23 ms·

Why I'm a Pirate

• drewblaisdell 15y ago
  The ultimate response to those who try to legislate against piracy for years has been to point out that there is no paid service which is as convenient as other unpaid, illegal ones (bittorrent or usenet, for instance). This is just one of the few unfortunate times where it makes fiscal sense for corporations to try to change the laws rather than innovate. They might say "you could never get every movie/album/piece of software in one place like that! It would be an organizational nightmare!" Given no other option, however, they will be forced to innovate. I own Blu-rays that have anti-piracy ads that I can't skip through before I watch the movie. That alone shows how screwed up this situation is.
  • rmc 15y ago
    They might say "you could never get every movie/album/piece of software in one place like that! It would be an organizational nightmare!" Given no other option, however, they will be forced to innovate. Heheh, and yet The Pirate Bay (and lots of others), have a single site with lots of things. It might be a nightmare, but not only can it exist, but it does exist. I am always amazed that the pirate/P2P swarm essentially distributes thousands and thousands of films/tv shows/music for free. Distribution is now free! You don't need to pay to copy your bits! Your users will do it for you, for free!
    • tjogin 15y ago
      The problem of music piracy is mostly solved, largely because of iPod/iTunes and Spotify and others. And it was, indeed, solved by making the legal services as good or better as the illegal ones. Sure there are some music piracy left, but only a fraction of the piracy during the Napster heydays. The problem that does persist (if it's a problem at all) is that the perceived value of recorded music has dropped, other forms of entertainment has taken the crown. The nineties are over, and it's not coming back, sadly the record industry thinks it's still possible.
      • tomp 15y ago
        > The problem of music piracy is mostly solved, largely because of iPod/iTunes and Spotify and others. You wish! Maybe for the US, UK and Germany, but I live in Slovenia, an EU, very highly developed (in terms of internet/mobile coverage and bandwidth) country, but since there's only 2 million of us, no one bothers to try to sell us things. Thank god I have friends in the UK that can buy music for me. However, after reading this post, I think I won't buy it any more, until it becomes user friendly.
        • tjogin 15y ago
          I feel for you. But when I described the problem as "solved", I meant that the solution to music piracy has been found, it's been tested, and it has prevailed where implemented. Unfortunately, it has yet to come to your country, probably due to your small population, as you said.
      • rmc 15y ago
        Yes, lots of piracy is due to a market failure. However for many countries (even highly developed, long time members of the EU, let alone the developing world), there is very few legal options. Not to mention that Linux users still have a very poor legal selection even in big rich countries (like UK).
    • jonhendry 15y ago
      "Your users will do it for you, for free!" They don't need users, they need customers. Without customers you go out of business, even if you have a zillion users.
• yason 15y ago
  I'm pretty much down to the same conclusion, personally. I'd happily pay a recurrent, if modest, sum of money for the ability to legally and easily download not only newer but, more importantly, older and more obscure movies and television series to my computer in the form of convenient unencumbered .avi|.mkv|.mp4 files, from a catalog whose selection and quality matches the level of service of the 2010's. If MAFIAA offered that, with a credible promise that the material will be there ten years from now, I would not only pay for the content but not bother to stash a single file onto my external hard disk. Because of the high level of sophistication when it comes to the selection, quality, and availability of the content it would be far more convenient to just pay again to redownload what I want to see again. Pay-per-view is exactly what the studios are dreaming of but it's not going to happen through restrictions, but through unrivalled convenience only.
• mark_up 15y ago
  I'm a pirate because my third world city doesn't have a single physical place I can buy or rent dvd's or cd's. I have only two options... to buy bootleg copies off the street, or visit tpb/demonoid. Buying bootleg copies off the street is actually cheaper because of the very high cost of bandwidth/data here, but I pay an extra USD$50/mnth for a higher datacap for the convenience of downloading. Also, iTunes/appstore doesn't support my country, so I can't buy from there either.
• zerostar07 15y ago
  At some point, someone has to devise a purely-virtual solution: You should be able to buy 'virtual tickets' that give you the right to download a movie from anywhere you want. People making use of music in their videos would be required to have a link to buy the ticket. I think the idea of charging for "digital copies" doesn't make sense anymore, because it has zero scarcity, same goes with "digital performance"
• TamDenholm 15y ago
  I used to be this guy, i would pirate software, music, tv shows, films, games etc. I did it mainly because it was easy. Innovation has changed my ways, not completely, but mostly. I no longer pirate music, ive paid for spotify for over 2 years now, i get music wherever i want on any device and its great, i wish they had metallica and acdc but theres youtube for that. I no longer pirate software, linux got good at "just working" and i've been using ubuntu for years now. I use google docs and other SaaS apps and pay for really good apps like dropbox. I no longer pirate games, mainly because i'm not much of a gamer, but i have paid for some indie games like SPAZ, Minecraft, QUBE, Darwinia etc because they're indie and the money goes to the developer and the price point is much more reasonable than the big games that come with heavily restrictive DRM. I still download TV Shows, but not as much as i used to because of BBC iPlayer and similar initiatives, its mainly American TV i download, i've actually no idea if this is illegal or not, considering most of the shows are put on the american networks websites for streaming too. For films there are LoveFilm, Netflix (now in the UK), iPlayer does some films now as does youtube, but i still think films are the category that is lacking the most, but also a really tough nut to crack, but hell, if it can be done with music, it can be done with films. So, in my opinion, innovation and me feeling good about giving money to actual people rather than conglomerates is what has stopped me from pirating as much as i used to and thats the key.
  • deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
  • rplnt 15y ago
    I no longer pirate software because I can live with free software or if I really need/want something I guess I could just pay for it. I no longer pirate games because I don't play that much and if I do I mostly play games that are "free to play". Several times a year I buy a "serious" game on steam because it is so easy. However I still do pirate movies because they are extremely expensive and I know of no way how to watch them online for smaller prices. I still pirate TV shows because there is no way I could watch them otherwise (that I know of at least). Music, well.. much less than I used to. Luckily it is not illegal to download a movie or a song, but it is still not right. I guess.
  • 15y ago
• citricsquid 15y ago
  This is such bullshit, I really wish I could downvote this sort of post. If you don't agree with the methods used by companies to sell their products DON'T then take it anyway, you're showing people WANT the product but aren't willing to pay, so what's the best solution? Make it harder to pirate / try to block pirating. This guy and everyone else who refuses to just not consume media they can't get on terms they and the companies agree with are the reason we have all this SOPA crap. If the latest Rihanna album is $10 and you're only willing to pay $1 instead of then pirating DON'T get it, just ignore it, if everyone did this we'd have no problems, then media companies would either adjust or accept that they're doing it wrong, they wouldn't then fight the internet. This guy and everyone else who follows the same point of view is essentially trying to blackmail media companies, how about instead you just move on. You have no right to the media they produce and if you're unhappy with what they want for it MOVE ON. If Sony want to sell the latest album from band x for $1,000 that's their choice, you have no right to that album.
