7 ms·

> Off to a torrent site or asking around to see if someone has rips or a box set. The other option is to just not watch it.

rayiner 8y ago
The down voting you’re getting is emblematic of the entitlement mentality among tech folks when it comes to content. There is no right to consume entertainment someone else produced for free. If you don’t like the terms on which they’re selling the fruits of their labor, don’t buy it.
- lovich 8y ago
  If that feeling went both ways I could agree. Companies however, obviously don't like not controlling everything the public has and do things like increase copyright to a length that their own company would have never started(Disney), or try to claim that users no longer own products they buy and can no longer repair things themselves (John Deere). Companies have already taken multiple sustained attacks against consumers rights so why would consumers care about the companies rights?
  - rayiner 8y ago
    “Companies” are not an undifferentiated mass. What does John Deere have to do with Dexter or Game of Thrones? Are people only pirating the work of “bad” companies?
    - lovich 8y ago
      Consumers aren't an undifferentiated mass either. Why are paying customers sitting through 5 minutes of FBI warnings in front of DVDs because some other people pirate? These arguments go both ways but a large portion of this forum seems to only view it from the companies perspective
      - adventured 8y ago
        > Why are paying customers sitting through 5 minutes of FBI warnings in front of DVDs because some other people pirate? It's not your product to design, in this case you don't get to decide how it's presented. You also don't get to decide the design of iOS, or how Apple designs its next processor, or what color Stack Overflow's logo is, or the design of Wikipedia, or what resolutions YouTube offers, or what algorithms Google uses in its search product.
        lovich 8y ago
        "your product" is a function of our laws concerning property and those are not a fundamental law of the universe. Corporations have had a large say in defining what property is in the modern world but consumers get a say too, through their actions. Why are a series of 1s and 0s this companies property or that person's property other than because society declares them to be so? If they can declare who owns what then that declaration can change Edit: For example, if steam boat Willie was still under the copyright laws that existed when it was created, it would be society property now. Because the rules were changed, it's Disney's property. If "property" can be taken from society by companies, then the reverse can happen as well
        scrumption 8y ago
        Just like you don't get to decide if I download it for free or not, lol. But for your information, I can and do run userscripts, custom ROMs, jailbroken firmware etc to change the exact sort of thing you spent the second half of your post talking about. You sound like you have a very boring consumerist relationship to technology and the opposite of a hacker ethos.
        rayiner 8y ago
        "Hacker ethos" is using other peoples' work for free?
- Retra 8y ago
  I down-voted them for stating the obvious and adding nothing of value to the discussion. Either way, it doesn't take an 'entitlement mentality' to prefer paying less for something. That's just good sense. And lots of people do pay for entertainment with the expectation that they can share it with people. Humanity has spent its entire history freely sharing things that grab our social fancy and percolate through our cultural attentions. Just because a business wants to make money doesn't mean they have a right to deny the basic workings of the human brain. >If you don’t like the terms on which they’re selling the fruits of their labor, don’t buy it. I'm pretty sure finding someone else who has access to it involves not buying it. Next thing you'll be telling me I have a moral obligation to not watch my sister's Breaking Bad DVD's with her. Or worse: a legal obligation.
  - zaphirplane 8y ago
    I don’t think people are not replying to your comment because it makes a convincing argument. I suppose if you refuse to lend your car out for a $ it’s ok for someone to take it. Oh it’s a digital copy, so it’s ok for people to copy your work and give it away.
