4 ms·

People want content without any inconvenience, it’s that simple. If they use ads they will block. If they ask for payment they will pirate. Luckily these peo

People want content without any inconvenience, it’s that simple. If they use ads they will block. If they ask for payment they will pirate. Luckily these people are the minority or there would be no content to begin with

Nextgrid 3y ago
> If they ask for payment they will pirate. If the price & convenience is right, a significant chunk (enough to offset the impact of freeloaders) will pay. Movie piracy used to be the norm before Netflix came along, yet movies were still made. Music piracy was the same until Spotify came along, yet there's more music than ever being produced.
- endisneigh 3y ago
  > Luckily these people are the minority or there would be no content to begin with The vast majority of people do not pirate, and most people who pay would probably find piracy unethical to begin with.
  - southerntofu 3y ago
    > The vast majority of people do not pirate I would be happy to see a serious study about this. What you call piracy has been the norm for centuries and millenia for spreading culture and reinterpreting music/shows produced by other people. In the vast majority of the world (including in the global north), the budget you have for culture is low (if any) and when you have people with a computer, copying stuff is very common. For example El Paquete in Cuba was well documented, but even growing up in France i remember so many examples of just sharing with friends (before the Internet but still). Even for the newer generations, Youtube & Spotify started as pirate services hosting a myriad of copyrighted content. I don't know about Spotify, but i still see people watching whole movies/shows pirated on Youtube rather often when going to places with shared computers. Sharing is the norm. Restricting sharing is delusional desire for control. Still, it's important that people making art & science make a living, although it's not just them who need to make a living in this crazy world and we'd be all better off with UBI or abolition of private property (one can dream). So you may find it interesting that HADOPI, the law that criminalized non-profit file-sharing in France actually ordered a study on piracy and media consumption back in the early 2010s, and their own study acknowledged that there was no economic loss from piracy (as people don't reduce their budget due to pirating) and the bigger pirates were also the bigger buyers. I dare you to find a single person who "does not pirate" in any sense of the world and actively respects copyright laws. If only, someone who doesn't sing "happy birthday" song because that's actually copyright infringement. Or doesn't watch music videos on Youtube because they might be pirated. I bet that person doesn't exist, or at least that they are not the "vast majority".
    - eldaisfish 3y ago
      this is a misleading reply because you ignore the speed and scale at which the internet allows sharing to happen. In the past, the speed of sharing was limited by communication at the time, either word of mouth, the speed of printing books etc. If what you describe truly was the norm, then creating any sort of content for any reason would generate negative returns. This was and is rarely the case. I do not see it as unfair for content creators to be paid and to demand that you consume their content on their terms, within reason.
      - autoexec 3y ago
        > If what you describe truly was the norm, then creating any sort of content for any reason would generate negative returns. Piracy doesn't always hurt creators, and often it helps them make money. The people who pirate the most, also spend the most money on the things they pirate (https://torrentfreak.com/pirates-are-valuable-customers-not-the-enemy-180606/ https://torrentfreak.com/pirates-are-valuable-customers-not-...). Just because something is pirated that does not mean there was a loss of income for the creator. I've pirated things and enjoyed them enough that I purchased them later, and I've purchased physical copies of things and later pirated digital copies. I've also pirated things I'd never have purchased at all which means there was never any chance of any of my money going to the creator. The vast majority of people today pirate all the time. Posting a meme that contains a copyrighted character or image, or listening to a song on youtube from anything other than an official channel, sharing a webcomic over social media, creating a GIF from a movie or TV