  • omouse 15y ago
    You have no right to the media they produce They have no right to force everyone else to conform to absurd rules made to preserve their profits.
    • citricsquid 15y ago
      That's an entirely different issue and not a counter point to what I'm saying.
    • VMG 15y ago
      Do they force you? Do you have to buy a Rihanna album?
      • ZeroGravitas 15y ago
        Some people would consider popular music to be part of their culture. It's much like asking if you have to buy Microsoft Office when it has such a hegemony. You can of course not buy it, but there is pressure to do so.
• Wab 15y ago
  Yeah and you know, so what? Let's all stop caring!
• Tycho 15y ago
  Piracy is dishonourable... That's all the reason anyone should need for not doing it.
  • dchest 15y ago
    Sure, attacking ships is bad. Sharing, on the other hand, is honorable.
    • Tycho 15y ago
      Sharing an original work against the express wishes of the creator? Nope, you are dishonouring their hard work in creating the content and their intentions in making it available to the public. I supposes breaching the terms of the GPL would be 'honourable' too.
      • rangibaby 15y ago
        How can sharing something be wrong? Especially when it is essentially a bunch of 0s and 1s that you could write down by hand if you had the patience to? Sharing a number is wrong? I don't understand what that has to do with GPL at all.
        • Tycho 15y ago
          Just like the GPL, copyright puts conditions on the disposal of a work. There are no physical restrictions in either case, just the idea that you honour these terms. Would you feel comfortable walking past an artist trying to graft a living selling paintings/prints in a street stall, then against his wishes take a picture of them and tell him you're going to share these with your friends so they don't have to buy his work? Does that seem honourable to you? Also consider a situation whereby two parties had a contract dictating the terms of how some artistic work could be used. There's obviously nothing wrong with this since both parties have agreed to the contract. Then say some third party illegally acquires the work and makes it available elsewhere. Seems fair that at this point we can rely upon copyright to protect the work of citizens. Just like you have privacy rights and defamation rights and so on.
• omouse 15y ago
  Pirating is basically how a world without "intellectual property" and copyright would be like and it this world is fucking awesome.
• gavinballard 15y ago
  This is a series of pretty poor arguments. The author seems to be looking for reasons to justify their own piracy and conflates anger at the approach of the "copyright industry" with infringement upon peoples' rights. One of the final lines of the article, in particular, is jarring: "If I'm a pirate, it's not to have some cheap music. It is because the time has come for you to fuck off." It's fine to be angry about the approach large copyright holders take to piracy - suing consumers, encouraging the extradition of 23 year old UK citizens for linking, throwing cash at politicians to try to push through obscene laws like SOPA/PIPA. I'm angry about it. It's a horribly reactive, staid approach to a changing world that just isn't going to net them any long-term profitability. What's not fine is in your mind elevating your piracy to the level of a significant political protest. It might make you feel better about it, but it really doesn't change the fact that you're stealing something of value that someone worked hard to produce.
  • ZeroGravitas 15y ago
    I wasn't particularly impressed with the quality of the arguments either. On the other hand I don't see much hope of change unless 'piracy' becomes even more commonplace than it already is. So while I personally would rather do without (similar to using Linux/Gimp vs pirating Windows/Photoshop etc.) and think that piracy in many ways strengthens the hand of the copyright owners by suffocating legitimate alternatives (again see Linux/Gimp vs pirated XP/Photoshop) I think that encouraging and legitimizing widespread piracy could well be the only "significant political protest" with any chance to succeed. Riots and revolutions tend to happen in the summer, maybe copyright will only change if some people get to watch Transformers for free. I can live with that.
  • Tichy 15y ago
    "with infringement upon peoples' rights" People's rights are man made, so they are debatable.
    • gavinballard 15y ago
      That's one of my problems with his argument. The author seems to think he has a fundamental right to access the produce of media companies... but only on terms he finds reasonable, of course. As you say, rights are often malleable - and reevaluating and redefining them (from both sides of this debate) should be an ongoing process.
• zalthor 15y ago
  When I was living in the United states I was able to use services like Netflix and spotify and get the content I wanted whenever I wanted where ever I wanted. Now, I that live in India, I cannot get that content legally. I cannot watch the TV shows I want to watch as they are aired (I have to wait 2-3 years for stuff to come on TV). The ONLY option I have is to download tv shows via torrents / find some online stream and discover new music via grooveshark. Its not that I can't pay for the content, or don't want to, its that I quite literally cant!
  • MengYuanLong 15y ago
    China is equally fun. Piracy is simply a fact. Universities use pirated windows XP. Street vendors sell every sort of game in plastic sleeves for a few kuai (approx 0.50 USD). Computer shops and tech markets do the same. I suppose I could set out to buy the "real thing" but I honestly wouldn't know where to start. I could go by price but even then... Even alcohol seems questionable often times. I am fairly confident I have yet to buy a bottle of gin/vodka/whiskey that hasn't been somehow meddled with. After all, if I put it in the freezer it always freezes. After writing this I guess I realize it is somewhat OT but it does signify that you have a major problem when the fake is nearly indistinguishable from the real.
    • nickik 15y ago
      Its an intressting casestudy. What would happen if the hole world would be like in china. Basiclly no copyright. Hard to imagen nowdays. Countries like china often start copying everthing an then start to innovate themselfs skip a century (or half) and its the other way around.
  • siphr 15y ago
    zalthor: You've highlighted a very important point here. One which a lot of people overlook and that is the unavailability of the content in most south-east-asian countries. Piracy, I believe, is the norm there and if it were not for piracy most of the countries over there would be severely lacking in terms of knowledge and awareness of a specific domain (for e.g: cultural awareness in terms of movies and music piracy). Having said that I think it is also quite difficult for the "greedy" companies to sell in these countries at the price points that would have suitable returns. This is because of the fact that the masses in these countries simply cannot afford to pay that much. This does not necessarily mean they should suffer for it. So, pirates are actually heroes in these regions no matter what anybody says because a genuine audience/market for them exists in poor/sanctioned countries around the world. SOPA or whatever other concoction they have in the rabbit hat, would do very little to affect the usual business of the day.
• planb 15y ago
  A lot of his arguments are centered around the music industry, but guess what: You can get a high quality, DRM free song with just one click for about $1 today. This makes his whole blog post sound like an uninformed, whiny rant.
  • deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
  • guard-of-terra 15y ago
    Not for every artist and not in every country.
    • absconditus 15y ago
      Oh, then ignore the rules in all cases.
• cientifico 15y ago
  I wan't to buy "How I Meet your Mother" on English with spanish subtitles. I am from Spain and live on Germany. The only option to get the content I am looking for is through megavideo/piratebay. With the films, happen the same. If I use my iTunes spanish account, the content is delayed 6 months, no tv shows and all of them in spanish. If I use a German account, I only get German content. I pay spotify premium since two years ago. But for tv shows and films. The only content i can get is from sites like megavideo/piratebay, etc. This industry is the only one that doesn't offer to the client what the client wants. Easy.
