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I always wanted to know how is the damage done determined ? "U.S. authorities say Dotcom and three co-accused Megaupload executives cost film studios and recor

I always wanted to know how is the damage done determined ? "U.S. authorities say Dotcom and three co-accused Megaupload executives cost film studios and record companies more than $500 million and generated more than $175 million by encouraging paying users to store and share copyrighted material." Distributing copyrighted stuff is illegal, period. But the way those calculations are made worries me. Do they start from the presumption that if the movie wasn't uploaded on megaupload, some person would have bought tickets to that film ? Is that the underlying premise? I mean as a consumer I could either buy the movie, or watch an illegal upload of it. Isn't that a false dichotomy?. I could just as well not watch it, if that illegal upload didn't exist, and as such I would not have costed the company one cent.

benchaney 9y ago
They're completely made up. There is no practical way to measure the amount of revenue lost by copyright infringement, and big numbers sound good and drive fear and outrage.
ska 9y ago
I suspect they use the same logic that police media relations tend to use in reporting "street value", etc. Something like assume the highest possible revenue outcome, then round up. If it doesn't immediately fail the giggle test, that's your number. We saw the same thing with music downloads, the assumption that every one represented the loss of a full priced album purchase or whatever.
toyg 9y ago
> Isn't that a false dichotomy? It is, and it's been pointed out from the dawn of computer piracy. But the world runs on greed, not on logic.
DavidNielsen 9y ago
Rob Reid did a funny 5min TED Talk on this called the 8 Billion dollar iPod: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZadCj8O1-0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZadCj8O1-0 He used the same premise when he wrote the comedy sci-fi book Year Zero, the story of naive aliens accidentally pirating all of Earths music and the legal consequences thereof, i.e. owning the citizens of Earth literally all the money in the universe leading to the ruination of their delightfully hedonistic utopia. A quick and hilarious read.
- logfromblammo 9y ago
  Maybe we should execute an international copyright convention that specifies that the public domain is only free for Earth people. We could own two entire universes someday.
  - xbkingx 9y ago
    Pffft Preemptive market inclusion never works. We tried with the 'World Series', and all we got was a few stray Canadians. Miss Universe? Still no aliens and we can't even get a Miss Antarctica. <--- encoding subspace transmission ---> <--- encoding failed ---> <--- Begin message contents ---> From: Infiltrator 72a9 To: Glop Flirbstekker Glorp, stop downloading that Earth music immediately. They've figured out a loophole in Protocol 3 that could make the Level 7 event on Stlafft look like a Level 2! I don't care how much you like Roy Orbison. Stop immediately! <--- End message contents --->
franciscop 9y ago
It depends on the country! In Spain for instance it's totally legal as long as there is no commercial intention. Both "distributing" and "copyrighted" are terms that some times have not such clear boundaries. Is giving your sibling a used DVD illegal? Is selling it to a 2nd hand store illegal? A book is clearly legal to resell, right? Then why wouldn't some digital material be? There is a whole industry interested in making you think that is illegal, so please don't spread FUD :)
- chrischen 9y ago
  People paid for their service too. So they are making money directly off of users’ illegal actions like how 1) airbnb users illegally converting rooms into short term rentals 2) amazon helping people avoid sales tax 3) uber lyft allowing drivers to drive taxis without a taxi license
  - jdmichal 9y ago
    As for point (2), technically it's on the consumer to pay use tax on an item that they did not pay sales tax on. Amazon was operating in a perfectly normal manner; it's just that interstate sales like that weren't common before the internet. The laws are still trying to catch up. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use_tax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use_tax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streamlined_Sales_Tax_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streamlined_Sales_Tax_Project
    - chrischen 9y ago
      My point is that it's on the consumers to follow the laws, but in each of those cases the companies are implicitly benefitting from mass "illegal" activity from users.
    - nitrogen 9y ago
      I thought mail-order catalogs were fairly common. How did they handle tax?
      - 9y ago
icebraining 9y ago
I don't know about this specific case, but in the US they often use statutory damages instead: "the copyright owner may elect, at any time before final judgment is rendered, to recover, instead of actual damages and profits, an award of statutory damages for all infringements involved in the action, with respect to any one work, for which any one infringer is liable individually, or for which any two or more infringers are liable jointly and severally, in a sum of not less than $750 or more than $30,000 as the court considers just." https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/504 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/504 This is how Thomas-Rasset was at one time convicted to pay almost $2M for having shared 24 songs on Kazaa: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitol_Records,_Inc._v._Thomas-Rasset https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitol_Records,_Inc._v._Thoma...
