8 ms·

This is terribly naive. When digital replication is easy -- as it is with arts like music or software -- piracy destroys innovation and hurts creators who want

This is terribly naive. When digital replication is easy -- as it is with arts like music or software -- piracy destroys innovation and hurts creators who want to earn a living by selling their creations. It's not like the farmers or the apartment owners are going to let people "pirate" a warm place to sleep or a good meal. IP haters often point to people who've successfully managed to encourage pseudo-piracy and made money. The Grateful Dead, for instance, let people freely copy mix tapes of their concerts and made their money on gate revenues. (They didn't let people in for free. Nope. ) If digital piracy is unchecked, then it forces artists to dream up other ways to make money. This creates inefficiencies and it just isn't fair to those who just want to sell their creations without holding a concert or drumming up some other scheme to get people to pay. Most "open source" companies spend endless hours trying to concoct ways to open source just enough of their product while forcing enough people to pay so everyone can eat. I've found that most of the people who speak like pitaj are in universities and they make their money through some mixture of outrageous tuition bills that can't be dodged or government funding from taxes that can't be escaped. There's no such thing as a free lunch.

tictoc 7y ago
I don't think people stealing would stop an artist from creating art. I think for people who view it as an ends to a mean, and make a living, it might make them seek other means of employment. But for the idealistic morons out there who create for the sake of creating, this wouldn't stop them in the least bit.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  > But for the idealistic morons out there who create for the sake of creating, this wouldn't stop them in the least bit. You'll notice the bait-and-switch modern society does here. We're supposed to value and respect artists, because they're "morons (...) who create for the sake of creating", who want to express their feelings and communicate their thoughts. And then we're given "artists" whose primary purpose is to make money through their creative works. I think we shouldn't be calling these two groups of people using the same word.
  - tictoc 7y ago
    I think for the consumer who is willing to put in the effort, it's not hard to find the true artists. Sometimes they may be on the billboard 100, but chances are most of them are not. There's a rabbit hole of art to consume and pontificate over. I don't think the tragedy is that more people aren't aware of great artists. I think the real tragedy is that even if they were aware of it, they wouldn't give a damn. Perhaps a solution should be engineered for that consumer who is looking, and that would be an art to avoid the mainstream bloat that would come with producing a mechanism like that.
collyw 7y ago
Linux and the open source ecosystem is evidence that creativeness is not limited to creators who sell a product.
kody 7y ago
This creates inefficiencies and it just isn't fair to those who just want to sell their creations without holding a concert or drumming up some other scheme to get people to pay. Are you arguing that it's unfair that a business needs to sell something that people are willing to pay for in order to make money?
- rayiner 7y ago
  That’s a specious argument. People are willing to pay large amounts of money for content. That has nothing to do with the propriety if people taking that content for free, other than it proves that those people are getting a valuable thing for nothing.
  - kody 7y ago
    If the tried and true method of getting paid is through concerts, Patreon, crowdfunding new albums, or selling CDs in the street, I don't think the market is as "unfair" as xhkkffbf is arguing. I agree that this has nothing to do with the propriety of people taking content with a price tag for free. But I think muddling the market sense of fairness (I don't want to/cannot perform in a concert; people should pay me for selling MP3s online) and the ethics of copying data is dangerous. Especially when we are solving the problem through legislation.
    - tptacek 7y ago
      There's nothing tried and true about that method. Artists do it because they have to, and the overwhelming majority of them are unable to make a full-time career out of it, and either relegate art to a side-hustle or take full-time jobs adjacent to their art (like recording engineering or record production).
- wolfgke 7y ago
  > Are you arguing that it's unfair that a business needs to sell something that people are willing to pay for I argue against that media companies are using goon squads (police, judges, industrial-prison complex) to rob people who pirate their money or their freedom. The fact that pircay exists exactly does show that their exist people that do not want to pay.
EvanAnderson 7y ago
The vast majority of human expression was created before the concept of "IP" existed. The business models we've had in the last few hundred years are the aberration, not the other way around. Creators aren't entitled to a "fair" world. Nobody is. Speaking of "fairness": How is it "fair" that someone should be entitled to profit again-and-again from a single act of work, just because that work was "creative"? Shouldn't the laborers who carried the stones to build a bridge be entitled to an ongoing royalty paid by everyone who crosses?
- ttoinou 7y ago
  just because that work was "creative"? That's where the IP theory all falls down. Originality or uniqueness doesn't exists, creation is all about recreating from what you learned from others. Creation is stealing in a moral and respectful way. Protecting your creations with IP laws is immoral and unrespectful against your public and previous artists you took from
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - rayiner 7y ago
