15 ms·

It's not hard to see how piracy threatens the entire business model. You can have rampant piracy or you can have financially sustainable content production. You

It's not hard to see how piracy threatens the entire business model. You can have rampant piracy or you can have financially sustainable content production. You cannot have both. There is some critical mass of piracy that would in fact destroy the economics of the content production model. The industry has to work to deter that by periodically making examples of people. The timing is likely not coincidental either. Expect to see more of this as content once again fragments across providers, reanimating the traditional package TV structure in fresh form.

foota 5y ago
In fairness, crowd funding and or altruistic consumers could theoretically sustain content production.
- skeeter2020 5y ago
  in reality this isn't the choice; it's typically private enterprise vs. public (government) broadcasters. Even PBS with lots of supporting patrons can't make it without significant government funding.
  - foota 5y ago
    Does PBS make content people want to watch?
  - account42 5y ago
    > in reality this isn't the choice In the reality with excessive copyright terms, yes. > Even PBS with lots of supporting patrons can't make it without significant government funding. Are government grants for the arts a bad thing now?
- esyir 5y ago
  The current state of oss would be a counterpoint to this. That maintainers are often poorly supported implies what I suspect we're all trying not to acknowledge.
  - foota 5y ago
    I think an interesting counter-counter point is the seeming success of video and board games crowdfunds, where hundreds of thousands of dollars seem to be fairly regularly collected, not that that rivals the scale of movie production.
  - account42 5y ago
    > The current state of oss would be a counterpoint to this. The current state of OSS exists in a world with copyright. If you want to extrapolate that to a world without copyright you better have a good argument why the incentives for OSS funding would not change.
chongli 5y ago
That may be the case for Hollywood blockbuster movies but it’s not true for TV shows, YouTube videos, or Twitch streams. People would much rather pay Netflix a small monthly fee for unlimited access to all the TV shows they watch than hunt them down online. Nobody at all bothers to download YouTube videos or Twitch streams since the content is free anyway. Honestly I think even movies could work similarly if the content creators actually made them available. People go crazy for Disney+ because everything is on there for one monthly fee.
- brokenmachine 5y ago
  >Nobody at all bothers to download YouTube videos or Twitch streams since the content is free anyway. I download every single video on youtube that I think there's any chance I'll want to watch again. When I look at my playlists, so many of the videos have been deleted. Even if I paid for youtube I wouldn't be able to watch them again.
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
  If the content were free to use however you wanted, what would stop Netflix from serving Disney's content or vice versa?
  - chongli 5y ago
    It's not hard to imagine a scenario where individual downloading is decriminalized but large-scale commercial piracy remains illegal. This would stop Netflix from serving Disney's content without a license but it wouldn't stop Joe Public from downloading Game of Thrones or what have you. Such a regime would encourage content creators to make it more readily available so that users are willing to pay for the convenience, a la Netflix.
    - 6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
      I imagine this taking the form of individual copying being okay while distribution is illegal. That would probably have to be regardless of scale and price/commercialization.
unity1001 5y ago
Record industry does not support content production at all. Less, artists. They are one of the biggest scams on the planet. http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100712/23482610186.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100712/23482610186.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110707/03264014993/riaa-accounting-how-to-sell-1-million-albums-still-owe-500000.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110707/03264014993/riaa-a... http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140425/07192227027/riaa-claims-that-it-is-standing-up-older-musicians-that-it-actually-left-to-rot.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140425/07192227027/riaa-c... ... That industry should be killed with fire.
- Joakal 5y ago
  Easy way to kill distributors AND support creators with this small change: Have copyright return to creators after a period of time, ie 20 years. Billions of dollars will be spent fighting hints of this suggestion.
  - gruez 5y ago
    How does this work for cooperative works?
mistrial9 5y ago
after thirty years of being in this debate, I tend to agree with the down-voted parent. In the West, there must be a source of payment to artists, production houses, management and legal.. its a tragedy when that fails, because it is the artists that lose the most, the quickest.
DennisP 5y ago
So change the business model. In the words of Robert Heinlein: "There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or a corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute nor common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back, for their private benefit." http://homepage.eircom.net/~odyssey/Quotes/Popular/SciFi/Heinlein.html http://homepage.eircom.net/~odyssey/Quotes/Popular/SciFi/Hei...
- crazygringo 5y ago
  What business model would you suggest, that is capable of financing the TV and films we like to watch? I'm not aware of anything that works in practice, except for legally enforced copyright for at least a handful of years. And enforcing copyright means making torrenting etc. of infringing material illegal. (Of course, whether it should be 5 or 10 or 20 or 50 or 100 years is a separate matter.) And copying the music streaming business, where convenience is worth a low monthly subscription, doesn't work for TV/film. Producing a TV show is multiple orders of magnitude more expensive than an album.