  • junto 15y ago
    I feel your pain. Unless you are English speaking in the USA, Spanish speaking in Spain, or German speaking in Germany then you are an edge case. I pity the 14 million "edge case" Catalan speakers in Spain.
    • ravenheart 15y ago
      14 million? Accordingo to this: http://www.caib.es/conselleries/educacio/dgpoling/user/catalaeuropa/castella/castella7.pdf http://www.caib.es/conselleries/educacio/dgpoling/user/catal... (sorry, spanish) there are around 7 million Catalan speakers in all europe (including Spain, Andorra, France and Italy). Your argument holds, still. Indeed, I'm pretty sure most content is available in Catalan here in Spain. I would be more worried about the italian ones, or even the french.
      • junto 15y ago
        Wikipedia says 11.5 million, but the point is that even at this scale, they are still treated as an edge case: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalan_language http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalan_language I'm sure there are other examples, but the general rule should be that language is a preference and not geographically forced.
  • thomasgerbe 15y ago
    Or you could just not watch it? It's not like your life would be worse off or there aren't alternative culture you could consume.
• VonLipwig 15y ago
  The only thing I agree with in this article is that film / music industry products often do not provide a good service. They are riddled with copy protection and unskippable ad's which punish people who actually buy the damn things. Take this ad: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6xj4jS8cho http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6xj4jS8cho This the truth... You spent an hour to go to the shop's and buy it / waited a day for delivery He spent 15 minutes downloading it. You have to sit though ad's you cannot skip. You have to watch a 39 second anti-piracy ad on a legitimate DVD. You have to wait 30 seconds for the title menu to load because some moron decided to show clips of the film you want to fecking play before it appears! He is already 5 minutes into the film. ------------------ Its horrible. As for the rest of the arguments I disagree. 1) Because you don't use my money well It doesn't matter how they spend there money. They are provided a product that you want. If they didn't exist the product wouldn't exist. "Everything else was probably diluted in stuffs I don't need: packaging, distribution, transport, marketing," If they didn't market you wouldn't have heard about it. If they didn't pay for distribution you wouldn't be able to get it. If they didn't pay for packaging you would receive a scratched, perhaps broken CD... 2) Because you are messing with my life "Worst, you will use my money to sue me in court because I would have downloaded something that I didn't want to buy anyway!" Yeah.. your like stealing their stuff? Why shouldn't they come after you? If you don't want it don't download. If you download it.. don't pretend you didn't want it. "With the change left, you will pay lobbyists to ensure the governments make stupid and dangerous laws." The politicians pass the law's. I see nothing wrong with the music / film industry lobbying to protect their interest's. Where it gets scary is when politicians act on the side of lobbyists without considering the wider picture. 3) Because you are destroying the whole society I agree there are problems but I completely disagree that these problems are all caused by the film and music industry. I didn't know EMI signed teachers for their lectures? Finally... "If I'm a pirate, it's not to have some cheap music. It is because the time has come for you to fuck off. In your arrogance, you are hurting the fundamental value of freedom only to save your little petty interests." I guess big hollywood movies and the majority of career musicians can fuck off as well aye?
• true_religion 15y ago
  I've always wondered what odd confusion of emotions could make someone say they are a thief and proud of it. I can understand those who claim that what they are doing isn't thievery. I can understand those that don't accept the idea of intellectual property in general. But for you to both buy into the philosophy that what you are taking is valuable, and ought to be protected---then still steal it proudly..... that is one thing I can't understand. Aren't people supposed to want to be good?
  • ZenPsycho 15y ago
    Sometimes people want to be bad to other people they don't like.
  • baq 15y ago
    what if you believe being a thief is a good thing?
  • dagw 15y ago
    Aren't people supposed to want to be good? Many people believe that punishing people whom in their eyes are doing wrong is a good and righteous act, irregardless of any local law. In the legend of Robin Hood, Robin is generally seen as a "good person" and the hero in most tellings, despite being a thief and a criminal.
• vlasta2 15y ago
  One more point worth considering. We were conditioned to associate the music with the medium, because it was more profitable. Now it is not anymore and there lies the problem. In the past I bought a MC and then I bought a CD. I paid twice for the same work. Did the shop offer me a discount? No. Do I get a discount when I watch the same movie twice in a cinema or if I buy a DVD after I have seen the movie in the cinema? No. Do I get easy access to mp3 if I buy a CD? No. The movie/music industry simply sends the wrong signals...
• NSMeta 15y ago
  I bought all the albums of my favourite performer and don't want to scratch the CDs or waste my time to rip the music from CDs, hence I download them from the web. Does that count as piracy?
  • ZenPsycho 15y ago
    yes it does.
    • burgerbrain 15y ago
      No it does not. He has a license for that media.
      • ZenPsycho 15y ago
        the key word here is "Media": The licensing terms for every medium that you purchase are different. You may own the CD and not have "download rights". In any case, this is the line from the RIAA. They don't want you to copy, download or do anything that causes them a perceived loss of a sale.
        • burgerbrain 15y ago
          I am under the impression that media changing is considered to be fair use.
        • ZenPsycho 15y ago
          If I buy a movie ticket, that doesn't give me a right to download the movie, or get a discount on the DVD, even though I "paid for a license" to that content. (to view it once, in a movie theater). Likewise when buying a CD, you are purchasing a license to experience that content in exactly the way the seller intended. Again I emphasise, this is not necessarily the law, this is just how the MPAA/RIAA seem to view the situation.
• NameNickHN 15y ago
  I'm surprised that only MPAA staff is commenting on this link.
• rythie 15y ago
  "I launch a search and I click. In less than 10 minutes, I've a full movie on my disk. In 20, I've the complete discography of an artist." When I hear about stuff like this, along with people's multi-terabyte arrays of content, I wonder if they actually listen/watch much of it. Movie/Record companies are worrying that this all got "stolen" but if it was never viewed was it actually "stolen"?
  • JumpCrisscross 15y ago
    That's interesting - if I pirate a song but never hear it, did I violate the gestalt of IP protection? Almost purely philosophical as answering in the negative would inherently cripple the enforceability of copyright laws. But interesting nevertheless given the party line is the IP grants a purchaser a licence to consume the content.
    • aangjie 15y ago
      Thanks for that quote license to consume... No problem.. am already cutting down my consumption and will just not consume.. bye..corporations with big IP portfolio.....
  • Jem 15y ago
    I am reminded of "If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?"
  • aangjie 15y ago
    That's akin to the philosophical "tree falling in a forest, without anyone hearing" it question.. Unfortunately, i haven't come across any approach to the answers i find interesting..:-(
    • aangjie 15y ago
      Oops.. simultaneous posts.... .downvoting sounds harsh..but hey life isn't fair..shrug...:)
• paul9290 15y ago
  The OP's last sentence saying goodbye your demise is soon or something to that extent is funny. There is always going to be a music and or movie business, as human beings since the dawn of time have fawned over larger then life figures. THere is a business around this (Justin Bieber) and there always will be.
  • JumpCrisscross 15y ago
    I think he was saying good-bye to the distributors, i.e. record labels, whom he sees as superfluous given digital distribution and marketing platforms.
