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>Gee, that sounds a lot like somebody else's problem. I don't know. Maybe I'm missing something, but that sounds an awful lot like some sort of weird consumer

>Gee, that sounds a lot like somebody else's problem. I don't know. Maybe I'm missing something, but that sounds an awful lot like some sort of weird consumer entitlement (that is shared by many). I mean, how is it not the consumer's problem? I am far from a big industry apologist, but why do many consumers of digital content believe that the content should be delivered on their own terms at a price they set, else stealing it is justifiable? I mean it's not like air or water where you have to consume it or else die. If the industry produces a product that is woefully expensive and delivered extraordinarily inefficiently for most consumers, then isn't the correct consumer response to do without? I am trying to see the difference between this and believing that it's OK to steal a car because the manufacturer hasn't made it "affordable enough" for you. What am I missing?

kbenson 12y ago
There's obviously a market. By not making it available, they are throwing away whatever revenue, however small, they could have gained, and others are capturing this revenue (if not the free hoster, the advertising firms or carriers along the way in some manner do). That the rights holders have not collectively figured this out yet is no longer the consumer's problem (for a large percentage of consumers) because consumers have just decided that they are willing to pay the small cost or illegally obtaining (that is, small when averaged across occurances based on consequences) versus figuring out if it's even possible to get a legal copy of the movie for them. In other words, consumers will get the movie either way, that the rights-holders are not getting money for it is someone else's problem (at least, that's how I interpreted the original post).
- unclebucknasty 12y ago
  >In other words, consumers will get the movie either way, that the rights-holders are not getting money for it is someone else's problem (at least, that's how I interpreted the original post). Well, your overall comment is just a statement of what's happening. We all know there's a market, demand, etc. And, your interpretation of the original post is pretty much how I interpreted it as well. But, it still begs my original question: why is it OK for "consumers to get the movie either way?" Why is it someone else's problem? That someone else actually owns the movie. Where else do we actually believe it's OK to take something that belongs to someone else simply because we don't like their terms? Then, we turn around and blame them for our stealing it because they should have offered better terms? It's just weird. I mean, if people want to steal something, then just steal it and be ready to pay the consequences as with anything else. But, all of this rationalization that they somehow deserve to own it because they were inconvenienced by the rightful owner is what I don't understand.
  - res0nat0r 12y ago
    Entitlement. Posters above feel entitled to demand the content on their own terms because if they don't agree they can easily just download it without facing any consequences, and feel for some reason that Hollywood should now cater to their demands. If there was a 99% chance of being fined / sued the next day after torrenting the latest blockbuster, the entitlement attitude I think would change dramatically.
    - tjradcliffe 12y ago
      True, but there is no chance of being fined/sued and there never will be. That's the reality we live with, and there are proven business models that will make a huge amount of money in that reality. Businesses that attempt to live in a separate reality will suffer. It's hardly fair, but it is fact.
    - kbenson 12y ago
      I think calling it "entitlement" is doing a disservice to the situation and the complex motivations and desires on all sides that have lead to and inform the future of the current situation. There's blame all around, from consumers that are willing to skirt and outright break the law, to rights-holders that have time and again resorted to morally ambiguous contracts and actions with a consumer base that's quickly coming to the conclusion they can't always expect a fair deal[1]. That said, only one of these groups has any real power to make a change in the short term. In the long term other possible solutions exist, such as through enacting new laws, but that seems to backfire as often as not given a enough time for the landscape to change yet again, so I don't hold hope that a good solution will come out of that. 1: http://boingboing.net/2013/12/15/amazon-takes-away-access-to-pu.html http://boingboing.net/2013/12/15/amazon-takes-away-access-to...
      - Illotus 12y ago