  - bawolff 5y ago
    To play devil's advocate, if there is no business model capable of supporting something, it should die. I like tv as much as the next person, but its hardly sacrosanct.
    - guerrilla 5y ago
      And if people love it enough, they will find a way.
    - smegger001 5y ago
      Perhapes a crowd funded subscription model. Where television and cinema lovers pay a service to create films and showes based on the interests of their subscribers. while we are at it perhapes we could stream then to those subscribers so they don't have to store them locally where storage is limited. Oh look we recreated modern netflix.
azalemeth 5y ago
Piracy, when casually undertaken by 50-70% of the population does not harm or even mildly helps sales, as found in a suppressed EU-wide report [1, 2] that you can read in detail here [3]. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27798879 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27798879 [2] TFA: https://www.engadget.com/2017-09-22-eu-suppressed-study-piracy-no-sales-impact.html https://www.engadget.com/2017-09-22-eu-suppressed-study-pira... [3] https://op.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/59ea4ec1-a19b-11e7-b92d-01aa75ed71a1 https://op.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/59e... or https://cdn.netzpolitik.org/wp-upload/2017/09/displacement_study.pdf https://cdn.netzpolitik.org/wp-upload/2017/09/displacement_s...
- tzs 5y ago
  Are you taking into account the effects on sales of substitute goods? If I pirate say a $500 graphics editing suite I can easily believe that does not represent a lost sale to the maker of that software. There is simply no way I'd buy a $500 graphics editing suite. But it might represent a lost sale to Pixelmator, because if I could not pirate the $500 graphics editing suite and could not afford to buy it I would have turned to a less expensive solution, such as Pixelmator Pro which is $40 and I can afford.
  - barbecue_sauce 5y ago
    That sounds more like a failure of marketing on Pixelmator's part.
  - account42 5y ago
    If I download the GIMP, should that count as a lost sale to Pixelmator. Should the law somehow protect them from that?
- mortehu 5y ago
  This "study" is a survey. No experiment was undertaken to actually determine a casual relationship.
intricatedetail 5y ago
Any business can be viable if it is backed by state violence. If it can't survive without violence then in my opinion should be allowed to perish.
- trothamel 5y ago
  Is there any business that isn't backed by state violence, to some degree? The computer you're typing this on is powered over copy wires, and those copper wires have value. What's to stop someone from just coming up and stealing them and everything else of value you own?
- rebelos 5y ago
  This is certainly possible. Watch all of your content in theaters with all copies of the content as heavily secured as possible (physically and digitally)
jstrH 5y ago
Open information; music, books, code, science, videos; threatens their entire business model. Not content to physically own the planet, they seek to own our emotions through expropriation of our agency in all contexts. It’s a managed economy of legal allowances, policed by an unelected minority beholden to no one. Hmm… where have I seen this before? No one saw it coming! Tax the billionaires until they’re merely mega millionaires; their figurative identity obsession is not any more important than rest of ours, except due to political protectionism. Our doing human shit empowers these specific people; they can lose an order of magnitude in wealth to honor that. As a result we’d be able to bolster health, education, and infrastructure everyone relies on. Deference to their wealth literally causes us to screw ourselves out of the time for such things.
- account42 5y ago
  fyi, your post was [dead]
kroltan 5y ago
As Gabe Newell said, piracy is a service problem. It was said in the context of video games, but I believe it very much well applies to other parts of the entertainment industry. If people are pirating content, then consuming that content is not worth the hassle to obtain. > If a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24 x 7, purchasable from the convenience of your personal computer, and the legal provider says the product is region-locked, will come to your country 3 months after the US release, and can only be purchased at a brick and mortar store, then the pirate’s service is more valuable. In that way, stamping out piracy is trying to address the symptoms, not the cause, and even if you are ultimately successful in eradicating piracy, then you'll likely still end up with a bunch of non-customers. Anecdotally, the popularization of Netflix definitely greatly reduced piracy among my demographic, up until the point where every publisher decided to roll their own, often subpar, streaming service, each with different region-locking rules.
loxias 5y ago
Remember that narrow window of time when Netflix had All The TV and was the only streaming platform, which you could access for a low monthly fee? I've always thought and argued that while money might be part of the motivation for digital piracy, ease of access and user experience is also a large component. 10 bucks a month to stream anything, without commercials, was great! For those few years I didn't download anything, because I didn't have to. It wasn't the path of least resistance. Now I have to deal with a half dozen streaming platforms, some of them don't work on my laptop (Peacock), others which are spotty (Disney+) and others which insist on wanting me to see commercials, despite taking my money (Hulu). With increasing fragmentation and a decreasing user experience, the path of least resistance has gone back to downloading and I expect it to increase. :/ I wonder how long until the industry re-invents cable packages. It might work if Netflix handled the tech, though I admit that would never happen in the real world.