• Zirro 15y ago
  How about those of us who live where getting certain products legally is essentially impossible? In my case, these are anime-series and documentaries, neither which can be bought where I live. What should I do, if I really want to watch these, and have no way of getting them except for P2P? (Fun fact: Availability was what "drove" me into piracy in the first place. There was a TV-show which had aired about a year earlier, which I had missed then but wanted to see. I tried every legal way to obtain it that I could think of, because I believed piracy was wrong at the time, but it was simply not for sale. In the end, I ended up with my first torrent downloading.)
  • absconditus 15y ago
    I promise that you will not perish if you do not fulfill your every desire.
  • kittxkat 15y ago
    > (Fun fact: Availability was what "drove" me into piracy in the first place. There was a TV-show which had aired about a year earlier, which I had missed then but wanted to see. I tried every legal way to obtain it that I could think of, because I believed piracy was wrong at the time, but it was simply not for sale. In the end, I ended up with my first torrent downloading.) This is also the very reason that that drove me (and thousands of others too, I'm sure) to piracy and the one reason why I still do it. Even if I really wanted to support that TV show, sometimes it's just not possible (Case in point: The comedy show "The Class", it's simply nowhere available on DVD or similar, yet all episodes are on The Bay. How am I supposed to not torrent that stuff if I wanted to watch it?).
• adaml_623 15y ago
  From my point of view the content that the artivle is talking about is the equivalent of candy. By pirating this content you are the same as a child stealing candy. The analogy is obviously imperfect because a shop owner is directly damaged by the physical theft but my point is that a child does not need sweets. And 'pirates' do not need bland tv shows distracting them from so many other things in this world that are more deserving of time. 'Pirates' just seem to be sadder version of consumers who don't even help the economy. Little black holes taking and giving nothing back. I feel sadness that these people try to justify their activities and ally themselves with the SOPA protests.
• stefanve 15y ago
  I like to pay for my stuff, most software I use is either OSS or I payed for it. I have tucked a way in the attic over 500 CD's. I didn't buy any CD in the last 8 years or so. I used to download all the music I liked (but I still go to concerts). Than emusic came along and I used that, until lots of labels stopped using it and it became more expensive. Now I'm a happy Spotify user. So I didn't download music in the last 4 years or so. The only thing that is left is movies and TV-series I download a lot (and still go to the movies). I tried Jaman but there is not allot of quality content (I did get 3 credits free but never used it since movies I liked where not available in my country). I would pay 50~100 euro per month for a all you can eat package providing that episodes are available with in a week of first broadcast (not in my country but global) and movies are available with in a month after showing in the theater. I asked around (yes very scientific) and most people would to that to. So I have this money to give to the industry (max 1200 euro per year) but there is no service to give the money to. You could say go rend a movie (if you still can find such a place) but I refuse to pay 5 euro for a sloppy movie (the best movies I see in the theater any ways). You could say buy the movie but I'm not willing to pay 20 euro for a single Blu-ray. If tomorrow I could not download movies and TV-series any more I still wouldn't do that). In almost every other industry products follow demand but apparently the entertainment industry thinks they are above basic free market economics.
• JumpCrisscross 15y ago
  I cannot sympathise with the OP on the whole. The music and publishing industries, though kicking and screaming, are on the whole evolving. The film industry hasn't figured out heads from tails, but neither did Kodak and we don't call their incompetence evil. Where I converge is on the fury and destructiveness inherent in SOPA/PIPA. This rather-burn-Berlin-than-see-her-fall attack on America's (and through legislative export, the world's) creative and innovative centres is selfish and un-forgivable. I also cannot help but notice the parallels in social malignancy between the banks Dodd used to regulate and the MPAA he commands today.
• poub 15y ago
  The author should have read first http://thepiratesdilemma.com/ http://thepiratesdilemma.com/ before publishing his article.
• nattyackermann 15y ago
  Instead of fighting to pass laws and restrictions, find ways to offer US the CONSUMERS BETTER QUALITY that we would be willing to pay for. Let go of the obsolete, and adapt and take advantage of change. CDs are obsolete. Radiohead is an AMAZING band that has offered their album up for free on the internet and they are still hugely successful. Take a clue from them. CHANGE and sharing IS A GOOD THING.
• phzbOx 15y ago
  He's good a point about the easiness of downloading/watching. Here's a real story: In Canada, it seems like all streaming music websites are illegal. (Spotify, pandora, <you name it>). But, I still wanted to be legal. So, at the end, I had to "hack" my way to download spotify and listen to it. Isn't that stupid? If they decide that spotify is illegal, at least give me a better solution.
  • MaxPresman 15y ago
    Rdio has Canadian content, and there isn't a law against streaming music in Canada, the reason most music services do no bother is because of the expensive and complicated structure of the paid royalties. It's hard to get the initial license and almost impossible to satisfy the royalty payments, Most music startups that stream music do not bother with canada, and that's sad. Read the article why pandora decided to quit the Canadian market, sad true story http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:JgGeRC_XXDkJ:www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/5638/125/+panfora+canada+blog&cd=6&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=ca http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:JgGeRC_...
• ewams 15y ago
  Has anyone else noticed all of the "I had to" or "There was no other option" for their rational? It sounds like you are addicted to drugs! Is the media you are consuming really that good? Do you have to take a hit everyday? Are you addicted to TV, movies and music? Sure sounds like it to me.
• ssgrfk 15y ago
  Downloading music for free that is available to buy, is immoral.. If artists can't earn money from their art, there will be less art and more lady GaGa VS justin bieber shit.. Do you want to live in that world?
  • scotty79 15y ago
    So piracy is now to blame for "lady GaGa VS justin bieber"? That fresh. I was under the impression that this was exactly what copyright brought us.
  • nuttendorfer 15y ago
    No, there will only be art from people who actually love to do it and are not in it for the money.
• ravenheart 15y ago
  Neil Gaiman on piracy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Qkyt1wXNlI http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Qkyt1wXNlI
• pinaceae 15y ago
  others have pointed out the problem of global availability vs. artificial rights barriers. i'd like to add one more thing, in regards of music: why should i pay for digital music reproduction? 1., radio is free 2., internet radio covers so much, i can listen to anything, for free (more channels than ever) 3., on demand is solved by youtube, which is already the biggest music platform bar none. some music video have 100+ million playcounts! 4., a lot of those youtube videos are legal by now, put up there by the industry themselves. they price their own content as ZERO. and then there are the specialty sites, like soundcloud, 8tracks, wearehunted,... all that music, on demand, for free. mainstream stuff, not some basement bands. the industry is pricing their content as free in a lot of channels already. so, sorry, hard to see that saving a youtube vid as an mp3 is actual piracy.