show, streaming a video game playthrough, and downloading a youtube video to edit into a reaction video are all technically violations of copyright law. Copyright law is so draconian that what most people consider totally normal activities online are violations. > I do not see it as unfair for content creators to be paid and to demand that you consume their content on their terms, within reason. I agree that creators have a right for a chance at payment for their work. I disagree that I have no right to choose how to consume that content. Most of the restrictions on how media is intended to be consumed comes from the corporations who own the copyright and not the creators themselves. When creators make it known that they want their content consumed in a certain way I'll take it into consideration. Musicians who ask that you only ever listen to their albums in their entirety and never listen to a single track I ignore. When Dave Chappelle asked fans to not watch Chappelle's Show I agreed and didn't.
poink 3y ago
> Luckily these people are the minority or there would be no content to begin with There is a whole galaxy of content creators who make great stuff but clearly aren’t making a living directly off content. People like making content for tons of reasons.
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  >People like making content for tons of reasons. Pretty much yeah. Just remember back to the first few years of youtube. Nobody was making any money from that but they were still doing it out of passion/hobby.
matheusmoreira 3y ago
Total nonsense. Before all this advertising nonsense, the web used to be literally full of people who had enough intrinsic motivation to create without compensation. People used to literally pay to have their own website in order to get their ideas out there. Open source is literally proof of this. I make software in my free time simply because I enjoy it. I publish it out there in a variety of licenses with zero expectations. I got a GitHub Sponsors profile with zero sponsors and I'm not even mad about it.
- freshhawk 3y ago
  When your job depends on it you tend to work really hard at believing that advertising is necessary and actually it's good, actually actually relevant ads are helpful! After all, if it wasn't then what am I doing with my life?
  - autoexec 3y ago
    In the case of advertisers that'd be mostly lying and manipulating people while hurting them by enabling a dangerous system of surveillance that threatens themselves and their families along with the rest of us. If I were an advertiser I'd probably want to lie to myself too.
- shiroiuma 3y ago
  >People used to literally pay to have their own website in order to get their ideas out there. Somewhat; at first, this was the case, though I'd say many of them were simply using their university's computer resources. Later on, banner ads happened and then we had sites like Tripod, where people could build their own simple website and not pay anything for it. Somehow, these sites did just fine (for a while) by hosting banner ads. These days, somehow it supposedly costs a small fortune to run a simple website even though computers are FAR more powerful than they were in 1999 and computer hardware generally costs much less.
ekianjo 3y ago
> Luckily these people are the minority or there would be no content to begin with Most authors write books without making any money for years. They write because they enjoy writing. Not because they need it to make a living. So your statement is easily invalidated by reality
- carlosjobim 3y ago
  They write because they enjoy writing, but they also need to make a living. Those things are not exclusive.
  - shiroiuma 3y ago
    They don't need to make a living. They're already making a living by doing some other job, probably a boring job. They're writing because they enjoy writing, and there might be a financial payoff, but it's certainly not something they're banking on. It's just like aspiring actors; they work as restaurant servers to make a living, hoping to become a big star. It's not really a good career move; if you want a low-risk high-paycheck career, you do something unglamorous and boring, like writing software, or some other office job that requires a college degree.
    - carlosjobim 3y ago
      > They don't need to make a living. How benevolent of you... May I then suggest that all software developers also should forego their paychecks and work for free, since they love programming and should do it in their spare time while having another day job? For example in a restaurant.