- some_account 9y ago
  America is always winning the craziness award in these threads, due to being ultra capitalistic with no regard to common sense.
  - digi_owl 9y ago
    With the added irony that they were late in signing the Bern convention on copyright (didn't happen until the 1980s).
- tzs 9y ago
  We probably need a new kind of statutory damages geared to this kind of infringement. The current statutory damages are geared toward commercial infringement. Note, though, that she had to work really hard to get damages that high. As noted in your quote, statutory damages fall in a range. She probably would have gotten near the low end of the possible range if she had not tried to destroy evidence, had not perjured herself in court, and had not tried to blame her children for the copyright infringement. Note also that she could have avoided this by taking the very reasonable settlement offer the RIAA made before they sued her. She was offering for distribution 1702 copyrighted songs, and they asked for $5000. That's under $3/song. When she refused and they sued, they only sued over 24 songs. Why only 24 instead of all 1702? I haven't seen anything that explains for sure why, but there are a couple plausible reasons. First, 24 x $750 = $18000. That's enough to get them the $5000 they wanted, plus a little more to cover the expense of having to actually start a lawsuit to get it. At this point, everyone in her life that is not a colossal moron should have been telling her to take that initial settlement offer, because when she loses in court the absolute minimum she loses is $18000, which is $12000 more than she could settle for. Second, for each song that is included in the lawsuit there is paperwork to be dealt with. They will have to introduce into evidence proof that all the proper filings were done at the copyright office, and that they represent the copyright owners and have the right to sue. Each and every one of those can be challenged by the defendant. There's just no point if all they want is what they asked for originally ($5000 to cover 1702 songs) plus something for the extra expense of having to go to trial. Note also that after the first couple of trials, which first led to a $200k award and then the $2 million award, the RIAA again offered a settlement: $25k. She refused. Eventually more proceedings got it back down to $200k, and again the RIAA offered to settle for a lower amount, if she would make a video about copyright infringement. She refused.
raattgift 9y ago
tl;dr: damages are claimed and argued by one of the parties in a lawsuit, or the prosecutor in criminal actions; the other side can argue that the calculation is wrong. In an adversarial system (in particular most systems that descend from English law), the claimant/plaintiff/prosecutor generally must claim a quantized liability at the start of proceedings, and then justify the quantum of liability. In some cases, some fraction (or even all) of the quantum may be subject to assessment by the court, which can consider the adversarial parties' pleadings and covering law (staute or case) and alter the quantum. In any event, if the defendant is not found liable, it very likely simply does not matter what the quantum of damages in the claim is (although a very high quantum can have an impact on the assessment of costs payable by the unsuccessful claimant in some circumstances, e.g. if a cheaper court cannot lawfully deal with such a large claim, or if there is over-reach in the face of something like an offer under England & Wales's Civil Procedure Rules (CPR) part 36). The key point here is that the defending party will generally argue that it is not liable in the first place, and if it is liable then the quantum of damages is too high "for the following reasons...". If the court doesn't agree that the defendant is liable at all, then it usually does not deal with the question of damages, even if how they are calculated by the claimant looks a bit suspect. If the claimed damages are overstated in an outrageous way, many courts will take that into account, and that will not benefit the claimant. In a case like this there likely will be litigation where Dotcom's litigation team will argue that the $500 and/or $175 million figure should be put to strict proof, and/or that it is unreasonably high (pointing to similar cases, for example). On the other hand, depending on the NZ court's rule on disclosure or discovery of evidence, that may expose them to having their books examined (at some cost) by the U.S. authorities. > Distributing copyrighted stuff is illegal, period. No; one may have a license from the copyright holder to distribute the material in question, there may be statutory license, or there may be defences against infringement claims in case law. Remember: there is copyright in everything that is produced from scratch by a human being in practically every jurisdiction in the world. I have copyright in this reply to you. You have copyright in the message I'm replying to. The sentence I quote above is a poor basis for you to raise a claim of copyright infringement since there is an implicit licensing, plausibly a mandatory licensing under HN TOS (since they necessarily made a copy and distributed one of those copies for me to read), a variety of defences based on concepts related to the U.S. doctrine of fair use, and local statute. You are free to liberally quote from this message in reply, and may do so entirely lawfully.