        I think you touch a key issue here. Changing the situation is really difficult. From consumer point of view pirating and campaigning for changing laws are pretty much the only ways that have potential to make a difference. Boycotting is not practical, because it so very rarely has any effect when the product is very desirable for many people.
gnoway 12y ago
Well, you're not missing anything. These arguments fall apart the moment 'stealing it' becomes part of the discussion. The correct way to protest a content offering in our society is to not consume it. That's actually true of any consumer product. If you just steal it instead, you're signaling the producer that you do want their product; you'd like to think that the proper response would be to make a product that entices you to buy instead of steal, but unless almost everyone is stealing, it's probably cheaper to lobby for the DMCA. Which is what happened. As far as the frictional costs, etc. alluded to earlier, I actually have no idea what that means. I think it may mean there is a lot of hand-waving built-in to what media costs, making it very difficult for me as a consumer to know what I'm actually paying for and, if I'm value conscious, to determine whether it's worth the price.
- neumann 12y ago
  > If you just steal it instead, you're signaling the producer that you do want their product; you'd like to think that the proper response would be to make a product that entices you to buy instead of steal, but unless almost everyone is stealing, it's probably cheaper to lobby for the DMCA. Which is what happened. RIAA/MPAA and other interested parties who experience their content being copyrighted must be at least happy that people think of it as stealing. I still think of stealing as a very to describe someone taking something that belongs to someone else, and depriving the victim of the object in the process. Downloading is copyright infringement, which, also happens to be illegal, but it is not stealing.
  - gnoway 12y ago
    It may be called infringement, but the process and outcome is really the same as theft. These companies have something they own, they have the right to control how it's distributed, they intend to distribute it to you under specific terms involving the exchange of currency, and instead of going along with that or choosing not to consume it, you're just stealing it. I'm clearly not a legal scholar but I am not sure infringement is really the term for this anyway - I tend to think that applies more when you copy something and then begin to pass it off as yours for redistribution or whatever. I think where people get hung up on this is that it's hard to say what a copy of an idea is worth. It's so trivial to copy a movie that it's easy to say it's worth nothing. But I don't think the value of something controls whether it can be stolen, only the severity of the theft.
lambda 12y ago
> What am I missing? The fact that under a first-sale model, there are business models that are able to handle selling this kind of long-tail content perfectly well, despite the higher up-front costs for printing up a batch of disks. But since streaming allows them to sell exclusively, which allows them to strike nice deals that look good up front but then wind up squeezing everyone in the industry and being crap for consumers, they wonder why revenues are declining and they can't sell anything, but never actually have the guts to go back to a model that worked but gives them less negotiation leverage with their vendors. > I am trying to see the difference between this and believing that it's OK to steal a car because the manufacturer hasn't made it "affordable enough" for you. Really? A car has fixed, very high costs per item. Downloading from a streaming site has zero costs for the studio. Yes, the content originally cost money to produce, but it makes absolutely no difference to them whether I watch it on a streaming site or spend the night at the local pub instead. What they're doing is more akin to someone having an open air concert that costs $50 bucks to get in and you have to go through a metal detector and pat down to ensure you don't bring in any recording devices, and then trying to complain that some people just listen to the concert from outside the fence.
- anigbrowl 12y ago
  Really? A car has fixed, very high costs per item. Downloading from a streaming site has zero costs for the studio. Simply not true. The marginal cost of a streaming download are near zero. the fixed costs of making a film available for streaming are non-trivial. Also, the costs fall on producers many of whom work outside studios. Here's the Netflix deliverables manual: http://newworlddistro.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/FullTechnicalSpecOperatorsManual-6-0.pdf http://newworlddistro.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/FullTec... Do you think all this stuff just takes care of itself? It doesn't. Going from a completed cut that's good enough to screen at a festival to a streaming deliverable in a great deal of work, and QCing it all is extremely time-consuming. It involves weeks of work for multiple specialists. Measuring compliance can be automated to a certain extent. Repairing defects cannot. The standards are the same for the latest blockbuster and for your little low-budget feature or that cool out-of-print classic cult film you managed to acquire the rights to. If you're lucky and planned it all out in advance, you might spend only $10,000. Excuse me if I've got a bee in my bonnet about this, but this stuff is what I do for a living a lot of people seem to think that getting a film onto a streaming service is just a matter of a quick transcode and an FTP PUT. It's actually a ton of highly skilled work.