- prepend 5y ago
  Disney is already pushing a package of Hulu+Disney+espn. My family wants both Hulu and Disney+ but no one cares about espn. They are already starting and it’s only a matter of time until hbo is $15 or $14 when bundled with peacock (or whatever).
- ndesaulniers 5y ago
  > Remember that narrow window of time when Netflix had All The TV and was the only streaming platform, which you could access for a low monthly fee? Pepperidge Farm remembers. I have all the streaming services, and yet now I find that most of what I want to watch is not licensed to any service! I'm constantly using justwatch.com and yet still many famous movies aren't being licensed by any of the services I have (at least in the US). Piracy it is then, and I guess it's time to start canceling these subscriptions to services that no longer license the kind of content they used to.
  - toast0 5y ago
    I have a heck of a time finding the content I want to watch on (paid) streaming services. I, like Pepperidge Farm, remember when Netflix had tons of stuff I wanted to watch, but now I can only find it on janky free channels that can't even figure out how to slot ads into spots where ads should go. To be fair, some of the low tier broadcast subchannels haven't figured that out either. But if I'm going to watch ad supported tv, would it kill people to not cut to ads 15 seconds before the break, then show that 15 seconds and then the stunning conclusion which sometimes has a bit of a recap? Also, I don't know why switching from programming to ads needs to retrigger HDCP negotiation, and it seems like the ads have stricter settings, because I'm more likely to get a fail screen when it goes to ads than when it goes to content. I just want to watch 80s action garbage like the A-Team, Knight Rider, and MacGyver. I'd pay $5/month for an 80s service, I already got suckered into Netflix, Disney+, and Amazon; something that has the low class stuff I want would be an easy sell. Edit: fixed spelling of MacGyver
prepend 5y ago
> You cannot have both Yet, we do have both. We are at both peak piracy and peak revenue for digital content. I think it’s false that people state that these things are exclusive.
- rebelos 5y ago
  Please feel free to read the next sentence.
  - prepend 5y ago
    Your next sentence is as baseless and incorrect as the one I quoted. I’ve been hearing this chicken little shit for 30 years and every year piracy is so bad that the end is near. I think it’s more likely that piracy drives and improved digital sales. That’s just my hunch, but it’s based on my experience of everything going digital, companies making more money on it than ever, and piracy greater than ever. Philosophically, I think piracy is a more future oriented and likely successful than the alternative. I fear for a future when we are digital beings having to subscribe to Apple Music in order to remember a song and play it in my “mind.” Piracy today is peace of mind tomorrow.
    - rebelos 5y ago
      If you think there's no level of piracy as a fraction of total consumption that would destroy the economics of content production, then I'm afraid you're too unreasonable a person for me to engage with successfully.
wyldfire 5y ago
> It's not hard to see how piracy threatens the entire business model. You can have rampant piracy or you can have financially sustainable content production. You cannot have both. The idea behind a copyright is to have The People temporarily forfeit their innate right to communicate art, ideas, and stories in order to stimulate an industry of artists and scientists. If the business model depends on people not copying your data then you can always sue for relief in the courts. Get damages, hooray. But criminal copyright infringement seems like a big stretch. Maybe worthy of fines or public service but imprisonment? Extradition to another country for potential imprisonment? Seems totally backwards.
- dendriti 5y ago
  If you actually read the link, Strauss is not being "extradited to another country for potential imprisonment" just for criminal copyright infringement.
  - wyldfire 5y ago
    The imprisonment bit comes if he's convicted in the US. From 17 U.S.C. 506(A) & 18 U.S.C 2319: > . A defendant, convicted for the first time of violating 17 U.S.C. § 506(a) by the unauthorized reproduction or distribution, during any 180-day period, of at least 10 copies or phonorecords, or 1 or more copyrighted works, with a retail value of more than $2,500 can be imprisoned for up to 5 years and fined up to $250,000, or both. 18 U.S.C. §§ 2319(b), 3571(b)(3).
- bserge 5y ago
  Eh, people sit in jail for not paying bus fares lol
ksec 5y ago
Well the key word here would be threatens and rampant. Which is sort of the absolute of extreme end of the augment. For example Adobe and Microsoft has turned a blind eye on piracy for years. I believe it was Steve Jobs who had the gut to point out the obvious, Student on campus just pirate their Photoshop. For content, you could derive additional revenue from non-content product like merchandise or other form of cross-industry IP sharing. You cant have these sort of deals without getting significant mindshare of the public. And for some piracy is part of it. Think Game of Thrones. The most pirated TV shows on the planet. And is the same with Music. Most artist dont earn much with licensing, streaming or disc sales any more. It is about live performance tours and merchandise. Streaming Music isn't doing as well as most media would like you to believe, such as back to to the peaks of 90s without accounting for inflation and population difference. That is why I sort of think in the future some content could end up going the freemium model. Just like how mobile games are doing.
bserge 5y ago
Never in my life have I heard of it deterring people. What deters them is platforms being taken down.
burnished 5y ago
Piracy is typically a service problem. You don't fix digital copying by sending people to jail, you do it by offering a compelling service.