some_account 9y ago
I would go as far to say that 99% of downloaded movies or games would not get bought if the person had to buy it. Their numbers are pure fiction.
- ksk 9y ago
  Extending that logic, open source advocates should be stopping people from pirating software. If they're not going to buy windows anyway, at-least a few of them would switch to Linux. >I would go as far to say that 99% [..] >Their numbers are pure fiction. How ironic :)
liberte82 9y ago
You wouldn't download a car, would you?
- nsomaru 9y ago
  If I could, I would. I'd love an open source electric car design that can be printed on home 3D printers. We're still a way aways from this, but it doesn't seem like the realm of complete fiction :)
- starshadowx2 9y ago
  "You wouldn't shoot a policeman, and then steal his helmet. You wouldn't go to the toilet in his helmet and then send it to the policeman's grieving widow, and then steal it again." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALZZx1xmAzg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALZZx1xmAzg
TallGuyShort 9y ago
It's absolutely a false dichotomy. I have wanted DRM-free digital copies of movies that I paid to see in theaters and paid to get the DVD. Where can I get a DRM-free copy? Illegally. I would pay for it, but it's not for sale. Many statutes of limitations ago, I pirated a lot of music that I would never have paid for otherwise. I actually went and bought a lot of it on CD because I discovered I liked it and wanted to own the original CD. In my case, piracy has caused no loss to movie studios because I've never pirated a movie when I had the faintest option of buying it legally, and was a net gain to record labels because I've bought music I wouldn't have even discovered without piracy. I'm sure the odd thing has slipped through that maybe I would have discovered and bought through some other channel eventually, and not everyone does this maybe, but I agree with you that the calculations are way off and presume too much.
pmarreck 9y ago
Or you could just download a ton of movies because you're a collector of digital stuff, and simply never watch it.
ballenf 9y ago
There's one other aspect to the damage calculation. It's admittedly even more subjective than the others in use, but in my opinion even more important. It's the subjective devaluation in the market of the content. If goods with zero marginal costs tend towards being priced at zero content creators need to raise the marginal cost of their goods to be above zero. With digital goods, the only ways to do that is to attach risk to the act of copying or distributing and increasing the difficulty of finding the content. Getting back to unauthorized copying of digital media, the cost could be calculated as the net reduction in perceived value of the good as a result of its easy availability. In hard terms, rampant copying might mean that pricing sweet spot for DVDs or legal streaming is depressed and that reduction then becomes the "cost" of the piracy to creators.
- thaumasiotes 9y ago
  This is true, but none of that reduction is attributable to a suable party, even one the size of megaupload.
  - ballenf 9y ago
    For sure. My point was just that it's the calculation that Hollywood studios should be thinking about internally when deciding how much spend on combatting piracy. At some point the expense becomes greater than the benefit. And I doubt they're so naive as to use the 1:1 calculation of each download being exactly equal to a lost ticket sale, except when it comes to press releases.
chrisbennet 9y ago
Obviously, once Megaupload was taken down, the subsequent jump in the injured parties revenues would indicate how much they were losing before. Oh wait, are you telling me there wasn’t a jump? /s
posterboy 9y ago
The rather small claim of 500m probably accounts for that. I had a similar problem at a job: Eating the food that had to be thrown away was called stealing if not payed for. I argued I wouldn't pay that much under normal circumstances and just don't want to waste food, but the next day I found myself willing to pay in my shift for a snack at least while the food was still good, postponed it for a while because I didn't have the time and then even went the last stretch of the shift thinking the snack would be free if I just waited. It's the famous slippery slope. On the other hand and more topical, after receiving a cease and desist letter and claims from a well known law firm I ignored them thinking I never directly payed for TV before and still indirectly do because advertisement is prised into the products I buy on the one hand, and because of bad availabilty I would have to pay a premium for DVDs which is not even in my budget nor my idea of my money's worth, but you might argue that I am just missing the incentive to work for it so there's indirect economic damage, as much as I hate to say that -- just playing devil's advocate. Ironically, if I had to work for it, I wouldn't have the time to binge watch as I did. My biggest gripe is probably that media players are full of bugs, so it's unhygenic to load from unknown sources ...