swartkrans 12y ago
> Maybe I'm missing something, but that sounds an awful lot like some sort of weird consumer entitlement It doesn't matter what you want to depict it as. You can browbeat people all you want, shake your head at humanity, none of it matters. You're not going to browbeat people into not watching a movie they want to see when all it takes is just a few clicks. These companies spend tens of millions of dollars marketing a product to create demand and then are unable to satisfy the demand. I don't have any kind of physical player anymore. Nothing in my house plays DVDs, BlueRays, VHS, nothing. If I want to see a movie I check on Netflix, I check on Amazon Video, and then if I still don't see it I check out. I don't pirate, but it is frustrating even for me. I can't watch any of the Star Wars films. Sure I guess there are some kind of weird deals that prevent these companies from making these changes, but all that means to me is that I can't watch those movies any more, and for others it means they'll just pirate it, with no fucks given about what you might think about that.
- unclebucknasty 12y ago
  My question wasn't browbeating. And I certainly didn't believe it would change anyone's mind. Anyway, another question for you: why don't you pirate?
  - swartkrans 12y ago
    > why don't you pirate? I don't like feeling bad, in the past I have felt bad about pirating.
    - unclebucknasty 12y ago
      I guess my question to you is why do you feel bad about it? And my original question was, why do others not only feel no remorse about it, but actually seem to feel entitled to do it?
      - avn2109 12y ago
        >> "... why do others not only feel no remorse about it, but actually seem to feel entitled to do [piracy]?" Because in market societies, we have all been trained since birth to find the goods and services we want at the lowest possible price in the market. I feel entitled to buying Wrigley's Doublemint gum for 75 cents instead of 2 bucks, because it's readily available at that price. In this case the price of movies is zero, so people feel entitled to that price.
ryanpardieck 12y ago
When have consumers ever cared if a firm makes such a costly product that it can't be profitable? Consumers will never care about that. Appeals to make them care about "manufacturing costs" are pointless. I think it's a little disingenuous to keep calling it "stealing." It's copyright infringement, and in my experience people have never felt as badly about doing it as compared to stealing. For instance, think back before digital books became popular: if you had a truly epic book of poems and you had several friends who wanted to read it and copies of the actual book were unusually difficult to procure, I think it used to be that many people would just run a large chunk of the book through a xerox machine without thinking twice. Similarly, I know people who used to get very into making custom mixed CDs as gifts for people. Copying an artwork has never been considered a crime on the level of stealing someone else's possession.
- Illotus 12y ago
  +1. The point about stealing is really good. It is really annoying tactic of trying to frame the issue as something other than it is. Other than that, in many countries (for example in Finland) you are allowed to copy movies and music for your own use (though according to the latest law you aren't allowed to circumvent copy protection). You can even let other people do the copying for you. This used to be really common for example in local university library where the librarians copied latest journal articles for whole bunch of people.
- nwatson 12y ago
  Pharmaceuticals: one product that's also costly to research and manufacture, and the firm that gets the magic compound first gets a couple of decades of monopoly. Plebs like us can't yet synthesize a copy of the medical product easily, so the pharmaceutical company has far fewer chokeholds to deal with to make sure no copies get out. Alas for media companies, copies are harder to manage. As for not calling it "stealing", but "copyright infringement" instead ... no! "Copyright infringement" would be distributing the media (in whole, part, or integrated into other product) to others as if you had the rights to do so. That's not what consumers of illicitly downloaded materials are doing. They're "stealing".