foota 5y ago

In fairness, crowd funding and or altruistic consumers could theoretically sustain content production.

skeeter2020 5y ago
in reality this isn't the choice; it's typically private enterprise vs. public (government) broadcasters. Even PBS with lots of supporting patrons can't make it without significant government funding.
- foota 5y ago
  Does PBS make content people want to watch?
- account42 5y ago
  > in reality this isn't the choice In the reality with excessive copyright terms, yes. > Even PBS with lots of supporting patrons can't make it without significant government funding. Are government grants for the arts a bad thing now?
esyir 5y ago
The current state of oss would be a counterpoint to this. That maintainers are often poorly supported implies what I suspect we're all trying not to acknowledge.
- foota 5y ago
  I think an interesting counter-counter point is the seeming success of video and board games crowdfunds, where hundreds of thousands of dollars seem to be fairly regularly collected, not that that rivals the scale of movie production.
- account42 5y ago
  > The current state of oss would be a counterpoint to this. The current state of OSS exists in a world with copyright. If you want to extrapolate that to a world without copyright you better have a good argument why the incentives for OSS funding would not change.

chongli 5y ago

That may be the case for Hollywood blockbuster movies but it’s not true for TV shows, YouTube videos, or Twitch streams. People would much rather pay Netflix a small monthly fee for unlimited access to all the TV shows they watch than hunt them down online. Nobody at all bothers to download YouTube videos or Twitch streams since the content is free anyway. Honestly I think even movies could work similarly if the content creators actually made them available. People go crazy for Disney+ because everything is on there for one monthly fee.