• kamaal 15y ago
  Ok, Let me tell you why Piracy, it works most people who sell stuff them self want piracy to work. To start with this let me tell you something. I didn't have genuine exposure to computers until I was 17, The first time I really worked with a computer seriously was in First semester engineering. Here in India it was not very easy to afford computers for guys like me. In the first semester I went to a friends home who had a PC. And he had Windows installed. I guess it was XP. Another friend said he is soon buying a PC and wanted the Win XP CD. I was flabbergasted to know how easy it was to just copy the CD and install the OS on an machine. Only many days later did I learn, If Microsoft wanted they could stop piracy easily. But they don't! Why? Because they want people to be trained in it, right from college. So that when they get jobs their employers are forced to buy the OS they are trained to work in. Most of my friends also bought endless pirated game CD's. Here in Gandhinagar, Bangalore you can buy pirated CD's like peanuts on the footpath. Again, why don't they stop it? They can if they want! But why the hell don't they do it? Now coming to Music and art piracy. Even here, upcoming musicians can't really expect people to shell out money for their work. Piracy acts as an easy distribution medium. Trust me piracy is a blessing in disguise for them. Sorry to say, but you have all the power to stop this thing without stealing our liberties. But you don't. Also expecting people to be morally upright and not get into Piracy is big BS according to me. Its like parking your Ferrari in a lonely street in the middle of the night, with the fuel tank full and keys inside. Its bound to be stolen, don't blame the world for it. You are to be blamed for not taking the right precautions when you actually could have! If Microsoft bans Piracy in India. I assure you they will have to beg and plead with people to even make a single sale. People will be happy to buy a non OS installed computer and install Linux on it. They don't want that to happen, they know it, we know it. This is why you can't end piracy.
  • smallblacksun 15y ago
    >Only many days later did I learn, If Microsoft wanted they could stop piracy easily. Microsoft spends millions fighting piracy. What is this magical way that Microsoft could "easily" stop piracy?
• vikram360 15y ago
  I've met this guy and he's even awesomer in person
• edw519 15y ago
  OP, if this is just a whine about how unfair the world is and how special you are, then fine. But if it's an attempt to make something happen (stop SOPA), then it's not working and is in fact counterproductive, so please just STFU. You are offsetting the good hard work of so many others trying to make the right things happen. Make no mistake about it, we have reached the point where the best course of action is probably to simply appeal to the common people's innate sense of "fairness". Copyright is not fair. We get that. Pirating is not right. Most people would agree with that, too. Multiple wrongs do not make a right; most people's reptilian brains sense that, too. Long ago, before the Code of Hammurabi, the common code of law was often unfair. If, for example, I accidently killed your daughter, the penalty was to put my daughter to death. Such logic today is laughable and modern people would never put up with it. Except that's exactly what SOPA is, penalizing Party B for Party A's transgression. We don't do that anymore. There are other good arguments against SOPA, but yours is not one of them. Instead of influencing those who need to be influenced, you are just fanning the flames of SOPA proponents. Hell, after reading your article, I almost understand their reasoning...they need to do something to stop your wrong to stop someone else's wrong to stop someone else's wrong, etc. It's time to stop the cycle of doing wrong to combat other wrong, and just start doing right. It works better anyway. It would be nice to have you on board for that. I have more to say, but unfortunately, someone in another thread did something wrong, so a moderator has turned off the rest of my comment... * * * * * * * * . * * * * * * * * * . * * * * * * * * * * * * * * . * . * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * . * * * * * * * * * . * * * * * * * * * . * * * * * * * * * * * * * * . * . * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *.
  • ThomPete 15y ago
    Perhaps your "life is unfair" line could be extended to the artists who feel it's their natural right to take advantage of the diminishing costs of digital distribution.
    • deleted 15y ago
      [deleted]
    • richardw 15y ago
• 541564654 15y ago
  Wow man, this guy is serious. Although I can see there are huge flaws in his argument I would really not like to debate someone's opinion just today. Instead I will tell you two silly reasons of why I pirate. 1. The prices are all wrong. If they want me to buy something I should be able to buy it. I am not saying that since I am a student I don't have the money to buy it. But spending 400 Bucks of my native currency for 12 songs is just ridiculous. I don't want to do that. 2. This is even more sillier, I pirate because I can. Maybe this is a usability problem, but I don't want to seem like I am on some kind of a high horse. But still, if you are willing to give me individual songs (I rarely want the whole album or OST) for cheap I will consider buying it. Payment is not that much of a problem, you can have a wallet like system.
• kochbeck 15y ago
  What's particularly galling about this post (and the SOPA / PIPA / whatever people on the other side too), is that I haven't found anyone on either side of the argument who's stopped and said, "Hey, wait! Somebody's getting some major economic benefit from piracy. Let's see who." Everyone - supporters and detractors alike - are either talking about their own positions (like this guy's) or these nebulous entities like the "music industry." (I worked in the "music industry," and I can't define it.) The guy who wrote that is receiving, at best, nominal returns from criminality along with the satisfaction of making the, "Fuck you, that's why," argument. Crime isn't paying well at all for him, because he's committing a potentially life-altering crime in increments of $0.99 in music. So let's just set all those people aside for a moment, because on an individual basis, that's just a wreck to explain. Would take interpretive dance. These sorts of people only matter economically in the aggregate (think: Bittorrent), but "people-in-the-aggregate" isn't in charge, doesn't steer anything. Real individual human beings are. So how about some individual human beings who are benefitting mightily from piracy? Somebody must be making out big time. They must have a lot of power and a strong justification for having the system be just so. And if you took a moment to ask, say, the former CTO of any political campaign, they'd tell you who those people are. But since you didn't ask, I'll just tell you: it's politicians. Heard it here first people: political campaigns PIRATE THEIR ASSES OFF. I know with 100% certainty that one of the sponsoring senators for PIPA won big riding on top of a sea of pirated software in their campaign office. You betcha. One of the sponsors. In the last decade, when money into campaigns has increased by orders of magnitude, piracy has actually increased on campaigns, many of which can now afford to pay. Why? Laptops. Back when desktops were still king, odds were good that you'd have one or two legal copies of, say, Office that you were installing across all the machines in your phone banks, another couple copies for your volunteer centers, maybe one for your staff offices... all those places where fixed machines were. So at least you were installing at like 5:1. Not legal, but not crazy. But that's not how it works anymore. Now everybody plays BYOL. Need Office? Sure, there's a copy on Bob's shared drive. Need MapInfo? That's on a fileserver. And everybody at a machine (and I mean everybody) needs basic commercial software to work. Some need even more - the Adobe Suite or Visio or MapInfo or... it just goes on and on. Copies of SPSS floating around. If it's a campaign for an incumbent, you need, at minimum, everything on your desktop in the campaign that the staff on the Hill