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German Pirate Party On Course to Election Win
- tzs 15y agoAre they as clueless as the Pirate Parties in other countries? For example, the head of the UK (if I recall correctly) Pirate Party was taking questions online. I asked him a simple question, along these lines: Right now, piracy is hard for the average person. They have to get a bittorrent client, find torrents, deal with poorly labeled or poorly ripped content, and so on. It's just easier to go to iTunes or Amazon and buy the music. Your platform calls for non-commercial file sharing to be completely legal. If that were implemented, wouldn't file sharing go mainstream? If the law says it is OK, that will remove the social stigma that might stop some people. PC companies would likely start bundling file sharing software, and would contribute to improving said software, to make it easy enough for the average consumer. File sharing would become the predominant way that music is distributed. How, in such a system, would music production be funded? His answer was that piracy has been shown to not significantly decrease sales. I pointed out that yes, it might not significantly decrease sales now, because it is difficult and illegal, and iTunes is so convenient. I'm asking about after his policies are implemented, when file sharing is as convenient as buying through iTunes, and as legal. Why would a significant number of people chose to buy through iTunes or Amazon instead of just using the P2P program that was bundled with their PC? His answer: piracy has not been shown to significantly decrease sales.