  - 12y ago
AYBABTME 12y ago
Consumer entitlement because Y offers simple viewing experience (I can buy a video and watch it now), while X doesn't. Then you feel entitled to a better experience from X. And I don't think it's crazy to do so.
fphhotchips 12y ago
Ok, here goes (from my perspective, obviously): 1) If the costs of distribution are high enough that rights holders will not make a profit, they may cease distribution to avoid the loss. This is fine and fair and good. 2) Distribution by others at that point by definition represents no loss to the rights holder, so long as there is no marginal cost to the rights holder. For example, an online game may represent a continuing marginal cost to the rights holder if they are still running servers, but pirating a movie represents zero marginal cost. 3) Therefore, it is not immoral to pirate a work where the rights holder has made it impossible to obtain the film through legal, profit generating channels. ------- LINE OF MORAL AMBIGUITY ------- 4) Where a rights holder makes it unreasonably difficult to obtain a work, either through price, geographical distribution or unnecessary technical encumberment, one may cease to be a potential profit generating customer of the rights holder. 5) Therefore, pirating (again with 0 marginal cost to the rights holder) is not immoral, as the rights holder is not losing potential profit as a result.
- anigbrowl 12y ago
  Distribution by others at that point by definition represents no loss to the rights holder Oh yes it does. What if the rightsholder can't afford to legally distribute it, but hopes to be able to at a later stage eg due to lowering of technical costs? Copyright infringement substantially reduces the net present value of an IP asset. Because the marginal cost of torrenting etc. is virtually zero, it's easy for copyright infringers to permanently crowd out rights holders. The bait-and-switch in a lot of pro-piracy arguments, which many proponents are not really conscious of, is that the rights holders are not monolithic. You're telling today's film production companies and professionals that they don't deserve to get paid because of what other firms did in the past. A vast amount of film production is carried out by small startup-like businesses that have about as much in common with the big studios as a small-time app developer has with Apple Computer. Should I be able to download apps for free because iPhones are expensive?
  - wooger 12y ago
    Can't afford it? Put it on Youtube for free. If your product is not on sale, you have no excuses.
clarry 12y ago
How about content producer insanity and entitlement? 1) Content producers make a movie and want me to watch that movie (out of the few million other movies released so far) and expect me to play with their terms and pay whatever price they've set? Oh, how entitled are they. I'd have to live at least a few hundred years to watch everyone's movie, and I have no clue how I could afford it. The supply is greater than I could demand in a lifetime. 2) Content producers make movies but don't expect me to be able to pay for it and watch it. Via copyright threats, they also send me the very clear message that they don't want me to watch it unless I can do it on their terms. Why would anyone spend time and effort making a movie and then not wanting people to see it? Oh how insane are they. I don't really want to disrespect authors' wishes, so if they really want to tell me to f__k off and not watch their movie, that's exactly what I do. And through that selfish, entitled and insane attitude they discourage me from even wanting to pay them when I could. I think it's their loss. I don't watch their movies. But I can't say anyone's in the wrong for disrespecting such insanity and therefore making copies of said movies (which comes at no cost for the author).
- unclebucknasty 12y ago
  >How about content producer insanity and entitlement? They created it and they own it. They have the right to issue insane terms for its consumption and they are, by definition, entitled. And you are entitled to choose not to consume it. Now, perhaps if enough people made that choice then "producer insanity" would come to an end. But, until then...
  - clarry 12y ago
    They own it for sure. But I'm not sure they should be entitled to freely set the terms under which the public may interact with copies of the work once released. And they definitely shouldn't be entitled to abuse the justice system and call the big men with guns to trample through the door and ruin the life of someone who didn't play along with these insane terms. By definition they may indeed be entitled, but I'm not sure their entitlement to people's wallet and liberty (which the producers don't own) is morally any more sound than the "consumer entitlement" to movies (which the consumers don't own).