benchaney 9y ago

They're completely made up. There is no practical way to measure the amount of revenue lost by copyright infringement, and big numbers sound good and drive fear and outrage.

ska 9y ago

I suspect they use the same logic that police media relations tend to use in reporting "street value", etc. Something like assume the highest possible revenue outcome, then round up. If it doesn't immediately fail the giggle test, that's your number. We saw the same thing with music downloads, the assumption that every one represented the loss of a full priced album purchase or whatever.

toyg 9y ago

> Isn't that a false dichotomy? It is, and it's been pointed out from the dawn of computer piracy. But the world runs on greed, not on logic.

DavidNielsen 9y ago

Rob Reid did a funny 5min TED Talk on this called the 8 Billion dollar iPod: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZadCj8O1-0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZadCj8O1-0 He used the same premise when he wrote the comedy sci-fi book Year Zero, the story of naive aliens accidentally pirating all of Earths music and the legal consequences thereof, i.e. owning the citizens of Earth literally all the money in the universe leading to the ruination of their delightfully hedonistic utopia. A quick and hilarious read.

logfromblammo 9y ago
Maybe we should execute an international copyright convention that specifies that the public domain is only free for Earth people. We could own two entire universes someday.
- xbkingx 9y ago
  Pffft Preemptive market inclusion never works. We tried with the 'World Series', and all we got was a few stray Canadians. Miss Universe? Still no aliens and we can't even get a Miss Antarctica. <--- encoding subspace transmission ---> <--- encoding failed ---> <--- Begin message contents ---> From: Infiltrator 72a9 To: Glop Flirbstekker Glorp, stop downloading that Earth music immediately. They've figured out a loophole in Protocol 3 that could make the Level 7 event on Stlafft look like a Level 2! I don't care how much you like Roy Orbison. Stop immediately! <--- End message contents --->

franciscop 9y ago

It depends on the country! In Spain for instance it's totally legal as long as there is no commercial intention. Both "distributing" and "copyrighted" are terms that some times have not such clear boundaries. Is giving your sibling a used DVD illegal? Is selling it to a 2nd hand store illegal? A book is clearly legal to resell, right? Then why wouldn't some digital material be? There is a whole industry interested in making you think that is illegal, so please don't spread FUD :)

chrischen 9y ago
People paid for their service too. So they are making money directly off of users’ illegal actions like how 1) airbnb users illegally converting rooms into short term rentals 2) amazon helping people avoid sales tax 3) uber lyft allowing drivers to drive taxis without a taxi license
- jdmichal 9y ago
  As for point (2), technically it's on the consumer to pay use tax on an item that they did not pay sales tax on. Amazon was operating in a perfectly normal manner; it's just that interstate sales like that weren't common before the internet. The laws are still trying to catch up. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use_tax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use_tax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streamlined_Sales_Tax_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streamlined_Sales_Tax_Project
  - chrischen 9y ago
    My point is that it's on the consumers to follow the laws, but in each of those cases the companies are implicitly benefitting from mass "illegal" activity from users.
  - nitrogen 9y ago
    I thought mail-order catalogs were fairly common. How did they handle tax?
    - 9y ago

icebraining 9y ago

I don't know about this specific case, but in the US they often use statutory damages instead: "the copyright owner may elect, at any time before final judgment is rendered, to recover, instead of actual damages and profits, an award of statutory damages for all infringements involved in the action, with respect to any one work, for which any one infringer is liable individually, or for which any two or more infringers are liable jointly and severally, in a sum of not less than $750 or more than $30,000 as the court considers just." https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/504 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/504 This is how Thomas-Rasset was at one time convicted to pay almost $2M for having shared 24 songs on Kazaa: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitol_Records,_Inc._v._Thomas-Rasset https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitol_Records,_Inc._v._Thoma...