have, because you're going to be passing lots of files. So incumbents' campaigns tend to get right into piracy real fast, because they need application parity with their official staff. Multiply that by every staffer and every intern and every volunteer who brings in their laptop and that's a huge number of copies. A successful presidential campaign is probably pirating on the order of at least 3,000+ copies of just Office alone. Seriously. Go audit Romney. They're there. Funny thing is, it was the artists(!) who ultimately cracked down on the rights management firms that made campaigns stop pirating music. Possibly the one time ASCAP and BMI actually did anything for the artists, and it was against politicians. The deal was, artists were tired of politicians they didn't agree with playing uncleared, public performances of their music. If they hated the guy, they sure didn't want him to also get the music for free. So the rights firms cracked down. Odds are, big campaigns now have a CD of cleared music with usually BMI. They don't do it till they think they're likely to get caught, so they STILL PIRATE THE DAMN MUSIC. But eventually they make good. Want to check that one out? Call the compliance desk at the folding Cain campaign and ask if you can see their BMI clearances. Bet they don't have any - they bowed out too soon to get caught. Oh, oh! Don't forget TV. A good rapid response operation is capturing all the news in areas in play and all the advertising for themselves and their opponents. Nowadays, there are firms that suck it down, and then they take the files and share them around the office. Much like Pirate Bay in the TV section. "Hey, did you see yesterday's AC360 on the other guy? Here's a copy!" Back when I was doing this crap, TiVo was still pretty much the best you could do on short notice, so I had a shelf of hacked TiVos. Ah, how life has gotten easier. One more thing. Lists. Copyrighted lists. Mailing lists. Demo data. All the information detritus from campaigning. Stealing lists is a serious no-no. Reason being, the way politicians get rich (if they don't start rich, of course) is their list: because your campaign is not a shareholder-based corporation, the candidate ends up owning the assets. The key asset that gets created is the supporter list. A good list from a very successful national single run can bring in millions. Even for the loser. So lists are precious. You'd think that somehow there would be an honor code around this, at least. "Thou shalt not screw thy coworkers out of their primary asset." That would, unfortunately, be untrue. Go ask any campaign data manager how they've "salted" their list. They'll tell you. They hide tripwire data in the list - emails that go to warning scripts or phone numbers that forward to their own cell. Because pirating each other's data in politics is also a national tradition. A few things, some of them quite complex, are at the root of all this. A good example is campaign finance reform where there are matching funds spending caps and such. Piracy is a really good way to keep from moving spent money into, say, Iowa and incrementally lay waste to the cap before you've decided if you're going to get matched. It's a complex set of considerations and public perceptions. There are a lot of little dances that campaigns do, and piracy is a really good way to disappear major expenses in a very cash-constrained environment. But a very senior Democratic political operative sat me down once when I was trying to convince him to buy legal licenses for an Iowa office. He said, "Dave, here's the deal: if we lose, there's nothing to go after. We'll leave the stage with negative money and nobody to pin it on. If we win, we are the Executive Office of the President, and we've got the Antitrust Division. Do you really think Microsoft, of all companies, is looking to pick that fight?" tl;dr: Politicians operate vast organizations with questionable legal practices called campaigns. These campaigns get them elected to power and make them rich. Once elected, they legislate against the citizenry doing the things they did to gain power and wealth. This is not a conspiracy. Turns out they're just assholes.
• Aissen 15y ago
  No one seems to address the third argument: giving the "Entertainment" industry more money, is giving them means to lobby for liberticide laws, like SOPA, ACTA … Is the only solution to isolate oneself from popular media ? At the price of cultural impoverishment ?
• Hari_Seldon 15y ago
  Those of you who continually refer to piracy as stealing are muddying the waters. I agree that it is morally wrong to download copyrighted works without paying for them, but whenever someone uses the word theft, I switch off. It is akin to borrowing a book and then scanning it and using OCR to make an ebook before it is returned to the owner. Or ripping a friend's CD. I don't think a reasonable person would describe this as stealing. This is exactly what file sharing is, except that the scanning/ripping has already been done. By insisting that this is "stealing" you will alienate some people who might be open to persuasion and to changing their behaviour. They know that they have not deprived the owner of it's use and that they have not stolen anything. Stop talking about stealing, it's lazy
• drstrangevibes 15y ago
  A lot of the pro copyright guys dont know what the purpose of copyright IS. So before you argue please research what you are arguing in favour of. In short copyright originated with the statute of Anne 1709 to protect authors from the publishers profiting from their work, the statute main purpose was to promote learning by allowing creators to recoup the expensive cost of publishing a) the publishers are now ripping off creators, b) publishing is not longer expensive c) placing easily accessible SCIENCE papers under DRM prohibits learning
• pgvoorhees 15y ago
  It's fine that the OP doesn't want to pay for media. But, the OP should not take it, no matter how easy it is to do. By all means, abstain from media. But do not steal.
  • kin 15y ago
    His point is that he doesn't want to pay for distribution. He's more than happy to support artists directly.
• powertower 15y ago
  TL;DR; "It's more convenient and less expensive to pirate!"
• deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
• ssharp 15y ago
  This is just another in a long-line of poorly reasoned reasons against SOPA. I don't know if this article touched on the entire "we'll pay for cheap streaming thing", but I've heard it enough times and think it's relevant enough to discuss in this topic. I'm curious to how much time people are really spending thinking about things from the perspective of the movie studios. For users, it's easy to say "charge me $10/month and I'll gladly pay". From the movie studio's perspective, that probably sounds AWFUL. Does the music industry really like paying fractions of a penny per play on Pandora, Spotify, etc.? Absolutely not. For them, however, it's better than the alternative. For the movie studios, it's not. At least not yet. The movie business model is designed to price discriminate. They charge consumers on a sliding scale. When a movie first comes out, it's only available in theaters at the cost of, let's say, $10 per person. Then it moves to the second-run theaters at $5 per person. Then it goes to video for $20 to own, or $5 / household to rent. Then it goes to on-demand/redbox/itunes/etc. for $5/6 to rent. Then it goes to premium cable, where money is distributed via pre-arranged agreements. Then it becomes an "archival" video and can be rented for $2/3 at a store or on-demand. The movie studios are going for maximum profits by attempting to charge people the exact price they're willing to pay, when they're willing to pay it. Of course, they have to settle for inefficiencies because they cannot create a perfect discrimination model. Regarding the pedants of the "stealing" thing, what you're stealing when you pirate something is missed revenues. Just because you're taking a digital good instead of a physical one should have no effect on the outcome of your actions. If you steal a physical CD that normally costs $12.99, you're not stealing $12.99 worth of stock from the music industry. The margins are purposefully high on CD's, and you're stealing those margins, not $12.99 worth of a physical product.