kbenson 12y ago

There's obviously a market. By not making it available, they are throwing away whatever revenue, however small, they could have gained, and others are capturing this revenue (if not the free hoster, the advertising firms or carriers along the way in some manner do). That the rights holders have not collectively figured this out yet is no longer the consumer's problem (for a large percentage of consumers) because consumers have just decided that they are willing to pay the small cost or illegally obtaining (that is, small when averaged across occurances based on consequences) versus figuring out if it's even possible to get a legal copy of the movie for them. In other words, consumers will get the movie either way, that the rights-holders are not getting money for it is someone else's problem (at least, that's how I interpreted the original post).

unclebucknasty 12y ago
>In other words, consumers will get the movie either way, that the rights-holders are not getting money for it is someone else's problem (at least, that's how I interpreted the original post). Well, your overall comment is just a statement of what's happening. We all know there's a market, demand, etc. And, your interpretation of the original post is pretty much how I interpreted it as well. But, it still begs my original question: why is it OK for "consumers to get the movie either way?" Why is it someone else's problem? That someone else actually owns the movie. Where else do we actually believe it's OK to take something that belongs to someone else simply because we don't like their terms? Then, we turn around and blame them for our stealing it because they should have offered better terms? It's just weird. I mean, if people want to steal something, then just steal it and be ready to pay the consequences as with anything else. But, all of this rationalization that they somehow deserve to own it because they were inconvenienced by the rightful owner is what I don't understand.
- res0nat0r 12y ago
  Entitlement. Posters above feel entitled to demand the content on their own terms because if they don't agree they can easily just download it without facing any consequences, and feel for some reason that Hollywood should now cater to their demands. If there was a 99% chance of being fined / sued the next day after torrenting the latest blockbuster, the entitlement attitude I think would change dramatically.
  - tjradcliffe 12y ago
    True, but there is no chance of being fined/sued and there never will be. That's the reality we live with, and there are proven business models that will make a huge amount of money in that reality. Businesses that attempt to live in a separate reality will suffer. It's hardly fair, but it is fact.
  - kbenson 12y ago
    I think calling it "entitlement" is doing a disservice to the situation and the complex motivations and desires on all sides that have lead to and inform the future of the current situation. There's blame all around, from consumers that are willing to skirt and outright break the law, to rights-holders that have time and again resorted to morally ambiguous contracts and actions with a consumer base that's quickly coming to the conclusion they can't always expect a fair deal[1]. That said, only one of these groups has any real power to make a change in the short term. In the long term other possible solutions exist, such as through enacting new laws, but that seems to backfire as often as not given a enough time for the landscape to change yet again, so I don't hold hope that a good solution will come out of that. 1: http://boingboing.net/2013/12/15/amazon-takes-away-access-to-pu.html http://boingboing.net/2013/12/15/amazon-takes-away-access-to...
    - Illotus 12y ago
      I think you touch a key issue here. Changing the situation is really difficult. From consumer point of view pirating and campaigning for changing laws are pretty much the only ways that have potential to make a difference. Boycotting is not practical, because it so very rarely has any effect when the product is very desirable for many people.

gnoway 12y ago

Well, you're not missing anything. These arguments fall apart the moment 'stealing it' becomes part of the discussion. The correct way to protest a content offering in our society is to not consume it. That's actually true of any consumer product. If you just steal it instead, you're signaling the producer that you do want their product; you'd like to think that the proper response would be to make a product that entices you to buy instead of steal, but unless almost everyone is stealing, it's probably cheaper to lobby for the DMCA. Which is what happened. As far as the frictional costs, etc. alluded to earlier, I actually have no idea what that means. I think it may mean there is a lot of hand-waving built-in to what media costs, making it very difficult for me as a consumer to know what I'm actually paying for and, if I'm value conscious, to determine whether it's worth the price.

neumann 12y ago
> If you just steal it instead, you're signaling the producer that you do want their product; you'd like to think that the proper response would be to make a product that entices you to buy instead of steal, but unless almost everyone is stealing, it's probably cheaper to lobby for the DMCA. Which is what happened. RIAA/MPAA and other interested parties who experience their content being copyrighted must be at least happy that people think of it as stealing. I still think of stealing as a very to describe someone taking something that belongs to someone else, and depriving the victim of the object in the process. Downloading is copyright infringement, which, also happens to be illegal, but it is not stealing.
- gnoway 12y ago
  It may be called infringement, but the process and outcome is really the same as theft. These companies have something they own, they have the right to control how it's distributed, they intend to distribute it to you under specific terms involving the exchange of currency, and instead of going along with that or choosing not to consume it, you're just stealing it. I'm clearly not a legal scholar but I am not sure infringement is really the term for this anyway - I tend to think that applies more when you copy something and then begin to pass it off as yours for redistribution or whatever. I think where people get hung up on this is that it's hard to say what a copy of an idea is worth. It's so trivial to copy a movie that it's easy to say it's worth nothing. But I don't think the value of something controls whether it can be stolen, only the severity of the theft.

lambda 12y ago

> What am I missing? The fact that under a first-sale model, there are business models that are able to handle selling this kind of long-tail content perfectly well, despite the higher up-front costs for printing up a batch of disks. But since streaming allows them to sell exclusively, which allows them to strike nice deals that look good up front but then wind up squeezing everyone in the industry and being crap for consumers, they wonder why revenues are declining and they can't sell anything, but never actually have the guts to go back to a model that worked but gives them less negotiation leverage with their vendors. > I am trying to see the difference between this and believing that it's OK to steal a car because the manufacturer hasn't made it "affordable enough" for you. Really? A car has fixed, very high costs per item. Downloading from a streaming site has zero costs for the studio. Yes, the content originally cost money to produce, but it makes absolutely no difference to them whether I watch it on a streaming site or spend the night at the local pub instead. What they're doing is more akin to someone having an open air concert that costs $50 bucks to get in and you have to go through a metal detector and pat down to ensure you don't bring in any recording devices, and then trying to complain that some people just listen to the concert from outside the fence.