    - Retra 8y ago
      You're over-simplifying the problem, which is that digital distribution naturally promotes decentralization of distribution. Media and information products suffer due to that, but most media and information-content producers are already piggybacking on human social behaviors to produce value in the first place. If you produce digital music, for instance, it has almost no value if nobody shares it. The decentralization of distribution is exactly the mechanisms one uses to make money off of these things. Your hope is that things go "viral" and that they are shared so prolifically that you'll be able to extract value out of your importance to the network overall, not due to some analogous 'artificial' manufacturing bottleneck like you would with concrete goods. The argument that it is ok to consume media for free hinges on the fact that it is both efficient and natural human behavior, and that it doesn't undermine the whole-network of value. If the latest Avenger movie makes $1Bn in one week, then it's pretty clear that plenty of value is being extracted from the network, regardless of how many people have not paid to see it. People have no moral obligation to allow a content producer to monopolize all distribution, especially when the rational basis for such level of profit is simply not there. And you can't have it both ways anyway: you can't expect to have "viral" information that people also have to pay to exchange. (Or rather, you can't expect them to be Ok with that.) The appropriate analogy for that situation would be more like Toyota trying to make it illegal to sell cars that they manufacture without their consent. It would destroy the second-hand market and be highly inefficient for people. If my sister streams her DVDs over the internet to me, all we're doing there is avoiding the coordination costs and being economically efficient. In either case, I pay for my internet access, so I would, in fact, be paying for media that I torrent or share online.
- freehunter 8y ago
  Completely playing devil's advocate here, but why should the companies feel entitled to money? If someone is going to go out of their way to pirate something, they're not spending money on it any anyway. So the company is spending their own money and time coming up with ways to prevent people from accessing their content which the other person wouldn't have paid for in the first place, then using that to show how much money they've lost. Think about it like this: a comedian tells a joke that offends someone. But the people who get offended aren't the audience of that comedian, and wouldn't have seen the comedian's show anyway. Should the comedian worry at all about these people boycotting the show if they never have and never will buy tickets anyway? Ending the devil's advocate, if these companies want to completely control popular culture and change the definition of society, they have to understand that memes (not the Internet kind, the real life kind) spread until they are pervasive. There's a limit to how much Disney can force Avengers into our cultural identity then demand payment for it. Either Avengers becomes a cultural meme and spreads virally, or you can keep people from seeing it unless you control the experience end-to-end and only have it become a moderate success and only make a moderate amount of money.
  - rhino369 8y ago
    >Completely playing devil's advocate here, but why should the companies feel entitled to money? If someone is going to go out of their way to pirate something, they're not spending money on it any anyway. Entitled to money for services rendered is differnet than just being entitled to money. They don't think they deserve your money if you don't want to pay. They just don't think you should also get the product. I seriously doubt the people spending time pirating and watching media would just suddenly take up reading books from the library or maybe sewing. They'd probably spend some money on media. Not every pirated media is a lost sale. But some of them are. I know when I sailed the high seas I just ended up forking down money for stuff I couldn't successfully pirate (multiplayer games and movies in theatres).
  - tzs 8y ago
    > Completely playing devil's advocate here, but why should the companies feel entitled to money? If someone is going to go out of their way to pirate something, they're not spending money on it any anyway. So the company is spending their own money and time coming up with ways to prevent people from accessing their content which the other person wouldn't have paid for in the first place, then using that to show how much money they've lost That analysis maybe works in the context of an individual piece of content from a single company, but it is a lot more shaky when applied to multiple pieces of content from multiple companies. For instance, suppose someone wants to watch a movie tonight. Their first choice is not yet available on any streaming platform they subscribe to, nor is it available on any of the rental platforms they have reasonable access to. It's only available for purchase at $25. If they cannot pirate it they aren't likely to cancel their movie night. They are likely to move on to their second or third choice that is available on one of their streaming services or is rentable. If they pirate their first choice, then the company that provides that movie loses nothing because, as you note, they were not going to get the money anyway. The company providing their second choice however does lose out on the sale they would have made if there was no piracy. (Well, actually, the company that makes their first choice loses nothing that night. If they could not have pirated it, they probably would not have given up on watching it. They would more likely have postponed it to a later movie night after it does become available for rental or streaming).