    That's a straw man. Copyright doesn't prohibit someone from learning from your work. It prohibits (in the US) five specific acts: reproduction, preparation of derivative works, distribution of copies, public performance, and display. You don't need to be able to define a work of purely unique expression. All you need to be able to do is define when a work is sufficiently original that it's not a derivative work or reproduction.
    - ttoinou 7y ago
      1. Protecting with IP ¡= Copyright 2. I didn't say Copyright prevents others from learning 3. A work is never sufficiently original, it's always a derivative
- rayiner 7y ago
  > The vast majority of human expression was created before the concept of "IP" existed. The business models we've had in the last few hundred years are the aberration, not the other way around. That's probably not true, for two reasons. The general reason is that most of anything was created recently, due to the exponential growth of human population and society. The specific reason is that copyright was developed hand-in-hand with the technology for creating easily-reproduced works. > Shouldn't the laborers who carried the stones to build a bridge be entitled to an ongoing royalty paid by everyone who crosses? There are, of course, toll bridges and roads, including private ones. (The fact that the laborer doesn’t get the payment is a function of the arrangement between the laborer and the person who owns the bridge, not a function of the nature of the property right.)
pitaj 7y ago
> When digital replication is easy -- as it is with arts like music or software -- piracy destroys innovation and hurts creators who want to earn a living by selling their creations. There's no evidence this is true. This is already the world we live in, and creativity is high. > It's not like the farmers or the apartment owners are going to let people "pirate" a warm place to sleep or a good meal. I made a specific point that IP is fundamentally different. > The Grateful Dead, for instance, let people freely copy mix tapes of their concerts and made their money on gate revenues. (They didn't let people in for free. Nope. ) That exactly the point. Monetizing through live shows is already how most music artists make money. > This creates inefficiencies and it just isn't fair to those who just want to sell their creations without holding a concert or drumming up some other scheme to get people to pay. It's competition that benefits the consumers of those creations and an opportunity for middle-men to connect creators with consumers (see Patreon). Define "fair" when copyright is often used as a way to censor and steal from smaller creators. > Most "open source" companies spend endless hours trying to concoct ways to open source just enough of their product while forcing enough people to pay so everyone can eat. And the outcome is that the public has access to countless sets of open source software alternatives. Which is amazing for users and innovators. > I've found that most of the people who speak like pitaj are in universities and they make their money through some mixture of outrageous tuition bills that can't be dodged or government funding from taxes that can't be escaped. Not true for me.
- zerocrates 7y ago
  Just on the open-source thread of things, one thing to note is that the "copyleft" regime depends on copyright to work. As do many of the schemes open-source projects use to monetize. "Stealing from smaller creators" by the big guys isn't a problem I foresee getting smaller in an IP-free world.
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    > one thing to note is that the "copyleft" regime depends on copyright to work The idea of copyleft doesn't. The particular implementation in our regulatory reality does, because RMS & others figured out how to hack a system typically used for rent-seeking and restricting innovation (thus lots of parties are investing money to preserve it), and use it for the opposite goal.
enriquto 7y ago
> When digital replication is easy -- as it is with arts like music or software -- piracy destroys innovation and hurts creators who want to earn a living by selling their creations. The "creation" is the work, which can still be sold. Copies of the work cost nothing and does not make any sense to sell them.
- vharuck 7y ago
  It seems like this is the best way to go, but capitalism's competitive nature is a problem. If a shipping company hires developers to write logistics software, and then everyone has access to the software, the company will have spent money but gained no edge. Same with novels. If everyone can freely print and sell a story, who's the sucker that'll pay the writer? Of course, I see this as a problem with thr economy. Freely distributing ideas is better for society as a whole than keeping secrets.
  - zanny 7y ago
    Look no further than the Linux kernel for an example of almost every major tech company being invested in the largest software project in history because its in all their individual self interests to not try to reinvent a wheel that big for a competitive advantage. The prevalence of proprietary kernel drivers likewise lends credence to the value in having forced openness, which would fall under more right to repair than IP for consumers of products hosting software.
lubujackson 7y ago
You say this with such authority, but you are being naive yourself about the history of arts and economics. The window of history when art was considered "IP" that couldn't exist otherwise is vanishingly small, less than 100 years. Art survived and prospered somehow before IP laws, even after the printing press. IP is a construct created by capitalism to monetize art and information. It is not a real thing and it is not a necessary thing. People create things just fine without and industrial complex behind them, and if losing that is the cost of all art being accessible to everyone, I am fine with that deal.
Kalium 7y ago