anigbrowl 12y ago
Really? A car has fixed, very high costs per item. Downloading from a streaming site has zero costs for the studio. Simply not true. The marginal cost of a streaming download are near zero. the fixed costs of making a film available for streaming are non-trivial. Also, the costs fall on producers many of whom work outside studios. Here's the Netflix deliverables manual: http://newworlddistro.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/FullTechnicalSpecOperatorsManual-6-0.pdf http://newworlddistro.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/FullTec... Do you think all this stuff just takes care of itself? It doesn't. Going from a completed cut that's good enough to screen at a festival to a streaming deliverable in a great deal of work, and QCing it all is extremely time-consuming. It involves weeks of work for multiple specialists. Measuring compliance can be automated to a certain extent. Repairing defects cannot. The standards are the same for the latest blockbuster and for your little low-budget feature or that cool out-of-print classic cult film you managed to acquire the rights to. If you're lucky and planned it all out in advance, you might spend only $10,000. Excuse me if I've got a bee in my bonnet about this, but this stuff is what I do for a living a lot of people seem to think that getting a film onto a streaming service is just a matter of a quick transcode and an FTP PUT. It's actually a ton of highly skilled work.

swartkrans 12y ago

> Maybe I'm missing something, but that sounds an awful lot like some sort of weird consumer entitlement It doesn't matter what you want to depict it as. You can browbeat people all you want, shake your head at humanity, none of it matters. You're not going to browbeat people into not watching a movie they want to see when all it takes is just a few clicks. These companies spend tens of millions of dollars marketing a product to create demand and then are unable to satisfy the demand. I don't have any kind of physical player anymore. Nothing in my house plays DVDs, BlueRays, VHS, nothing. If I want to see a movie I check on Netflix, I check on Amazon Video, and then if I still don't see it I check out. I don't pirate, but it is frustrating even for me. I can't watch any of the Star Wars films. Sure I guess there are some kind of weird deals that prevent these companies from making these changes, but all that means to me is that I can't watch those movies any more, and for others it means they'll just pirate it, with no fucks given about what you might think about that.

unclebucknasty 12y ago
My question wasn't browbeating. And I certainly didn't believe it would change anyone's mind. Anyway, another question for you: why don't you pirate?
- swartkrans 12y ago
  > why don't you pirate? I don't like feeling bad, in the past I have felt bad about pirating.
  - unclebucknasty 12y ago
    I guess my question to you is why do you feel bad about it? And my original question was, why do others not only feel no remorse about it, but actually seem to feel entitled to do it?
    - avn2109 12y ago
      >> "... why do others not only feel no remorse about it, but actually seem to feel entitled to do [piracy]?" Because in market societies, we have all been trained since birth to find the goods and services we want at the lowest possible price in the market. I feel entitled to buying Wrigley's Doublemint gum for 75 cents instead of 2 bucks, because it's readily available at that price. In this case the price of movies is zero, so people feel entitled to that price.

ryanpardieck 12y ago

When have consumers ever cared if a firm makes such a costly product that it can't be profitable? Consumers will never care about that. Appeals to make them care about "manufacturing costs" are pointless. I think it's a little disingenuous to keep calling it "stealing." It's copyright infringement, and in my experience people have never felt as badly about doing it as compared to stealing. For instance, think back before digital books became popular: if you had a truly epic book of poems and you had several friends who wanted to read it and copies of the actual book were unusually difficult to procure, I think it used to be that many people would just run a large chunk of the book through a xerox machine without thinking twice. Similarly, I know people who used to get very into making custom mixed CDs as gifts for people. Copying an artwork has never been considered a crime on the level of stealing someone else's possession.