• grellas 15y ago
  Creative effort - or at at least any that is truly worthy of the name - takes tears, and sweat, and blood. We can marvel at the output of an artist, or a writer, or a composer, or a film maker and yet fail to focus on the years of toil that often preceded that work. And I am not here speaking of some isolated genius. I still remember the days when I was so dissatisfied with my lack of writing skills that I decided to devour the subject with a non-stop investment of thousands of hours of work specifically aimed at improving those skills - and the seemingly fruitless results of what seemed to be mediocre output at the time - only to wind up, in time, with some degree competence in that area, competence that has served me well professionally and otherwise as I now exercise that skill set in various ways. That sort of creativity is something we all can do, each in his own way, and it is therefore common to us all and not limited to the work of the occasional genius. We all can create, some better than others, and we can all rejoice in that process because it is one of the fundamentally rewarding things we can do in life. It is in our nature to build things, and to improve upon them, and to innovate. This can be in writing, or drawing, or painting, or sculpting, or coding, or composing, or performing, or doing any other act requiring creativity. This is not some trivial take-it-or-leave-it part of life. It is often what defines us at our core. Copyright, at its heart, is aimed at giving the person who creates something control over the creative work. If I write something, I control what is done with it. No random person can just come along and appropriate it to that person's use or profit. I can say no to that or I can say yes, as I determine. If I say yes, I can require that person to compensate me for using my work or I can decide that I don't want compensation because I want others to freely benefit from my work. The point is that it is my decision. I have sole control over what is done with that which I create. Why? Because the law protects that right. And it does so, for the most part, through copyright. When people propose that copyright be abolished, they are saying, if effect, that anybody who produces a creative work immediately forfeits any right to control it and that any random person can come along and freely enjoy the benefits of that work and also freely reproduce and distribute that work. Under that sort of legal system, I can attempt to sell my work, or license it, or perform it publicly, but anybody else can do the same. Why? Because it is no longer "my" work, at least not legally. It is not protected in any way from the efforts of others to exploit it commercially or to give it away as they like. It is anyone's right to do with it what he will. Now, of course, I may rejoice in this. I may desire to create something wonderful and see to it that it is freely distributed to the maximum degree possible because I feel it is important that people benefit from my creative output without any obligation to me. Under a society in which copyright is protected, I can freely choose to do that if I like. I can place my work in the public domain and relinquish any right to compensation for it. Or I can let others use it freely but only on if they meet some condition that I impose on it, such as giving me attribution. The point is that this is my decision. If copyright does not exist, though, I have no such rights and I have no such control. In that case, anybody can use it, replicate it, seek to profit from it, claim it as his own, or whatever, all without my having any say whatever in that process. In such a system, anything created by anybody is simply common property. People can use it for good or for bad but I have no say in it. I may be the creator but that is beside the point. People like the author of this piece can simply saunter by and take it for whatever use the like. When a society makes a decision to defend the right of a creative person to control his work, and to profit from it or give it away as he likes, it has to make all sorts of policy decisions. Should such control last indefinitely? Of course not. Why? Because the benefits that we all get from being able to control our creative work only last so long. After a time, and certainly after we die, we have presumably exhausted whatever benefit we get from such control. Then too, others also create and, in time, all sorts of people borrow from one another and build upon the efforts of others regardless of the degree of creativity that they add to the process. Given enough time, we get what is known as a "common heritage" - something that far transcends the creative work of any one person. And so we have what is known as a public domain - a rich collection of creative output that is freely available to all. Those who value copyright and its social benefits in protecting creative output also value the public domain because it is a natural concomitant to the protected core of works that fall under copyright in any given generation. Indeed, a key aspect of copyright is precisely to encourage people to create - to invest the very blood and sweat that it often takes to do something great - in order that society generally will be enhanced and improved as creative works are done, are made available to the world as the creator may decide, and eventually pass into the public domain. So a fundamental tenet of copyright is that it cannot be absolute. It needs to be strictly bounded to achieve its legitimate goals without being extended to a point where it defeats those goals and gives special privileges to persons for no good reason. Today, copyright has been seriously abused in the U.S. and elsewhere and needs to be fixed. In particular, terms of copyright need to be brought back to sensible levels. The public domain as it exists needs to be preserved and a better system needs to be in place by which orphaned works can freely enter the public domain. Many other fixes are needed as well. What is most definitely not needed is a SOPA-style enforcement scheme that opens up legal channels to copyright holders that would permit all sorts of abusive actions against innocent parties in the name of copyright enforcement. This sort of thing merely perpetuates the abuse and does not fix anything. Those who have been paying attention strongly sense this, and it has been pretty amazing to watch people unite to oppose the back-room sleaziness that led to such legislative efforts in the first place. To defeat SOPA, though, one must affirm copyright. Just as we recoil at legal abuse in a SOPA-style scheme, we equally recoil at self-righteous claims that people can freely take what others create with no consideration whatever given to those who create it. That sort of radical assertion will get us nowhere when it comes to shaping serious legal policy in the SOPA debate. It needs to be roundly rejected.
• wwwtyro 15y ago
  I'll probably be sent to the back of the pack for this, but in light of the "End Piracy, Not Liberty" meme bouncing around, I'd like to offer an alternative viewpoint and some rationale for it: Don't End "Piracy" or Liberty: I believe that when you buy your hard drive, you own it. I believe that the bits on your hard drive are yours to set however you please. I believe that if someone else tells you how to set those bits so that you can run them through a video decoder to watch the latest Batman movie that neither they nor you have done anything that can be responded to with force, because your actions (communication and altering your own property) have been nonviolent. I believe that if someone tries to throw you in jail for setting those bits or telling someone else about the bits, they are the ones that are being unethical, because they are using aggressive force. It's probably true that the jobs and/or income of people in the entertainment industry may be at risk because of this. The problem, in my opinion, does not stem from the act of copying, but rather from a business model that depends on aggressive force. It strikes me as incredibly narrow-minded to stick to this foundering and unethical business model when there are an infinite number of ethical business models to try. They can do literally anything (anything!) that does not involve violence.
• chj 15y ago
  A better title "Why I'm a Thief". You can always choose not to buy it or watch it if you dislike it. Is it something like air that you really can't live without? People tend to be greedy. No matter the big guys or the little guys. Just the same. People sucks.
• DanielStraight 15y ago
  The author claims that he hates the music industry and won't miss them, yet he admits he's willing to break the law to get their products. Consider the absurdity of this juxtaposition. Modern popular music is properly considered the product of both the artists and the industry. Someone mentioned Rihanna. Do you think you would have any idea who Rihanna is without the music industry? Would her music sound at all the same with the music industry's backing (funds to pay for studio use and hire studio musicians)? If you don't like modern popular music fine, but if you don't like it, why are you pirating it? Given that perspective, when you download music, you are enjoying both the labor of the artist and the record company. If you don't like the price they're charging to enjoy their services, that does not give you the right to simply not pay. (We can debate elsewhere whether you already have the right to not pay, but you certainly don't get that right simply because you don't like the price.) Someone asked for a better analogy. Sneaking into a movie theater and standing (so you aren't taking up a seat) in the back is an analogous situation. You are enjoying the services of the movie theater (which you consider worth breaking the law to get access to) without paying their asking price. Someone reminded us that copying isn't stealing. Well it isn't sharing either. Two children playing with two toys isn't sharing. Two children taking turns with one toy is sharing. To return to the most important point, the author's argument can be summed up and generalized as, "If you don't like the cost/benefit ratio of a service, you have the right to take it for free as long as no one is directly hurt in the process." Frankly, I think people like that should be stopped, which as Ed pointed out, almost makes me feel like a SOPA supporter.