> If digital piracy is unchecked, then it forces artists to dream up other ways to make money. I think you've accurately captured the state of the world for the vast majority of owners of IP who wish to profit from their work. It is extremely rare for royalties to produce any significant percentage of revenues for artists. Most revenue comes from merchandise, live performances, custom work, and so on. With this in mind, I submit that the actual value of IP in most cases is close to zero.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  I think it also must be noted that this would be the case with zero piracy as well. It's not pirates who eat up all the IP revenue, it's the middlemen between the artist and the audience.
  - Kalium 7y ago
    It may also be worth considering how value is created by the intermediaries. In the case of, for example, a hit single it's not obvious to me how much of the financial value came from the music itself and how much from the promotion of it. Which only makes me wonder further if the underlying IP is really valuable or not.
    - TeMPOraL 7y ago
      That's a fair point. Come to think of it, hit singles seem to be a lottery - most of the successful ones aren't much different from the unsuccessful ones, except that they reach the threshold of popularity (after which it becomes a positive feedback loop for a while). Spending money on promotion increases the chances of a single to win the lottery. So I guess I must concede the point. At least in pop music, it could be argued that the value of the work alone is small, and almost all of the value is created by third parties. You gave me something to think about.
    - ddingus 7y ago
      Given an IP strong environment, promotion via piracy, either by blatant give away, "free", or by tolerating some piracy can be high value when compared with the cost of promoters. A few examples: Official torrent with tip jar, purchase here info included. One could host this torrent too. Download here page with ads and opportunity to buy, pay what one wants to pay. Pay for copy, or stream it anytime from our nice server... Social media, coupled with variations on the above can get word out quickly. These things, and the many variations on them possible, are of least advantage to the big players, and can be a serious advantage for new, small, up and coming players. Piracy does not eliminate any sales opportunities. And it can often garner attention where buying that attention can be otherwise costly. Being relevant opens a lot of potential doors.
saagarjha 7y ago
> I've found that most of the people who speak like pitaj are in universities and they make their money through some mixture of outrageous tuition bills that can't be dodged or government funding from taxes that can't be escaped. This sounds like a personal attack and I feel your comment would be better without it.
knolax 7y ago
The word you're looking for is a "public good", a good that is non-excludable and non-rivalrous. In economics it is well known that businesses operating in the free market will always underproduce public goods if at all. We've already solved this issue with other public goods like infrastructure and defense, which is to fund it publically. > ... or government funding from taxes that can't be escaped. This is bad why? You seem to have issue with the fact that it's being funded in a way that you can't be avoided, but this is true even for private institutions. The truth is that in perfectly competitive markets most companies do not make enough profit to reinvest into research. Most research instead come from near-monopoly markets that have the profits to invest in research. Take for example the development of UNIX at Bell Labs. I doubt anybody living in that era could've avoided telephone charges entirely.
lunias 7y ago
Digital replication is easy and the mass adoption of digital mediums has rendered old business models ineffective. This is called progress. We've created something so great (computing, the internet) that its displaced much of what was before. The root model is still very much effectual: trade goods and services. If you sell a hardback copy of your book then you can make a margin from people who buy it to have in their offline library. If you perform your music live then you can profit off of your audience. If you open source your software then you can build a company offering consulting around it. Just think about the amount of advertising and reach that people have access to now. Using your example; giving away a million mix tapes to sell a hundred thousand tickets to your concerts is likely better than selling a thousand mix tapes because no one knows who you are and few want to take a chance. Say we succeeded in creating a crime free society. Would people be justified in their complaints about the lack of police jobs?
DiseasedBadger 7y ago
"Digital Piracy" is not a real thing. It's a convention you're advocating for, and one that reasonable people have still not heard a decent argument for adopting.
paulie_a 7y ago
There absolutely is a thing called a free lunch. In fact their is an album named after it "fat of the land" I pirate all the time even though I do try and buy the legal options first. When in a lot of cases. Kodi with a couple add-ons take care of the rest. I bought a physical copy of some book but the company drm servers are no longer maintained I'm out of luck. Pirated copies to the rescue. There is an entire generation that was raised to not give a shit about copyright. I've probably committed five felonies today yet paid once because I'd prefer to do that. So why bother paying any attention to copyright law? There are zero repercussions.
zaarn 7y ago
Piracy is not something that just replaces all forms of paid ownership of digital media. Piracy is just another competitor on the market; if for the customer the pirated copy provides a better experience at a cheaper price, no IP law will be able to stop the customer from using the better solution. That's capitalism at work. If you want piracy to stop the solution is simple; provide a better product. Either by providing a better experience (Netflix until recently, Steam) or at a cheaper/equivalent price (Offering your product for free or under an open source license).