- falcor84 8y ago
  Human rights are a very politically controversial topic, so let's instead reverse our focus and address this via Dawkins's concept of memetics. Looking at a piece of well-designed popular consumer entertainment content, we can see that its main reason of being is to spread out as if it were an epidemic, infecting people's minds and getting them to pass it around. Continuing with the epidemiological metaphor, there are several possible vectors for the content to spread, and the prevalence of each depends on the particular circumstances of specific hosts or communities of hosts. For example, if the vector of "Alice advising Bob to consume it on subscription service X" is effective in a particular community (and this effectiveness obviously depends on several different parameters), then piracy wouldn't be an issue there. But if all such legal vectors are ineffective in that community, while the content is still very potent in its memetic properties, then it will still spread out, in one of several forms of alternative less legal vectors. To paraphrase John Gilmore's famous quote about the internet, society treats inconvenient content providers as if they weren't there and routes around them, creating alternative distribution methods.
  - IAmGraydon 8y ago
    I think most of us are aware of why people steal content without lengthy, pretentious explanations. The point is that the OP acts as if he couldn’t possibly consider not watching. He believes that someone should provide it to him on the terms he deems fair or he has no choice but to steal it. OP is the textbook definition of a sociopath.
    - falcor84 8y ago
      I would argue that by using the term "steal" in regarding to content, you demonstrate why we do need to continue this dialog. There is no single truth here and I think that you are being overly offensive in saying that, by advocating for a different set of social rights, the OP is a sociopath. By the same token, any civil disobedience should be treated as sociopathy, no?
    - benchaney 8y ago
      > He believes that someone should provide it to him on the terms he deems fair or he has no choice but to steal it He made no such claim. You have to foundation from which to argue he believes this. > OP is the textbook definition of a sociopath. Blatantly lying about what someone else believes to paint them in a negative light is much more sociopathic than pirating something.
- mlthoughts2018 8y ago
  What do you think about a situation in which a consumer would be happy to pay full price to watch content, but they are prevented entirely by a service provider? For example, suppose where you live there is a monopoly ISP-cable conglomerate, you cannot afford to move away, and you are literally unable to consume from any other ISP / cable level provider. For some content, like watching European soccer in the US, this situation can mean that you are literally prevented from properly paying money to see that content, even though providers exist who can take your money and give you the content. It might even come down to your specific zip code, street, or even apartment building in some cities, where a content provider is case-by-case prevented from selling their content to certain residents purely based on whether a certain ISP has a monopoly on that location. Telling the consumer to just not watch seems morally hollow in that specific case (which is a really common case). The customer wants to pay, and a third-party wants to give the content, but a rent-seeking middleman that the consumer has no control over (ISP) can limit the customer’s choices. The customer cannot do what the market would suggest and take their business elsewhere to incentivize the services they want, and because of the ubiquitous need for internet connectivity to conduct basic life duties, totally boycotting the monopoly ISP is functionally not an option. (Really, it would not be reasonable to suggest such a drastic option.) I don’t see any ethical reason why the consumer should just accept being worse off (in terms of planned consumption), since it’s pure rent-seeking and value destruction on the part of the ISP, which the consumer is literally prevented from rejecting. Many other ISP behaviors are likewise just artificial rent-seeking attempts, to construct artificial tiering, bundling, etc., which the consumer is prevented from “not buying” because the service provider is often literally a monopoly. I’m just curious if you take an extreme view of this, that the ISPs or monopoly providers “are right” to use their monopoly position to introduce artificial rent-seeking opportunities? And that if a customer must choose between either paying the rent-seeking premium, stealing the content, or not consuming at all, that the customer should accept that the ISP / content provider’s ability to inflict this situation (through what are unequivocally antitrust violations that are just not punished solely because of regulatory capture) does indees mean the consumer just should opt to not consume at all? Essentially, “because ISPs spend money on regulatory capture, I should accept living a worse life by not consuming at all rather than watching illegally.”
