at all in purchasing decisions. I know plenty of otherwise nice and decent people who would happily purchase a product that they knew was made by child slavery, hell people even joke about it.
It seems that considering the consequences of your actions isn't hip anymore once consumerism is involved.
You have a right to eat food. You don't have a right to walk into a restaurant and eat without paying. I don't have the right to take your food.
You have a right to exercise. You don't have the right to walk into Gold's Gym and use their facilities without paying. I don't have the right to enter your home and use the equipment in the basement.
You have a right to have mutually consensual sex with someone else without paying. You don't have the right to rape a prostitute if they only offer sex for money because you didn't want to pay. I don't have the right to demand sex from your family.
You have the right to borrow a book from your friend if he's willing to lend it to you. You don't have the right to borrow your buddy's book without their permission just as you don't have the right to walk into a bookstore and borrow their books without permission. I don't have the right to take your books from you.
You've confused physical property with intellectual property. Depriving someone of the physical immediately victimizes them, copying their intellectual property doesn't, it's not the same thing.
Do you work for free? It's pretty essential to all of society that work and/or value is generally paid for. You demanding that content be available for free simply because you want it is no different from your boss deciding to not pay you because he doesn't want to.
Yes people can choose to make their work available for free, and that's great. But that choice again lies in the person who created the work, not the person who consumes it.
And to be perfectly clear, I have no delusion that piracy will ever go away. It's a fact of the digital world. My point is pirates should not delude themselves into thinking what they do is justified. It's not.
The value of said work lies in the consumer, not the producer. If consumers by in large don't want to pay for something, then it simply isn't valuable and producing something in that segment and then complaining about piracy is rather pointless. You know going in consumers don't value that because they're accustomed to getting it for free. You had better expect piracy.
Your point about value lying in the consumer is a good response to the parent. The parent implies that society should invent business models to protect people who do things (but then even fails to make the point through use of word "generally").
However, I don't think the rest of your points are strong. People might not want to pay for apples, but that doesn't give them the justification to steal them. That's not because they don't value them - clearly they do. Or else they wouldn't want them.
Copying is different to stealing because in copying you don't deprive the creating from anything apart from completely arbitrary rights that the law grants to them.
It may also be worth raising that there's room for a difference between protection of 1. privacy (this photo is of me and I don't want it released because that would be invasive to a reasonable definition of privacy); 2. first release (I created something but it's personal, I haven't released it to anyone, and don't want people redistributing it - this is an anti-right, but more reasonable than the next one); 3. Protection of publishers (I create something, and the government gives me a monopoly over all copies and derivatives of it to such an extent that government invades people's civil liberties to protect my business models).
The apple comparison isn't apt; apples are physical products, I'm talking about intellectual products.
Copying isn't stealing, so yea, it's different.
As for the final paragraph, all of those are rather easily solved by realizing that information will be copied whether you like it or not. If you don't want it out there, don't release it. Fake government monopolies on information copying is a dying model, the death throws of the old guard trying to cope with a world they don't understand. Information will be free, eventually.
city41 wrote "If they are not willing to pay for it, then they have no right to enjoy it." in the context that "it" is copyrighted work that is offered for sale, not just anything. You know it as well as everyone here.
But I do believe that if somebody has something you want and they only offer to you for a price (be it money or otherwise), you don't have a right to it for free, pretty much whatever "it" is. (assuming they have the right to that control in the first place obviously) See biot's comment for eloquent point-by-point explanation.
If the pirate derives benefit from it but less benefit than the price and thus does not consume, then there is a deadweight loss. In this case, piracy provides a net benefit to society.
(Studies have shown that the sales-displacing effect of piracy in music ranges from 42% to no effect at all[1]. If all piracy could be prevented, that's an awfully large deadweight loss)
If the pirate is enjoying the music, then clearly the pirate would be willing to pay something more than nothing to hear the music, if piracy were not easily avaliable.
> be willing to pay something more than nothing to hear the music.
In this case $0 or even a negative value amount is what you can plug into something. Why? Think about artists that tried pay-what-you-want model. A lot of people pay $0. Some pay $0.10. But a lot pay $0.
However, what they pay with is with their time and attention.
I used to know someone who managed a movie theater. He would sneak us into movies quite often. Good and bad. And quite often after coming out of the movie I felt like wanting "my free back".
Let's say an artist is unknown and I am a customer that has quite a few connection ( a blog with a large following perhaps ). Then what would make sense is for me to pay a negative amount ( the artist would pay me to spend my time listening to his new cool record in the hopes that I might spread the news about it ).
> Think about artists that tried pay-what-you-want model. A lot of people pay $0. Some pay $0.10. But a lot pay $0.
FWIW, the only album I've paid for in years was a pay-what-you-want deal. I paid something like $3. Which was all that was left in my bank account after I paid my rent and bought groceries for that month - I'm a college student.
Of course, but that implies that it is possible to pay for it. The copyright holders must adapt business models so potential customers can pay for a product they want, not some inferior DRM that hurts the customer. As long as piracy gives potential customers the best product, the incentive to pay is lost.
There is an economic cost. If even one person pirates a digital work who WOULD have paid for it had pirating not been an option, it causes a cost to the producer of the media. So there is a real cost.