brokenmachine 5y ago
>Nobody at all bothers to download YouTube videos or Twitch streams since the content is free anyway. I download every single video on youtube that I think there's any chance I'll want to watch again. When I look at my playlists, so many of the videos have been deleted. Even if I paid for youtube I wouldn't be able to watch them again.
6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
If the content were free to use however you wanted, what would stop Netflix from serving Disney's content or vice versa?
- chongli 5y ago
  It's not hard to imagine a scenario where individual downloading is decriminalized but large-scale commercial piracy remains illegal. This would stop Netflix from serving Disney's content without a license but it wouldn't stop Joe Public from downloading Game of Thrones or what have you. Such a regime would encourage content creators to make it more readily available so that users are willing to pay for the convenience, a la Netflix.
  - 6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
    I imagine this taking the form of individual copying being okay while distribution is illegal. That would probably have to be regardless of scale and price/commercialization.

unity1001 5y ago

Record industry does not support content production at all. Less, artists. They are one of the biggest scams on the planet. http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100712/23482610186.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100712/23482610186.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110707/03264014993/riaa-accounting-how-to-sell-1-million-albums-still-owe-500000.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110707/03264014993/riaa-a... http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140425/07192227027/riaa-claims-that-it-is-standing-up-older-musicians-that-it-actually-left-to-rot.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140425/07192227027/riaa-c... ... That industry should be killed with fire.

Joakal 5y ago
Easy way to kill distributors AND support creators with this small change: Have copyright return to creators after a period of time, ie 20 years. Billions of dollars will be spent fighting hints of this suggestion.
- gruez 5y ago
  How does this work for cooperative works?

mistrial9 5y ago

after thirty years of being in this debate, I tend to agree with the down-voted parent. In the West, there must be a source of payment to artists, production houses, management and legal.. its a tragedy when that fails, because it is the artists that lose the most, the quickest.

DennisP 5y ago

So change the business model. In the words of Robert Heinlein: "There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or a corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute nor common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back, for their private benefit." http://homepage.eircom.net/~odyssey/Quotes/Popular/SciFi/Heinlein.html http://homepage.eircom.net/~odyssey/Quotes/Popular/SciFi/Hei...

crazygringo 5y ago
What business model would you suggest, that is capable of financing the TV and films we like to watch? I'm not aware of anything that works in practice, except for legally enforced copyright for at least a handful of years. And enforcing copyright means making torrenting etc. of infringing material illegal. (Of course, whether it should be 5 or 10 or 20 or 50 or 100 years is a separate matter.) And copying the music streaming business, where convenience is worth a low monthly subscription, doesn't work for TV/film. Producing a TV show is multiple orders of magnitude more expensive than an album.
- bawolff 5y ago
  To play devil's advocate, if there is no business model capable of supporting something, it should die. I like tv as much as the next person, but its hardly sacrosanct.
  - guerrilla 5y ago
    And if people love it enough, they will find a way.
  - smegger001 5y ago
    Perhapes a crowd funded subscription model. Where television and cinema lovers pay a service to create films and showes based on the interests of their subscribers. while we are at it perhapes we could stream then to those subscribers so they don't have to store them locally where storage is limited. Oh look we recreated modern netflix.

azalemeth 5y ago

Piracy, when casually undertaken by 50-70% of the population does not harm or even mildly helps sales, as found in a suppressed EU-wide report [1, 2] that you can read in detail here [3]. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27798879 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27798879 [2] TFA: https://www.engadget.com/2017-09-22-eu-suppressed-study-piracy-no-sales-impact.html https://www.engadget.com/2017-09-22-eu-suppressed-study-pira... [3] https://op.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/59ea4ec1-a19b-11e7-b92d-01aa75ed71a1 https://op.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/59e... or https://cdn.netzpolitik.org/wp-upload/2017/09/displacement_study.pdf https://cdn.netzpolitik.org/wp-upload/2017/09/displacement_s...

tzs 5y ago
Are you taking into account the effects on sales of substitute goods? If I pirate say a $500 graphics editing suite I can easily believe that does not represent a lost sale to the maker of that software. There is simply no way I'd buy a $500 graphics editing suite. But it might represent a lost sale to Pixelmator, because if I could not pirate the $500 graphics editing suite and could not afford to buy it I would have turned to a less expensive solution, such as Pixelmator Pro which is $40 and I can afford.
- barbecue_sauce 5y ago
  That sounds more like a failure of marketing on Pixelmator's part.
- account42 5y ago
  If I download the GIMP, should that count as a lost sale to Pixelmator. Should the law somehow protect them from that?
mortehu 5y ago
This "study" is a survey. No experiment was undertaken to actually determine a casual relationship.