  - 8y ago
- AtlasBarfed 8y ago
  These companies are explicitly setting up vertical monopolies, when they already have horizontal monopolies. The entitlement here is the elites, who don't have anything to fear from antitrust legislation and can fundamentally undermine the free market, which allegedly is important to the underlying Ayn Rand undercurrent of this site. In that context, rebellion/revolt/resistance is a somewhat legitimate choice by some points of view. Seriously, we just had an election directly related to the over-concentration of media in a few powers, and now we're allowing them to vertically monopolize the delivery of that content. Which would be a bit... ok... if it was just Mickey Mouse, but the news is fully controlled by oligarchs. By vertically integrating the internet access, they can censor the only uncontrolled news outlet: the internet.
- cam_l 8y ago
  Sure, if i don't like the terms of distribution I don't get the privilege to have it. If society doesn't like the terms, the company doesn't retain the privilege to sell it. Plenty of people do work which is not properly compensated. I don't get to set the terms of the sale of my intellectual property, as I work in an industry where this has little worth.. and I am an employee. This is all about power. The power to set prices, the power to use propaganda to change peoples morals, the power to change the law to criminalise minor contract infringements. And as such I get to say, whenever and wherever i can get away with it, fuck their power. For the very, very minimal amount that's about the sale of the fruits of labour of the creatives and workers producing this entertainment.. Well I wish there was an easier way to compensate them that didn't involve also paying off the distributors.
- esturk 8y ago
  There's a public library system that gives everyone in their city the entitlement to do so. There's nothing you can do or say to stop it too. It will be bought once and watched over 100+ times.
- ekianjo 8y ago
  > If you don’t like the terms on which they’re selling the fruits of their labor, don’t buy it. He's not buying it. He just got it for free. Problem solved.
- mikec3010 8y ago
  By offering their product to me, they implicitly agreed to my terms of service which gives me the express right to use a torrenting service. It also waives their right to sue and requires binding arbitration with an arbiter of my choosing.
rhizome 8y ago
The other option is to just not watch it. Why wouldn't I take advantage of every possible opportunity and technology to participate in our shared culture?
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]

rayiner 8y ago

The down voting you’re getting is emblematic of the entitlement mentality among tech folks when it comes to content. There is no right to consume entertainment someone else produced for free. If you don’t like the terms on which they’re selling the fruits of their labor, don’t buy it.

lovich 8y ago
If that feeling went both ways I could agree. Companies however, obviously don't like not controlling everything the public has and do things like increase copyright to a length that their own company would have never started(Disney), or try to claim that users no longer own products they buy and can no longer repair things themselves (John Deere). Companies have already taken multiple sustained attacks against consumers rights so why would consumers care about the companies rights?
- rayiner 8y ago
  “Companies” are not an undifferentiated mass. What does John Deere have to do with Dexter or Game of Thrones? Are people only pirating the work of “bad” companies?
  - lovich 8y ago
    Consumers aren't an undifferentiated mass either. Why are paying customers sitting through 5 minutes of FBI warnings in front of DVDs because some other people pirate? These arguments go both ways but a large portion of this forum seems to only view it from the companies perspective
    - adventured 8y ago
      > Why are paying customers sitting through 5 minutes of FBI warnings in front of DVDs because some other people pirate? It's not your product to design, in this case you don't get to decide how it's presented. You also don't get to decide the design of iOS, or how Apple designs its next processor, or what color Stack Overflow's logo is, or the design of Wikipedia, or what resolutions YouTube offers, or what algorithms Google uses in its search product.