some_account 9y ago
America is always winning the craziness award in these threads, due to being ultra capitalistic with no regard to common sense.
- digi_owl 9y ago
  With the added irony that they were late in signing the Bern convention on copyright (didn't happen until the 1980s).
tzs 9y ago
We probably need a new kind of statutory damages geared to this kind of infringement. The current statutory damages are geared toward commercial infringement. Note, though, that she had to work really hard to get damages that high. As noted in your quote, statutory damages fall in a range. She probably would have gotten near the low end of the possible range if she had not tried to destroy evidence, had not perjured herself in court, and had not tried to blame her children for the copyright infringement. Note also that she could have avoided this by taking the very reasonable settlement offer the RIAA made before they sued her. She was offering for distribution 1702 copyrighted songs, and they asked for $5000. That's under $3/song. When she refused and they sued, they only sued over 24 songs. Why only 24 instead of all 1702? I haven't seen anything that explains for sure why, but there are a couple plausible reasons. First, 24 x $750 = $18000. That's enough to get them the $5000 they wanted, plus a little more to cover the expense of having to actually start a lawsuit to get it. At this point, everyone in her life that is not a colossal moron should have been telling her to take that initial settlement offer, because when she loses in court the absolute minimum she loses is $18000, which is $12000 more than she could settle for. Second, for each song that is included in the lawsuit there is paperwork to be dealt with. They will have to introduce into evidence proof that all the proper filings were done at the copyright office, and that they represent the copyright owners and have the right to sue. Each and every one of those can be challenged by the defendant. There's just no point if all they want is what they asked for originally ($5000 to cover 1702 songs) plus something for the extra expense of having to go to trial. Note also that after the first couple of trials, which first led to a $200k award and then the $2 million award, the RIAA again offered a settlement: $25k. She refused. Eventually more proceedings got it back down to $200k, and again the RIAA offered to settle for a lower amount, if she would make a video about copyright infringement. She refused.

raattgift 9y ago

tl;dr: damages are claimed and argued by one of the parties in a lawsuit, or the prosecutor in criminal actions; the other side can argue that the calculation is wrong. In an adversarial system (in particular most systems that descend from English law), the claimant/plaintiff/prosecutor generally must claim a quantized liability at the start of proceedings, and then justify the quantum of liability. In some cases, some fraction (or even all) of the quantum may be subject to assessment by the court, which can consider the adversarial parties' pleadings and covering law (staute or case) and alter the quantum. In any event, if the defendant is not found liable, it very likely simply does not matter what the quantum of damages in the claim is (although a very high quantum can have an impact on the assessment of costs payable by the unsuccessful claimant in some circumstances, e.g. if a cheaper court cannot lawfully deal with such a large claim, or if there is over-reach in the face of something like an offer under England & Wales's Civil Procedure Rules (CPR) part 36). The key point here is that the defending party will generally argue that it is not liable in the first place, and if it is liable then the quantum of damages is too high "for the following reasons...". If the court doesn't agree that the defendant is liable at all, then it usually does not deal with the question of damages, even if how they are calculated by the claimant looks a bit suspect. If the claimed damages are overstated in an outrageous way, many courts will take that into account, and that will not benefit the claimant. In a case like this there likely will be litigation where Dotcom's litigation team will argue that the $500 and/or $175 million figure should be put to strict proof, and/or that it is unreasonably high (pointing to similar cases, for example). On the other hand, depending on the NZ court's rule on disclosure or discovery of evidence, that may expose them to having their books examined (at some cost) by the U.S. authorities. > Distributing copyrighted stuff is illegal, period. No; one may have a license from the copyright holder to distribute the material in question, there may be statutory license, or there may be defences against infringement claims in case law. Remember: there is copyright in everything that is produced from scratch by a human being in practically every jurisdiction in the world. I have copyright in this reply to you. You have copyright in the message I'm replying to. The sentence I quote above is a poor basis for you to raise a claim of copyright infringement since there is an implicit licensing, plausibly a mandatory licensing under HN TOS (since they necessarily made a copy and distributed one of those copies for me to read), a variety of defences based on concepts related to the U.S. doctrine of fair use, and local statute. You are free to liberally quote from this message in reply, and may do so entirely lawfully.