tictoc 7y ago

I don't think people stealing would stop an artist from creating art. I think for people who view it as an ends to a mean, and make a living, it might make them seek other means of employment. But for the idealistic morons out there who create for the sake of creating, this wouldn't stop them in the least bit.

TeMPOraL 7y ago
> But for the idealistic morons out there who create for the sake of creating, this wouldn't stop them in the least bit. You'll notice the bait-and-switch modern society does here. We're supposed to value and respect artists, because they're "morons (...) who create for the sake of creating", who want to express their feelings and communicate their thoughts. And then we're given "artists" whose primary purpose is to make money through their creative works. I think we shouldn't be calling these two groups of people using the same word.
- tictoc 7y ago
  I think for the consumer who is willing to put in the effort, it's not hard to find the true artists. Sometimes they may be on the billboard 100, but chances are most of them are not. There's a rabbit hole of art to consume and pontificate over. I don't think the tragedy is that more people aren't aware of great artists. I think the real tragedy is that even if they were aware of it, they wouldn't give a damn. Perhaps a solution should be engineered for that consumer who is looking, and that would be an art to avoid the mainstream bloat that would come with producing a mechanism like that.

collyw 7y ago

Linux and the open source ecosystem is evidence that creativeness is not limited to creators who sell a product.

kody 7y ago

This creates inefficiencies and it just isn't fair to those who just want to sell their creations without holding a concert or drumming up some other scheme to get people to pay. Are you arguing that it's unfair that a business needs to sell something that people are willing to pay for in order to make money?

rayiner 7y ago
That’s a specious argument. People are willing to pay large amounts of money for content. That has nothing to do with the propriety if people taking that content for free, other than it proves that those people are getting a valuable thing for nothing.
- kody 7y ago
  If the tried and true method of getting paid is through concerts, Patreon, crowdfunding new albums, or selling CDs in the street, I don't think the market is as "unfair" as xhkkffbf is arguing. I agree that this has nothing to do with the propriety of people taking content with a price tag for free. But I think muddling the market sense of fairness (I don't want to/cannot perform in a concert; people should pay me for selling MP3s online) and the ethics of copying data is dangerous. Especially when we are solving the problem through legislation.
  - tptacek 7y ago
    There's nothing tried and true about that method. Artists do it because they have to, and the overwhelming majority of them are unable to make a full-time career out of it, and either relegate art to a side-hustle or take full-time jobs adjacent to their art (like recording engineering or record production).
wolfgke 7y ago
> Are you arguing that it's unfair that a business needs to sell something that people are willing to pay for I argue against that media companies are using goon squads (police, judges, industrial-prison complex) to rob people who pirate their money or their freedom. The fact that pircay exists exactly does show that their exist people that do not want to pay.

EvanAnderson 7y ago

The vast majority of human expression was created before the concept of "IP" existed. The business models we've had in the last few hundred years are the aberration, not the other way around. Creators aren't entitled to a "fair" world. Nobody is. Speaking of "fairness": How is it "fair" that someone should be entitled to profit again-and-again from a single act of work, just because that work was "creative"? Shouldn't the laborers who carried the stones to build a bridge be entitled to an ongoing royalty paid by everyone who crosses?