      - lovich 8y ago
        "your product" is a function of our laws concerning property and those are not a fundamental law of the universe. Corporations have had a large say in defining what property is in the modern world but consumers get a say too, through their actions. Why are a series of 1s and 0s this companies property or that person's property other than because society declares them to be so? If they can declare who owns what then that declaration can change Edit: For example, if steam boat Willie was still under the copyright laws that existed when it was created, it would be society property now. Because the rules were changed, it's Disney's property. If "property" can be taken from society by companies, then the reverse can happen as well
      - scrumption 8y ago
        Just like you don't get to decide if I download it for free or not, lol. But for your information, I can and do run userscripts, custom ROMs, jailbroken firmware etc to change the exact sort of thing you spent the second half of your post talking about. You sound like you have a very boring consumerist relationship to technology and the opposite of a hacker ethos.
        rayiner 8y ago
        "Hacker ethos" is using other peoples' work for free?
Retra 8y ago
I down-voted them for stating the obvious and adding nothing of value to the discussion. Either way, it doesn't take an 'entitlement mentality' to prefer paying less for something. That's just good sense. And lots of people do pay for entertainment with the expectation that they can share it with people. Humanity has spent its entire history freely sharing things that grab our social fancy and percolate through our cultural attentions. Just because a business wants to make money doesn't mean they have a right to deny the basic workings of the human brain. >If you don’t like the terms on which they’re selling the fruits of their labor, don’t buy it. I'm pretty sure finding someone else who has access to it involves not buying it. Next thing you'll be telling me I have a moral obligation to not watch my sister's Breaking Bad DVD's with her. Or worse: a legal obligation.
- zaphirplane 8y ago
  I don’t think people are not replying to your comment because it makes a convincing argument. I suppose if you refuse to lend your car out for a $ it’s ok for someone to take it. Oh it’s a digital copy, so it’s ok for people to copy your work and give it away.
  - Retra 8y ago
    You're over-simplifying the problem, which is that digital distribution naturally promotes decentralization of distribution. Media and information products suffer due to that, but most media and information-content producers are already piggybacking on human social behaviors to produce value in the first place. If you produce digital music, for instance, it has almost no value if nobody shares it. The decentralization of distribution is exactly the mechanisms one uses to make money off of these things. Your hope is that things go "viral" and that they are shared so prolifically that you'll be able to extract value out of your importance to the network overall, not due to some analogous 'artificial' manufacturing bottleneck like you would with concrete goods. The argument that it is ok to consume media for free hinges on the fact that it is both efficient and natural human behavior, and that it doesn't undermine the whole-network of value. If the latest Avenger movie makes $1Bn in one week, then it's pretty clear that plenty of value is being extracted from the network, regardless of how many people have not paid to see it. People have no moral obligation to allow a content producer to monopolize all distribution, especially when the rational basis for such level of profit is simply not there. And you can't have it both ways anyway: you can't expect to have "viral" information that people also have to pay to exchange. (Or rather, you can't expect them to be Ok with that.) The appropriate analogy for that situation would be more like Toyota trying to make it illegal to sell cars that they manufacture without their consent. It would destroy the second-hand market and be highly inefficient for people. If my sister streams her DVDs over the internet to me, all we're doing there is avoiding the coordination costs and being economically efficient. In either case, I pay for my internet access, so I would, in fact, be paying for media that I torrent or share online.
freehunter 8y ago
Completely playing devil's advocate here, but why should the companies feel entitled to money? If someone is going to go out of their way to pirate something, they're not spending money on it any anyway. So the company is spending their own money and time coming up with ways to prevent people from accessing their content which the other person wouldn't have paid for in the first place, then using that to show how much money they've lost. Think about it like this: a comedian tells a joke that offends someone. But the people who get offended aren't the audience of that comedian, and wouldn't have seen the comedian's show anyway. Should the comedian worry at all about these people boycotting the show if they never have and never will buy tickets anyway? Ending the devil's advocate, if these companies want to completely control popular culture and change the definition of society, they have to understand that memes (not the Internet kind, the real life kind) spread until they are pervasive. There's a limit to how much Disney can force Avengers into our cultural identity then demand payment for it. Either Avengers becomes a cultural meme and spreads virally, or you can keep people from seeing it unless you control the experience end-to-end and only have it become a moderate success and only make a moderate amount of money.