  • scotty79 15y ago
    > The author claims that he hates the music industry and won't miss them, yet he admits he's willing to break the law to get their products. He's not breaking "the law". His breaking some law. You surely broke some law in your life? You can't be sure that you didn't. You just try not to inflict harm on other people and get by. "Their products" spam everything everywhere. Their billboards litter public space. Their music litters radio waves. Their silly cliches litter minds. If you dangle a carrot in front of peoples faces you shouldn't complain that someone will eventually eat it without paying you a goddamn thing. Especially if he can do that without you even noticing. I think if piracy stops Hollywood from shoving their crap in everyone's faces it will be a good thing.
• ravloony 15y ago
  I'm not going to set my own behaviour up as an example here, which is something that I think invalidates the OP's point, at least partially, and certainly obscures it, but I have a couple of points: - It is unreasonable on the whole to expect people to refrain from piracy when it's just so easy. It's kind of like putting candy in front of a child and not expecting him to eat it, compounded by the fact that there is at least the illusion of anonymity on the internet. - It is unreasonable to expect artists to use the internet by themselves to distribute their content, although some do. Most of them are probably not that technically inclined. There needs to be someone there to take that pain away from them. - It is just that people who create content get paid for doing so. So it's really a market problem. We need a system that allows people to just download as easily as pirating, but allows the content creators to live off their creation. If the traditional content distributors (who are not the creators) cannot supply a service which does this, then I cannot see why they should be pitied. I think something along the lines of Deezer et al is ok : a service that would allow you to consume music, no questions asked. The problem is that deezer is getting all its content from the distributors, so in effect there is a double middle man. But a subscription-based "deezer" which paid artists directly according to how much their tracks were listened to would work, IMHO. I believe such services already exist, in fact. Also, you'd only need the big distributors to realize this, and build their own versions, and suddenly there's a proper market for tunes, films, etc. These new distributors would each have a catalogue of films and music on download, but they could also open the catalogue to cinemas, tv channels and so on. The only thing they couldn't do is restrict access, under pain of piracy. I'm just hypothesising here, but as far as I can see the content distributors are being the artisans of their own downfall by not doing this themselves.
• billpatrianakos 15y ago
  How about "how I just don't want to pay While trying to play it off like I have some moral/political agenda". This post hurts the pro-copyright people, anti-copyright people, and all people with brains. Edit: I think I was too harsh with that last line. But my point still stands that this article is doing more harm than good. There are a lot of people who write these rants but do it for the wrong reasons and try to play it off like they're some sort of freedom fighter.
  • marshray 15y ago
    Are there some examples from the article that support this idea that primarily "he just doesn't want to pay"?
• hugh4life 15y ago
  I used to be a huge pirate but I'm not anymore... except for one thing and that's live streaming of cable television. Quite honestly, I wish everyone pirated cable television until it is offered a la carte. The way these media companies stuff packages down consumers throats is just evil.
• peterhajas 15y ago
  This attitude is really obnoxious. It's not yours. You don't get to pick. You can't arbitrarily point at something and dislike how they distribute it, and instead steal it. That's not justification for your actions. Furthermore, the title and the picture frame this as "cool" or "fun" or "free". It's more like leeching off of another's work, and disregarding their right to do with it what they please.
• falling 15y ago
  Yes, you are a pirate because you want cheap music. There are nowadays plenty of ways to get music with much less hassle than TPB, at reasonable prices, with good audio quality and no DRM, often even directly from minor labels’ websites. If you don't use any them it's because you don't want to pay and just that. (Movies are still a problem, but the author is focusing on music here, which is largely resolved)
• electic 15y ago
  It really is true. Entertainment seems to be one of the few products you can buy that will actually attack you back. Seems very reminiscent of tobacco products.
• AlbumX10 15y ago
  The barriers for the consumer to pay full price for a music album includes high pricing and an uncertainty of the quality of the entire record, thus many pirate their music for free. This puts the artists at an unfair disadvantage because, despite the reality of the vulnerability of music files to be easily duplicated and shared, and regardless of what their incentives for making music are, they do deserve to be paid for their labor. No one's going to argue that consumers want to save money. They want quality products, but they don't want to pay too much for it. When did we get into the convention of charging 99 cents per song? That seems to be the standard cost these days from iTunes to Amazon. Why are most albums $14+? To cover the cost of recording, packaging, distribution, and all the bureaucratic middlemen-ing in the music industry? Consumers are de-incentivized to obtain their copy legally when they know that they can just get it for free. So why not meet both parties half-way? In the new era of online music distribution, artists don't need to heavily rely on agents or record companies to push their products. They just need an avid fanbase willing to make their content viral. Success would then be more dependent on quality as well than on connections and affiliation with big names in the industry, which have given us so many abhorrent "stars." Eliminate these expenses, and I believe artists can afford to charge under $5 or even $2 for a full-length album. This makes it much more palatable and economically feasible for fans to make legal purchases to more of their favorite bands. It will alleviate moral guilt by giving them an alternative to high-pricing and pirating. And even if they had downloaded it for free previously (to listen through and make sure they actually like the product), they can still reasonably buy the album again from the artist at a low cost. This is different from the Paypal donation system too as it will allow artists to retain rights to charge what they want for their product. In a business sense this makes a lot of sense too. As Theodore Levitt has said, "The purpose of a business is to create and keep a customer. To do that you have to deliver goods and services that people want and value at prices that are attractive."
• InclinedPlane 15y ago
  This entire debate has been wrong footed from day 1, "piracy" is and always has been a misnomer and an aggressive attempt to frame the debate. Sharing, lending, and broadcasting have been a core part of the dissemination of creative works for centuries. Libraries. Personal borrowing. Museums. Broadcast TV and radio. For the entirety of the modern age it has been the norm for the average individual "consuming" a creative work to do so without directly purchasing a licensed copy. Somehow creative industries survived. Today the limits to copying are very different and thus unfamiliar if not frightening for some. Yet creative industries have not died and are not dying, despite persistent attempts to fight against modern technology at every stage (resisting digital distribution, creating experiences that are typically wholly inferior to the "piracy" experience). Imagine if literature, music, etc. never embraced libraries, radio, or television. Imagine if book lending was made illegal. There are ways to embrace sharing and dissemination of IP without direct payment for every consumed copy while still maintaining profitability. The old limits are dead. Portraying all manner of sharing of creative works as "intellectual property theft" is frankly ridiculous. The idea that the line between borrowing a book from a library (or reading a book within the library) and borrowing a digital copy of a movie from a friend (or even a stranger) is a line between acceptable behavior and theft is an idea born of prejudice and provincialism. We need to get over such old prejudices and begin to form new models and new boundaries.
• shousper 15y ago
  I still don't see anyone offering a viable solution.. There are a lot of variables that come into play for a generic copyright or IP law that encompasses all creative works. The first of which should probably be scope. Physical and non-physical creations; a painting or a jpg; a photo of a painting in jpg format; a photo of a photo of a painting in jpg format. The digital work - the internet - has changed the world forever and we're not going back. Some form of "SOPA" or "PIPA" is inevitable. The question is simple: what are you going to do about it?