Illotus 12y ago
+1. The point about stealing is really good. It is really annoying tactic of trying to frame the issue as something other than it is. Other than that, in many countries (for example in Finland) you are allowed to copy movies and music for your own use (though according to the latest law you aren't allowed to circumvent copy protection). You can even let other people do the copying for you. This used to be really common for example in local university library where the librarians copied latest journal articles for whole bunch of people.
nwatson 12y ago
Pharmaceuticals: one product that's also costly to research and manufacture, and the firm that gets the magic compound first gets a couple of decades of monopoly. Plebs like us can't yet synthesize a copy of the medical product easily, so the pharmaceutical company has far fewer chokeholds to deal with to make sure no copies get out. Alas for media companies, copies are harder to manage. As for not calling it "stealing", but "copyright infringement" instead ... no! "Copyright infringement" would be distributing the media (in whole, part, or integrated into other product) to others as if you had the rights to do so. That's not what consumers of illicitly downloaded materials are doing. They're "stealing".
- 12y ago

AYBABTME 12y ago

Consumer entitlement because Y offers simple viewing experience (I can buy a video and watch it now), while X doesn't. Then you feel entitled to a better experience from X. And I don't think it's crazy to do so.

fphhotchips 12y ago

Ok, here goes (from my perspective, obviously): 1) If the costs of distribution are high enough that rights holders will not make a profit, they may cease distribution to avoid the loss. This is fine and fair and good. 2) Distribution by others at that point by definition represents no loss to the rights holder, so long as there is no marginal cost to the rights holder. For example, an online game may represent a continuing marginal cost to the rights holder if they are still running servers, but pirating a movie represents zero marginal cost. 3) Therefore, it is not immoral to pirate a work where the rights holder has made it impossible to obtain the film through legal, profit generating channels. ------- LINE OF MORAL AMBIGUITY ------- 4) Where a rights holder makes it unreasonably difficult to obtain a work, either through price, geographical distribution or unnecessary technical encumberment, one may cease to be a potential profit generating customer of the rights holder. 5) Therefore, pirating (again with 0 marginal cost to the rights holder) is not immoral, as the rights holder is not losing potential profit as a result.

anigbrowl 12y ago
Distribution by others at that point by definition represents no loss to the rights holder Oh yes it does. What if the rightsholder can't afford to legally distribute it, but hopes to be able to at a later stage eg due to lowering of technical costs? Copyright infringement substantially reduces the net present value of an IP asset. Because the marginal cost of torrenting etc. is virtually zero, it's easy for copyright infringers to permanently crowd out rights holders. The bait-and-switch in a lot of pro-piracy arguments, which many proponents are not really conscious of, is that the rights holders are not monolithic. You're telling today's film production companies and professionals that they don't deserve to get paid because of what other firms did in the past. A vast amount of film production is carried out by small startup-like businesses that have about as much in common with the big studios as a small-time app developer has with Apple Computer. Should I be able to download apps for free because iPhones are expensive?
- wooger 12y ago
  Can't afford it? Put it on Youtube for free. If your product is not on sale, you have no excuses.

clarry 12y ago

How about content producer insanity and entitlement? 1) Content producers make a movie and want me to watch that movie (out of the few million other movies released so far) and expect me to play with their terms and pay whatever price they've set? Oh, how entitled are they. I'd have to live at least a few hundred years to watch everyone's movie, and I have no clue how I could afford it. The supply is greater than I could demand in a lifetime. 2) Content producers make movies but don't expect me to be able to pay for it and watch it. Via copyright threats, they also send me the very clear message that they don't want me to watch it unless I can do it on their terms. Why would anyone spend time and effort making a movie and then not wanting people to see it? Oh how insane are they. I don't really want to disrespect authors' wishes, so if they really want to tell me to f__k off and not watch their movie, that's exactly what I do. And through that selfish, entitled and insane attitude they discourage me from even wanting to pay them when I could. I think it's their loss. I don't watch their movies. But I can't say anyone's in the wrong for disrespecting such insanity and therefore making copies of said movies (which comes at no cost for the author).

unclebucknasty 12y ago
>How about content producer insanity and entitlement? They created it and they own it. They have the right to issue insane terms for its consumption and they are, by definition, entitled. And you are entitled to choose not to consume it. Now, perhaps if enough people made that choice then "producer insanity" would come to an end. But, until then...
- clarry 12y ago
  They own it for sure. But I'm not sure they should be entitled to freely set the terms under which the public may interact with copies of the work once released. And they definitely shouldn't be entitled to abuse the justice system and call the big men with guns to trample through the door and ruin the life of someone who didn't play along with these insane terms. By definition they may indeed be entitled, but I'm not sure their entitlement to people's wallet and liberty (which the producers don't own) is morally any more sound than the "consumer entitlement" to movies (which the consumers don't own).