- rhino369 8y ago
  >Completely playing devil's advocate here, but why should the companies feel entitled to money? If someone is going to go out of their way to pirate something, they're not spending money on it any anyway. Entitled to money for services rendered is differnet than just being entitled to money. They don't think they deserve your money if you don't want to pay. They just don't think you should also get the product. I seriously doubt the people spending time pirating and watching media would just suddenly take up reading books from the library or maybe sewing. They'd probably spend some money on media. Not every pirated media is a lost sale. But some of them are. I know when I sailed the high seas I just ended up forking down money for stuff I couldn't successfully pirate (multiplayer games and movies in theatres).
- tzs 8y ago
  > Completely playing devil's advocate here, but why should the companies feel entitled to money? If someone is going to go out of their way to pirate something, they're not spending money on it any anyway. So the company is spending their own money and time coming up with ways to prevent people from accessing their content which the other person wouldn't have paid for in the first place, then using that to show how much money they've lost That analysis maybe works in the context of an individual piece of content from a single company, but it is a lot more shaky when applied to multiple pieces of content from multiple companies. For instance, suppose someone wants to watch a movie tonight. Their first choice is not yet available on any streaming platform they subscribe to, nor is it available on any of the rental platforms they have reasonable access to. It's only available for purchase at $25. If they cannot pirate it they aren't likely to cancel their movie night. They are likely to move on to their second or third choice that is available on one of their streaming services or is rentable. If they pirate their first choice, then the company that provides that movie loses nothing because, as you note, they were not going to get the money anyway. The company providing their second choice however does lose out on the sale they would have made if there was no piracy. (Well, actually, the company that makes their first choice loses nothing that night. If they could not have pirated it, they probably would not have given up on watching it. They would more likely have postponed it to a later movie night after it does become available for rental or streaming).
falcor84 8y ago
Human rights are a very politically controversial topic, so let's instead reverse our focus and address this via Dawkins's concept of memetics. Looking at a piece of well-designed popular consumer entertainment content, we can see that its main reason of being is to spread out as if it were an epidemic, infecting people's minds and getting them to pass it around. Continuing with the epidemiological metaphor, there are several possible vectors for the content to spread, and the prevalence of each depends on the particular circumstances of specific hosts or communities of hosts. For example, if the vector of "Alice advising Bob to consume it on subscription service X" is effective in a particular community (and this effectiveness obviously depends on several different parameters), then piracy wouldn't be an issue there. But if all such legal vectors are ineffective in that community, while the content is still very potent in its memetic properties, then it will still spread out, in one of several forms of alternative less legal vectors. To paraphrase John Gilmore's famous quote about the internet, society treats inconvenient content providers as if they weren't there and routes around them, creating alternative distribution methods.
- IAmGraydon 8y ago
  I think most of us are aware of why people steal content without lengthy, pretentious explanations. The point is that the OP acts as if he couldn’t possibly consider not watching. He believes that someone should provide it to him on the terms he deems fair or he has no choice but to steal it. OP is the textbook definition of a sociopath.
  - falcor84 8y ago
    I would argue that by using the term "steal" in regarding to content, you demonstrate why we do need to continue this dialog. There is no single truth here and I think that you are being overly offensive in saying that, by advocating for a different set of social rights, the OP is a sociopath. By the same token, any civil disobedience should be treated as sociopathy, no?