intricatedetail 5y ago

Any business can be viable if it is backed by state violence. If it can't survive without violence then in my opinion should be allowed to perish.

trothamel 5y ago
Is there any business that isn't backed by state violence, to some degree? The computer you're typing this on is powered over copy wires, and those copper wires have value. What's to stop someone from just coming up and stealing them and everything else of value you own?
rebelos 5y ago
This is certainly possible. Watch all of your content in theaters with all copies of the content as heavily secured as possible (physically and digitally)

jstrH 5y ago

Open information; music, books, code, science, videos; threatens their entire business model. Not content to physically own the planet, they seek to own our emotions through expropriation of our agency in all contexts. It’s a managed economy of legal allowances, policed by an unelected minority beholden to no one. Hmm… where have I seen this before? No one saw it coming! Tax the billionaires until they’re merely mega millionaires; their figurative identity obsession is not any more important than rest of ours, except due to political protectionism. Our doing human shit empowers these specific people; they can lose an order of magnitude in wealth to honor that. As a result we’d be able to bolster health, education, and infrastructure everyone relies on. Deference to their wealth literally causes us to screw ourselves out of the time for such things.

account42 5y ago
fyi, your post was [dead]

kroltan 5y ago

As Gabe Newell said, piracy is a service problem. It was said in the context of video games, but I believe it very much well applies to other parts of the entertainment industry. If people are pirating content, then consuming that content is not worth the hassle to obtain. > If a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24 x 7, purchasable from the convenience of your personal computer, and the legal provider says the product is region-locked, will come to your country 3 months after the US release, and can only be purchased at a brick and mortar store, then the pirate’s service is more valuable. In that way, stamping out piracy is trying to address the symptoms, not the cause, and even if you are ultimately successful in eradicating piracy, then you'll likely still end up with a bunch of non-customers. Anecdotally, the popularization of Netflix definitely greatly reduced piracy among my demographic, up until the point where every publisher decided to roll their own, often subpar, streaming service, each with different region-locking rules.

loxias 5y ago

Remember that narrow window of time when Netflix had All The TV and was the only streaming platform, which you could access for a low monthly fee? I've always thought and argued that while money might be part of the motivation for digital piracy, ease of access and user experience is also a large component. 10 bucks a month to stream anything, without commercials, was great! For those few years I didn't download anything, because I didn't have to. It wasn't the path of least resistance. Now I have to deal with a half dozen streaming platforms, some of them don't work on my laptop (Peacock), others which are spotty (Disney+) and others which insist on wanting me to see commercials, despite taking my money (Hulu). With increasing fragmentation and a decreasing user experience, the path of least resistance has gone back to downloading and I expect it to increase. :/ I wonder how long until the industry re-invents cable packages. It might work if Netflix handled the tech, though I admit that would never happen in the real world.

prepend 5y ago
Disney is already pushing a package of Hulu+Disney+espn. My family wants both Hulu and Disney+ but no one cares about espn. They are already starting and it’s only a matter of time until hbo is $15 or $14 when bundled with peacock (or whatever).
ndesaulniers 5y ago
> Remember that narrow window of time when Netflix had All The TV and was the only streaming platform, which you could access for a low monthly fee? Pepperidge Farm remembers. I have all the streaming services, and yet now I find that most of what I want to watch is not licensed to any service! I'm constantly using justwatch.com and yet still many famous movies aren't being licensed by any of the services I have (at least in the US). Piracy it is then, and I guess it's time to start canceling these subscriptions to services that no longer license the kind of content they used to.
- toast0 5y ago
  I have a heck of a time finding the content I want to watch on (paid) streaming services. I, like Pepperidge Farm, remember when Netflix had tons of stuff I wanted to watch, but now I can only find it on janky free channels that can't even figure out how to slot ads into spots where ads should go. To be fair, some of the low tier broadcast subchannels haven't figured that out either. But if I'm going to watch ad supported tv, would it kill people to not cut to ads 15 seconds before the break, then show that 15 seconds and then the stunning conclusion which sometimes has a bit of a recap? Also, I don't know why switching from programming to ads needs to retrigger HDCP negotiation, and it seems like the ads have stricter settings, because I'm more likely to get a fail screen when it goes to ads than when it goes to content. I just want to watch 80s action garbage like the A-Team, Knight Rider, and MacGyver. I'd pay $5/month for an 80s service, I already got suckered into Netflix, Disney+, and Amazon; something that has the low class stuff I want would be an easy sell. Edit: fixed spelling of MacGyver