ttoinou 7y ago
just because that work was "creative"? That's where the IP theory all falls down. Originality or uniqueness doesn't exists, creation is all about recreating from what you learned from others. Creation is stealing in a moral and respectful way. Protecting your creations with IP laws is immoral and unrespectful against your public and previous artists you took from
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- rayiner 7y ago
  That's a straw man. Copyright doesn't prohibit someone from learning from your work. It prohibits (in the US) five specific acts: reproduction, preparation of derivative works, distribution of copies, public performance, and display. You don't need to be able to define a work of purely unique expression. All you need to be able to do is define when a work is sufficiently original that it's not a derivative work or reproduction.
  - ttoinou 7y ago
    1. Protecting with IP ¡= Copyright 2. I didn't say Copyright prevents others from learning 3. A work is never sufficiently original, it's always a derivative
rayiner 7y ago
> The vast majority of human expression was created before the concept of "IP" existed. The business models we've had in the last few hundred years are the aberration, not the other way around. That's probably not true, for two reasons. The general reason is that most of anything was created recently, due to the exponential growth of human population and society. The specific reason is that copyright was developed hand-in-hand with the technology for creating easily-reproduced works. > Shouldn't the laborers who carried the stones to build a bridge be entitled to an ongoing royalty paid by everyone who crosses? There are, of course, toll bridges and roads, including private ones. (The fact that the laborer doesn’t get the payment is a function of the arrangement between the laborer and the person who owns the bridge, not a function of the nature of the property right.)

pitaj 7y ago

> When digital replication is easy -- as it is with arts like music or software -- piracy destroys innovation and hurts creators who want to earn a living by selling their creations. There's no evidence this is true. This is already the world we live in, and creativity is high. > It's not like the farmers or the apartment owners are going to let people "pirate" a warm place to sleep or a good meal. I made a specific point that IP is fundamentally different. > The Grateful Dead, for instance, let people freely copy mix tapes of their concerts and made their money on gate revenues. (They didn't let people in for free. Nope. ) That exactly the point. Monetizing through live shows is already how most music artists make money. > This creates inefficiencies and it just isn't fair to those who just want to sell their creations without holding a concert or drumming up some other scheme to get people to pay. It's competition that benefits the consumers of those creations and an opportunity for middle-men to connect creators with consumers (see Patreon). Define "fair" when copyright is often used as a way to censor and steal from smaller creators. > Most "open source" companies spend endless hours trying to concoct ways to open source just enough of their product while forcing enough people to pay so everyone can eat. And the outcome is that the public has access to countless sets of open source software alternatives. Which is amazing for users and innovators. > I've found that most of the people who speak like pitaj are in universities and they make their money through some mixture of outrageous tuition bills that can't be dodged or government funding from taxes that can't be escaped. Not true for me.

zerocrates 7y ago
Just on the open-source thread of things, one thing to note is that the "copyleft" regime depends on copyright to work. As do many of the schemes open-source projects use to monetize. "Stealing from smaller creators" by the big guys isn't a problem I foresee getting smaller in an IP-free world.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  > one thing to note is that the "copyleft" regime depends on copyright to work The idea of copyleft doesn't. The particular implementation in our regulatory reality does, because RMS & others figured out how to hack a system typically used for rent-seeking and restricting innovation (thus lots of parties are investing money to preserve it), and use it for the opposite goal.

enriquto 7y ago

vharuck 7y ago
It seems like this is the best way to go, but capitalism's competitive nature is a problem. If a shipping company hires developers to write logistics software, and then everyone has access to the software, the company will have spent money but gained no edge. Same with novels. If everyone can freely print and sell a story, who's the sucker that'll pay the writer? Of course, I see this as a problem with thr economy. Freely distributing ideas is better for society as a whole than keeping secrets.
- zanny 7y ago
  Look no further than the Linux kernel for an example of almost every major tech company being invested in the largest software project in history because its in all their individual self interests to not try to reinvent a wheel that big for a competitive advantage. The prevalence of proprietary kernel drivers likewise lends credence to the value in having forced openness, which would fall under more right to repair than IP for consumers of products hosting software.

lubujackson 7y ago

You say this with such authority, but you are being naive yourself about the history of arts and economics. The window of history when art was considered "IP" that couldn't exist otherwise is vanishingly small, less than 100 years. Art survived and prospered somehow before IP laws, even after the printing press. IP is a construct created by capitalism to monetize art and information. It is not a real thing and it is not a necessary thing. People create things just fine without and industrial complex behind them, and if losing that is the cost of all art being accessible to everyone, I am fine with that deal.

Kalium 7y ago

> If digital piracy is unchecked, then it forces artists to dream up other ways to make money. I think you've accurately captured the state of the world for the vast majority of owners of IP who wish to profit from their work. It is extremely rare for royalties to produce any significant percentage of revenues for artists. Most revenue comes from merchandise, live performances, custom work, and so on. With this in mind, I submit that the actual value of IP in most cases is close to zero.

