4 ms·
You left out one important point: 6. Convenience. I believe that the content industry is relying on a sufficient number of people still finding it easier to b
by rednukleus 13y ago
You left out one important point:
6. Convenience.
I believe that the content industry is relying on a sufficient number of people still finding it easier to buy a DVD/Bluray rather than pirate. For technical people, pirating is already sometimes more convenient for reasons that you stated.
There is also a
7. Ethics
Some people do not find pirating ethical under any circumstances, and will inconvenience themselves to avoid it.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- aylons 13y agoEthics is really important for me, but rootkits makes the official distribution as ethical as the pirated content.
- Swizec 13y agoSome people also think using animal products isn't ethical and inconvenience themselves to avoid it. But you probably don't want to build a mass market business on that. For the record, I don't pirate music anymore. Spotify has made pirating too inconvenient.
- namdnay 13y agoI'm not sure the comparison is just. Using animal products isn't illegal.
- scotty79 13y agoI don't think ethics overlaps much with law.
- namdnay 13y agoSeriously? Theft, Assault, Civil Liability etc.. I think there's a significant overlap between Ethics and Law. Our systems of laws are based on the work of philosophers studying ethics, of course there's a huge overlap
- mrmekon 13y agoThere's also offshore tax havens, political action committees, and patent trolls. Some unethical things are legal. There's also underage sexting, media piracy, cryptocurrencies, and marijuana. Some things aren't globally agreed upon as ethical or unethical, but the law still attempts to address them. Identifying the overlap is difficult.
- GhotiFish 13y agopeople create laws to enforce ethics, but ethics and laws and law often don't overlap because law gets tinkered with less than ethical people and one man's justice is another man's horror.
- namdnay 13y agoI agree with you, they definitely don't match exactly. But I was arguing that they overlap: Some parts match, or at leats cover the same ground.
- general_failure 13y agoAw, come on, don't sound like a troll. Don't argue for the sake of arguing. THere is a big overlap between ethics and laws. Just because some items don't overlap doesn't warrant such a statement.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- king_jester 13y ago> Some people also think using animal products isn't ethical and inconvenience themselves to avoid it. But you probably don't want to build a mass market business on that. Vegan products are mass market commodity goods like any grocery. Just because vegan goods consist of a smaller slice of all grocery and food sales doesn't mean you'd be a fool to make a business out of it.
- Swizec 13y agoPoint. But I don't think the MPAA and RIAA are after the market of "people who find it more unethical to pirate than they find it inconvenient to consume legally"
- thirdsun 13y agoAnd that's the problem - you might as well keep pirating as Spotify isn't helping any artist while users think they're doing the noble thing.
- cheald 13y agoBut people don't listen to music to benefit the artists (even when they purchase a CD or whatever) -- they do it for themselves. Artists make the vast majority of their money on tour, which is more or less unrelated to the choice of distribution channel, except that a more prolific channel results in more people attending a show.
- thirdsun 13y agoThat point is brought up often, but don't forget that while touring might work for your average indie rockband, it's not as easy for obscure ambient, experimental musicians. Music that is primarily intended for home listening is a lot harder to sell as live performance. Again, I don't intend to offend the users of those services - just saying that Spotify, rdio and co. alone won't work for many artists.
- robryan 13y agoSpotify is legal and the artists on the platform are on there of their own free will (or their publishers will who they signed that right away to). They could decide that they on want to steam on another platform if that is a better deal for them.
- thirdsun 13y agoAbsolutely, and many smaller artists and indie labels chose not to offer their catalogue on those platforms. I didn't intend to offend the users of streaming services. I subscribed to rdio myself, only as a tastemaker though - I still buy a lot of lossless music.
- cheald 13y agoGabe Newell of Valve Software has famously said that piracy is a distribution problem, and I fully believe he's right. > “The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work,” Newell said. “It’s by giving those people a service that’s better than what they’re receiving from the pirates.” Steam single-handedly killed even the temptation to pirate games for me, because it's ridiculously convenient to just fire up Steam, click a button, and have the game delivered to my desktop at multi-megabit speeds without any obnoxious DRM getting in the way of me being able to play. Pandora, Spotify, and most recently Google All Access make music piracy a complete non-issue for me, because I don't want to have to spend time chasing down a song or even futzing with iTunes - I just punch something into search and it's playing. Netflix and Hulu provide so much content that I can't watch all of it - while they don't always have the most recent content, they have a lot of it. Provide me a service that is a. affordable (Steam Sales and $8/month for movies or music are excellent models here, content folks) b. convenient (click button, enjoy content), and c. reliable (no explanation necessary) and I won't have any incentive to pirate content. I'm convinced that the people who can afford stuff but pirate it anyway do so because of distribution problems in getting that content legally. The people who pirate stuff who can't afford it, or wouldn't buy it if they can are arguably even a net benefit - they aren't lost sales, but they increase the reach and visibility of the product. In either case, it's not really worth worrying about them (though the studios sure do love to gripe about them as if they're all lost sales), which leaves us with one very easy solution - have the best distribution channel available, and people will pay for it. At that point, piracy is about as solved as it'll get from an economic standpoint.
- sixothree 13y agoAgreed, I find the ethics of the recording industry extremely distasteful. Whenever I pay for music I feel like I'm giving money to a mobster.