some_account 9y ago

I would go as far to say that 99% of downloaded movies or games would not get bought if the person had to buy it. Their numbers are pure fiction.

ksk 9y ago
Extending that logic, open source advocates should be stopping people from pirating software. If they're not going to buy windows anyway, at-least a few of them would switch to Linux. >I would go as far to say that 99% [..] >Their numbers are pure fiction. How ironic :)

liberte82 9y ago

You wouldn't download a car, would you?

nsomaru 9y ago
If I could, I would. I'd love an open source electric car design that can be printed on home 3D printers. We're still a way aways from this, but it doesn't seem like the realm of complete fiction :)
starshadowx2 9y ago
"You wouldn't shoot a policeman, and then steal his helmet. You wouldn't go to the toilet in his helmet and then send it to the policeman's grieving widow, and then steal it again." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALZZx1xmAzg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALZZx1xmAzg

TallGuyShort 9y ago

It's absolutely a false dichotomy. I have wanted DRM-free digital copies of movies that I paid to see in theaters and paid to get the DVD. Where can I get a DRM-free copy? Illegally. I would pay for it, but it's not for sale. Many statutes of limitations ago, I pirated a lot of music that I would never have paid for otherwise. I actually went and bought a lot of it on CD because I discovered I liked it and wanted to own the original CD. In my case, piracy has caused no loss to movie studios because I've never pirated a movie when I had the faintest option of buying it legally, and was a net gain to record labels because I've bought music I wouldn't have even discovered without piracy. I'm sure the odd thing has slipped through that maybe I would have discovered and bought through some other channel eventually, and not everyone does this maybe, but I agree with you that the calculations are way off and presume too much.

pmarreck 9y ago

Or you could just download a ton of movies because you're a collector of digital stuff, and simply never watch it.

ballenf 9y ago

There's one other aspect to the damage calculation. It's admittedly even more subjective than the others in use, but in my opinion even more important. It's the subjective devaluation in the market of the content. If goods with zero marginal costs tend towards being priced at zero content creators need to raise the marginal cost of their goods to be above zero. With digital goods, the only ways to do that is to attach risk to the act of copying or distributing and increasing the difficulty of finding the content. Getting back to unauthorized copying of digital media, the cost could be calculated as the net reduction in perceived value of the good as a result of its easy availability. In hard terms, rampant copying might mean that pricing sweet spot for DVDs or legal streaming is depressed and that reduction then becomes the "cost" of the piracy to creators.

thaumasiotes 9y ago
This is true, but none of that reduction is attributable to a suable party, even one the size of megaupload.
- ballenf 9y ago
  For sure. My point was just that it's the calculation that Hollywood studios should be thinking about internally when deciding how much spend on combatting piracy. At some point the expense becomes greater than the benefit. And I doubt they're so naive as to use the 1:1 calculation of each download being exactly equal to a lost ticket sale, except when it comes to press releases.

chrisbennet 9y ago

Obviously, once Megaupload was taken down, the subsequent jump in the injured parties revenues would indicate how much they were losing before. Oh wait, are you telling me there wasn’t a jump? /s

posterboy 9y ago

The rather small claim of 500m probably accounts for that. I had a similar problem at a job: Eating the food that had to be thrown away was called stealing if not payed for. I argued I wouldn't pay that much under normal circumstances and just don't want to waste food, but the next day I found myself willing to pay in my shift for a snack at least while the food was still good, postponed it for a while because I didn't have the time and then even went the last stretch of the shift thinking the snack would be free if I just waited. It's the famous slippery slope. On the other hand and more topical, after receiving a cease and desist letter and claims from a well known law firm I ignored them thinking I never directly payed for TV before and still indirectly do because advertisement is prised into the products I buy on the one hand, and because of bad availabilty I would have to pay a premium for DVDs which is not even in my budget nor my idea of my money's worth, but you might argue that I am just missing the incentive to work for it so there's indirect economic damage, as much as I hate to say that -- just playing devil's advocate. Ironically, if I had to work for it, I wouldn't have the time to binge watch as I did. My biggest gripe is probably that media players are full of bugs, so it's unhygenic to load from unknown sources ...