TeMPOraL 7y ago
I think it also must be noted that this would be the case with zero piracy as well. It's not pirates who eat up all the IP revenue, it's the middlemen between the artist and the audience.
- Kalium 7y ago
  It may also be worth considering how value is created by the intermediaries. In the case of, for example, a hit single it's not obvious to me how much of the financial value came from the music itself and how much from the promotion of it. Which only makes me wonder further if the underlying IP is really valuable or not.
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    That's a fair point. Come to think of it, hit singles seem to be a lottery - most of the successful ones aren't much different from the unsuccessful ones, except that they reach the threshold of popularity (after which it becomes a positive feedback loop for a while). Spending money on promotion increases the chances of a single to win the lottery. So I guess I must concede the point. At least in pop music, it could be argued that the value of the work alone is small, and almost all of the value is created by third parties. You gave me something to think about.
  - ddingus 7y ago
    Given an IP strong environment, promotion via piracy, either by blatant give away, "free", or by tolerating some piracy can be high value when compared with the cost of promoters. A few examples: Official torrent with tip jar, purchase here info included. One could host this torrent too. Download here page with ads and opportunity to buy, pay what one wants to pay. Pay for copy, or stream it anytime from our nice server... Social media, coupled with variations on the above can get word out quickly. These things, and the many variations on them possible, are of least advantage to the big players, and can be a serious advantage for new, small, up and coming players. Piracy does not eliminate any sales opportunities. And it can often garner attention where buying that attention can be otherwise costly. Being relevant opens a lot of potential doors.

saagarjha 7y ago

> I've found that most of the people who speak like pitaj are in universities and they make their money through some mixture of outrageous tuition bills that can't be dodged or government funding from taxes that can't be escaped. This sounds like a personal attack and I feel your comment would be better without it.

knolax 7y ago

The word you're looking for is a "public good", a good that is non-excludable and non-rivalrous. In economics it is well known that businesses operating in the free market will always underproduce public goods if at all. We've already solved this issue with other public goods like infrastructure and defense, which is to fund it publically. > ... or government funding from taxes that can't be escaped. This is bad why? You seem to have issue with the fact that it's being funded in a way that you can't be avoided, but this is true even for private institutions. The truth is that in perfectly competitive markets most companies do not make enough profit to reinvest into research. Most research instead come from near-monopoly markets that have the profits to invest in research. Take for example the development of UNIX at Bell Labs. I doubt anybody living in that era could've avoided telephone charges entirely.

lunias 7y ago

Digital replication is easy and the mass adoption of digital mediums has rendered old business models ineffective. This is called progress. We've created something so great (computing, the internet) that its displaced much of what was before. The root model is still very much effectual: trade goods and services. If you sell a hardback copy of your book then you can make a margin from people who buy it to have in their offline library. If you perform your music live then you can profit off of your audience. If you open source your software then you can build a company offering consulting around it. Just think about the amount of advertising and reach that people have access to now. Using your example; giving away a million mix tapes to sell a hundred thousand tickets to your concerts is likely better than selling a thousand mix tapes because no one knows who you are and few want to take a chance. Say we succeeded in creating a crime free society. Would people be justified in their complaints about the lack of police jobs?

DiseasedBadger 7y ago

"Digital Piracy" is not a real thing. It's a convention you're advocating for, and one that reasonable people have still not heard a decent argument for adopting.

paulie_a 7y ago

There absolutely is a thing called a free lunch. In fact their is an album named after it "fat of the land" I pirate all the time even though I do try and buy the legal options first. When in a lot of cases. Kodi with a couple add-ons take care of the rest. I bought a physical copy of some book but the company drm servers are no longer maintained I'm out of luck. Pirated copies to the rescue. There is an entire generation that was raised to not give a shit about copyright. I've probably committed five felonies today yet paid once because I'd prefer to do that. So why bother paying any attention to copyright law? There are zero repercussions.

zaarn 7y ago

Piracy is not something that just replaces all forms of paid ownership of digital media. Piracy is just another competitor on the market; if for the customer the pirated copy provides a better experience at a cheaper price, no IP law will be able to stop the customer from using the better solution. That's capitalism at work. If you want piracy to stop the solution is simple; provide a better product. Either by providing a better experience (Netflix until recently, Steam) or at a cheaper/equivalent price (Offering your product for free or under an open source license).