Nextgrid 3y ago

> If they ask for payment they will pirate. If the price & convenience is right, a significant chunk (enough to offset the impact of freeloaders) will pay. Movie piracy used to be the norm before Netflix came along, yet movies were still made. Music piracy was the same until Spotify came along, yet there's more music than ever being produced.

endisneigh 3y ago
> Luckily these people are the minority or there would be no content to begin with The vast majority of people do not pirate, and most people who pay would probably find piracy unethical to begin with.
- southerntofu 3y ago
  > The vast majority of people do not pirate I would be happy to see a serious study about this. What you call piracy has been the norm for centuries and millenia for spreading culture and reinterpreting music/shows produced by other people. In the vast majority of the world (including in the global north), the budget you have for culture is low (if any) and when you have people with a computer, copying stuff is very common. For example El Paquete in Cuba was well documented, but even growing up in France i remember so many examples of just sharing with friends (before the Internet but still). Even for the newer generations, Youtube & Spotify started as pirate services hosting a myriad of copyrighted content. I don't know about Spotify, but i still see people watching whole movies/shows pirated on Youtube rather often when going to places with shared computers. Sharing is the norm. Restricting sharing is delusional desire for control. Still, it's important that people making art & science make a living, although it's not just them who need to make a living in this crazy world and we'd be all better off with UBI or abolition of private property (one can dream). So you may find it interesting that HADOPI, the law that criminalized non-profit file-sharing in France actually ordered a study on piracy and media consumption back in the early 2010s, and their own study acknowledged that there was no economic loss from piracy (as people don't reduce their budget due to pirating) and the bigger pirates were also the bigger buyers. I dare you to find a single person who "does not pirate" in any sense of the world and actively respects copyright laws. If only, someone who doesn't sing "happy birthday" song because that's actually copyright infringement. Or doesn't watch music videos on Youtube because they might be pirated. I bet that person doesn't exist, or at least that they are not the "vast majority".
  - eldaisfish 3y ago
    this is a misleading reply because you ignore the speed and scale at which the internet allows sharing to happen. In the past, the speed of sharing was limited by communication at the time, either word of mouth, the speed of printing books etc. If what you describe truly was the norm, then creating any sort of content for any reason would generate negative returns. This was and is rarely the case. I do not see it as unfair for content creators to be paid and to demand that you consume their content on their terms, within reason.
    - autoexec 3y ago
      > If what you describe truly was the norm, then creating any sort of content for any reason would generate negative returns. Piracy doesn't always hurt creators, and often it helps them make money. The people who pirate the most, also spend the most money on the things they pirate (https://torrentfreak.com/pirates-are-valuable-customers-not-the-enemy-180606/ https://torrentfreak.com/pirates-are-valuable-customers-not-...). Just because something is pirated that does not mean there was a loss of income for the creator. I've pirated things and enjoyed them enough that I purchased them later, and I've purchased physical copies of things and later pirated digital copies. I've also pirated things I'd never have purchased at all which means there was never any chance of any of my money going to the creator. The vast majority of people today pirate all the time. Posting a meme that contains a copyrighted character or image, or listening to a song on youtube from anything other than an official channel, sharing a webcomic over social media, creating a GIF from a movie or TV show, streaming a video game playthrough, and downloading a youtube video to edit into a reaction video are all technically violations of copyright law. Copyright law is so draconian that what most people consider totally normal activities online are violations. > I do not see it as unfair for content creators to be paid and to demand that you consume their content on their terms, within reason. I agree that creators have a right for a chance at payment for their work. I disagree that I have no right to choose how to consume that content. Most of the restrictions on how media is intended to be consumed comes from the corporations who own the copyright and not the creators themselves. When creators make it known that they want their content consumed in a certain way I'll take it into consideration. Musicians who ask that you only ever listen to their albums in their entirety and never listen to a single track I ignore. When Dave Chappelle asked fans to not watch Chappelle's Show I agreed and didn't.

poink 3y ago

> Luckily these people are the minority or there would be no content to begin with There is a whole galaxy of content creators who make great stuff but clearly aren’t making a living directly off content. People like making content for tons of reasons.

FirmwareBurner 3y ago
>People like making content for tons of reasons. Pretty much yeah. Just remember back to the first few years of youtube. Nobody was making any money from that but they were still doing it out of passion/hobby.

matheusmoreira 3y ago

Total nonsense. Before all this advertising nonsense, the web used to be literally full of people who had enough intrinsic motivation to create without compensation. People used to literally pay to have their own website in order to get their ideas out there. Open source is literally proof of this. I make software in my free time simply because I enjoy it. I publish it out there in a variety of licenses with zero expectations. I got a GitHub Sponsors profile with zero sponsors and I'm not even mad about it.

freshhawk 3y ago
When your job depends on it you tend to work really hard at believing that advertising is necessary and actually it's good, actually actually relevant ads are helpful! After all, if it wasn't then what am I doing with my life?
- autoexec 3y ago
  In the case of advertisers that'd be mostly lying and manipulating people while hurting them by enabling a dangerous system of surveillance that threatens themselves and their families along with the rest of us. If I were an advertiser I'd probably want to lie to myself too.
shiroiuma 3y ago
>People used to literally pay to have their own website in order to get their ideas out there. Somewhat; at first, this was the case, though I'd say many of them were simply using their university's computer resources. Later on, banner ads happened and then we had sites like Tripod, where people could build their own simple website and not pay anything for it. Somehow, these sites did just fine (for a while) by hosting banner ads. These days, somehow it supposedly costs a small fortune to run a simple website even though computers are FAR more powerful than they were in 1999 and computer hardware generally costs much less.

ekianjo 3y ago

> Luckily these people are the minority or there would be no content to begin with Most authors write books without making any money for years. They write because they enjoy writing. Not because they need it to make a living. So your statement is easily invalidated by reality

carlosjobim 3y ago
They write because they enjoy writing, but they also need to make a living. Those things are not exclusive.
- shiroiuma 3y ago
  They don't need to make a living. They're already making a living by doing some other job, probably a boring job. They're writing because they enjoy writing, and there might be a financial payoff, but it's certainly not something they're banking on. It's just like aspiring actors; they work as restaurant servers to make a living, hoping to become a big star. It's not really a good career move; if you want a low-risk high-paycheck career, you do something unglamorous and boring, like writing software, or some other office job that requires a college degree.
  - carlosjobim 3y ago
    > They don't need to make a living. How benevolent of you... May I then suggest that all software developers also should forego their paychecks and work for free, since they love programming and should do it in their spare time while having another day job? For example in a restaurant.