  - benchaney 8y ago
    > He believes that someone should provide it to him on the terms he deems fair or he has no choice but to steal it He made no such claim. You have to foundation from which to argue he believes this. > OP is the textbook definition of a sociopath. Blatantly lying about what someone else believes to paint them in a negative light is much more sociopathic than pirating something.
mlthoughts2018 8y ago
What do you think about a situation in which a consumer would be happy to pay full price to watch content, but they are prevented entirely by a service provider? For example, suppose where you live there is a monopoly ISP-cable conglomerate, you cannot afford to move away, and you are literally unable to consume from any other ISP / cable level provider. For some content, like watching European soccer in the US, this situation can mean that you are literally prevented from properly paying money to see that content, even though providers exist who can take your money and give you the content. It might even come down to your specific zip code, street, or even apartment building in some cities, where a content provider is case-by-case prevented from selling their content to certain residents purely based on whether a certain ISP has a monopoly on that location. Telling the consumer to just not watch seems morally hollow in that specific case (which is a really common case). The customer wants to pay, and a third-party wants to give the content, but a rent-seeking middleman that the consumer has no control over (ISP) can limit the customer’s choices. The customer cannot do what the market would suggest and take their business elsewhere to incentivize the services they want, and because of the ubiquitous need for internet connectivity to conduct basic life duties, totally boycotting the monopoly ISP is functionally not an option. (Really, it would not be reasonable to suggest such a drastic option.) I don’t see any ethical reason why the consumer should just accept being worse off (in terms of planned consumption), since it’s pure rent-seeking and value destruction on the part of the ISP, which the consumer is literally prevented from rejecting. Many other ISP behaviors are likewise just artificial rent-seeking attempts, to construct artificial tiering, bundling, etc., which the consumer is prevented from “not buying” because the service provider is often literally a monopoly. I’m just curious if you take an extreme view of this, that the ISPs or monopoly providers “are right” to use their monopoly position to introduce artificial rent-seeking opportunities? And that if a customer must choose between either paying the rent-seeking premium, stealing the content, or not consuming at all, that the customer should accept that the ISP / content provider’s ability to inflict this situation (through what are unequivocally antitrust violations that are just not punished solely because of regulatory capture) does indees mean the consumer just should opt to not consume at all? Essentially, “because ISPs spend money on regulatory capture, I should accept living a worse life by not consuming at all rather than watching illegally.”
- 8y ago
AtlasBarfed 8y ago
These companies are explicitly setting up vertical monopolies, when they already have horizontal monopolies. The entitlement here is the elites, who don't have anything to fear from antitrust legislation and can fundamentally undermine the free market, which allegedly is important to the underlying Ayn Rand undercurrent of this site. In that context, rebellion/revolt/resistance is a somewhat legitimate choice by some points of view. Seriously, we just had an election directly related to the over-concentration of media in a few powers, and now we're allowing them to vertically monopolize the delivery of that content. Which would be a bit... ok... if it was just Mickey Mouse, but the news is fully controlled by oligarchs. By vertically integrating the internet access, they can censor the only uncontrolled news outlet: the internet.
cam_l 8y ago
Sure, if i don't like the terms of distribution I don't get the privilege to have it. If society doesn't like the terms, the company doesn't retain the privilege to sell it. Plenty of people do work which is not properly compensated. I don't get to set the terms of the sale of my intellectual property, as I work in an industry where this has little worth.. and I am an employee. This is all about power. The power to set prices, the power to use propaganda to change peoples morals, the power to change the law to criminalise minor contract infringements. And as such I get to say, whenever and wherever i can get away with it, fuck their power. For the very, very minimal amount that's about the sale of the fruits of labour of the creatives and workers producing this entertainment.. Well I wish there was an easier way to compensate them that didn't involve also paying off the distributors.
esturk 8y ago
There's a public library system that gives everyone in their city the entitlement to do so. There's nothing you can do or say to stop it too. It will be bought once and watched over 100+ times.
ekianjo 8y ago
> If you don’t like the terms on which they’re selling the fruits of their labor, don’t buy it. He's not buying it. He just got it for free. Problem solved.
mikec3010 8y ago
By offering their product to me, they implicitly agreed to my terms of service which gives me the express right to use a torrenting service. It also waives their right to sue and requires binding arbitration with an arbiter of my choosing.

rhizome 8y ago

The other option is to just not watch it. Why wouldn't I take advantage of every possible opportunity and technology to participate in our shared culture?

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]