prepend 5y ago

> You cannot have both Yet, we do have both. We are at both peak piracy and peak revenue for digital content. I think it’s false that people state that these things are exclusive.

rebelos 5y ago
Please feel free to read the next sentence.
- prepend 5y ago
  Your next sentence is as baseless and incorrect as the one I quoted. I’ve been hearing this chicken little shit for 30 years and every year piracy is so bad that the end is near. I think it’s more likely that piracy drives and improved digital sales. That’s just my hunch, but it’s based on my experience of everything going digital, companies making more money on it than ever, and piracy greater than ever. Philosophically, I think piracy is a more future oriented and likely successful than the alternative. I fear for a future when we are digital beings having to subscribe to Apple Music in order to remember a song and play it in my “mind.” Piracy today is peace of mind tomorrow.
  - rebelos 5y ago
    If you think there's no level of piracy as a fraction of total consumption that would destroy the economics of content production, then I'm afraid you're too unreasonable a person for me to engage with successfully.

wyldfire 5y ago

> It's not hard to see how piracy threatens the entire business model. You can have rampant piracy or you can have financially sustainable content production. You cannot have both. The idea behind a copyright is to have The People temporarily forfeit their innate right to communicate art, ideas, and stories in order to stimulate an industry of artists and scientists. If the business model depends on people not copying your data then you can always sue for relief in the courts. Get damages, hooray. But criminal copyright infringement seems like a big stretch. Maybe worthy of fines or public service but imprisonment? Extradition to another country for potential imprisonment? Seems totally backwards.

dendriti 5y ago
If you actually read the link, Strauss is not being "extradited to another country for potential imprisonment" just for criminal copyright infringement.
- wyldfire 5y ago
  The imprisonment bit comes if he's convicted in the US. From 17 U.S.C. 506(A) & 18 U.S.C 2319: > . A defendant, convicted for the first time of violating 17 U.S.C. § 506(a) by the unauthorized reproduction or distribution, during any 180-day period, of at least 10 copies or phonorecords, or 1 or more copyrighted works, with a retail value of more than $2,500 can be imprisoned for up to 5 years and fined up to $250,000, or both. 18 U.S.C. §§ 2319(b), 3571(b)(3).
bserge 5y ago
Eh, people sit in jail for not paying bus fares lol

ksec 5y ago

Well the key word here would be threatens and rampant. Which is sort of the absolute of extreme end of the augment. For example Adobe and Microsoft has turned a blind eye on piracy for years. I believe it was Steve Jobs who had the gut to point out the obvious, Student on campus just pirate their Photoshop. For content, you could derive additional revenue from non-content product like merchandise or other form of cross-industry IP sharing. You cant have these sort of deals without getting significant mindshare of the public. And for some piracy is part of it. Think Game of Thrones. The most pirated TV shows on the planet. And is the same with Music. Most artist dont earn much with licensing, streaming or disc sales any more. It is about live performance tours and merchandise. Streaming Music isn't doing as well as most media would like you to believe, such as back to to the peaks of 90s without accounting for inflation and population difference. That is why I sort of think in the future some content could end up going the freemium model. Just like how mobile games are doing.

bserge 5y ago

Never in my life have I heard of it deterring people. What deters them is platforms being taken down.

burnished 5y ago

Piracy is typically a service problem. You don't fix digital copying by sending people to jail, you do it by offering a compelling service.