No one is obliged to give me money -- unless they consume the content I created. At that point, they are.
Anything else assumes that because content exists, people have the right to consume it -- for free if they can work out how.
Let's be clear: I fully agree that Hollywood needs to catch up, and make content accessible in the way that Popcorn time has. But I don't have the right to consume content illegally, just because I find their business model inconvenient.
I'm happy to pay, as long as the terms are reasonable. (I have a Rdio account that's been active for years now - I can't remember the last time I pirated music... I can't remember the last time I pirated software, either).
However, in Canada, the only way to watch (for example) Game of Thrones is to
a) get a massive cable subscription which includes 1000 channels you don't want and HBO (which itself has 100 programs you don't want to watch and GoT),
b) wait for the episode to show up on itunes and pay $4.50 per episode (whaat?) (and oh, season 5 isn't available yet),
c) pirate.
Is it a huge surprise that a lot of people choose option C? And can you blame them? At a certain point, non-Americans specifically just get fed up with being told "sorry, no, that content isn't available in your region."
Not being able to watch a TV show isn't exactly oppression. If I didn't get into a closed beta of a highly-anticipated web service or video game, it wouldn't be "a form of protest" to brute-force someone else's login, or to crack the signup system. It would be wrong.
It's not oppression, you're right. It's way, way smaller than that. My little act of 'defiance' is way smaller than it would be if it were exactly oppression, too.
I'm pirating content. I'm watching something that I want to watch, and at the same time, I'm hoping that my small increment of the 'pirated_copies_of_got' metric causes someone at HBO to go and sort out the way they distribute content outside of the US.
Literally no one else is harmed - because, no, I'm not going to pay the prices they've set. It's just nowhere near worth it. I'll go read a book instead.
Btw, hacking someone else's account is considerably more 'wrong', in my opinion: you're breaching someone's personal info and preventing them from using their account.
Look, you don't want to pay for it. For you, free is better than having to shell out money.
I wish people would just stop with their dumb moral workarounds. The show costs $X. You don't want to pay. You know how to get the content via other means. And so you do.
Don't embarrass yourself further by claiming you're somehow helping HBO out by going against their wishes and pirating the show they produced. You don't know what effect you (and other pirates) are having on HBO's business.
You apparently work for a company that aims to empower musicians. I would expect you to have a deeper understanding of how difficult it can be to make a living producing entertainment in this day and age.
And one last thing: It is actually quite insulting to be reduced down to 'free is better than having to shell out money'.
No, it's not. I buy books (audible.com is amazing), I buy music, I buy software - all of which are just as easy to pirate.
I go to shows, I buy prints of photographsy that I like, I support artists. I am fully aware of how hard it is as an artist (my wife is an illustrator).
So, please don't reduce me down to "cheap bastard just doesn't want to pay". It's insulting and untrue.
I apologize -- I went off on you as a straw man instead of as someone who had literally just said that they didn't pirate music or software. That was unfair.
You touched a nerve. The "I'm not doing any harm" line is the general defense to the piracy question and I think it's very much wrong. I think I'm right in saying that too many people attempt to use it as a moral cover for the fact that they just want stuff for free.
And there's definitely a part of me that is biased to "free is better than not-free," so for sure, that's a part of my decision-making process. But unless the content companies actively work to make it difficult for me to consume their content, I try very hard to inhibit that "i can get it for free" mentality.. Precisely because I do know how hard it can be for artists.
Anyway, thanks for the apology (and sorry for getting a bit defensive there). Cheers.
I'm not trying to help HBO at all. Seriously, not. Couldn't care less about HBO. And you're right, I don't want to pay for it, not when it's priced like that and the distribution mechanisms in Canada are so broken.
But look: all of these American companies look at Canada, Australia, the UK, etc and go "you know what, we're just going to focus on the US." <Sorry, that content is not available in your region>.
That's so amazingly frustrating. So, yes, I honestly do hope that HBO sees the international piracy numbers and sorts out its sketchy content deals with Bell Media and launches HBO Go in Canada. Until the TV/Movie industry gets its act together, I'll pirate. (Since music is available to stream in Canada, I don't pirate music. Simple as that.)
As for my job: a) my personal opinion has nothing to do with my company, but b) I'm pretty comfortable with how Wavo empowers musicians and artists. We're a small company, so the fully-realized vision is still a ways off, but fundamentally the goal of Wavo is to help artists. There are no contradictions here.
These arguments are so stupid to me. Joe Consumer has X amount of dollars to spend on entertainment.
Joe Consumer can find various ways of maximizing his dollars. $15 of that goes to Spotify so that he and his wife can listen to whatever music they please whenever, wherever they want (except Taylor Swift because she has a mansion in Rhode Island to pay for).
Joe Consumer would rather not pay $70 to buy Frozen on three devices, one on Blu-Ray to watch on his television, the Apple Store to watch it on an iPad on the way to Disneyland and Google Play on the Nexus Tablet after taking the kids to the theatre to watch said movie for $50 all the while hosting a Frozen themed birthday party... He would rather tell the studios to go fuck themselves and download it.
so yea, I don't want to pay for it because I feel a bit cheated that I must pay three times for the same thing.and apparently I'm an asshole because Disney isn't getting every god damn cent of entertainment dollar they are entitled to according to piracy police like you. The Rent is too damn high.
As for the musicians not getting paid, please... anybody can pick up a guitar and become a musician and post it on the internet. That does not entitle anyone to be paid for it. Nobody is shedding tears for Taylor Swift's inability to make money.
I actually do. I'm arguing a lot in this thread, but I stopped watching game of thrones around season three. I maybe pirate a movie every 8 or 10 weeks or something? I have young kids and a startup job. :) And I have Netflix (Canadian version, no vpn, so like 1/4 the content as in the US) for when I have some free time. But frankly I do prefer books (again, audible.com is the best)
That said, content distribution is completely broken outside the US, so I'm going to shed exactly one tiny crocodile tear for HBO when I do decide to get back into game of thrones. And I sure as hell won't be paying for it, unless they give me some sane options.
I pay for HBO and a few times I've still had to pirate Game of Thrones because their delivery is so poor. For a while it was impossible to watch on HBO Go when it aired because they were somehow unaware that their popular program would draw a lot of viewers to the site and it would crash. Now that doesn't happen, but instead I get poor quality video that pauses and stutters with annoying grey bars on either side of the screen that pop in and out and distort the video. This past Sunday I was fed up enough after 15 minutes that I just decided to wait an hour and download it in HD.
The terms aren't the only things that have to be reasonable, the quality of service must be as well.
Is it a surprise? No. What you've described is downright annoying. It seems nonsensical to me that hollywood makes it so difficult for me to give them money to watch Game of Thrones.
But, Piracy isn't a form of protest, any more than stealing a car is -- regardless of how reasonable you consider the price.
Laws aren't all equal. Stealing a car is zero-sum: if I take your car, you no longer have a car, which is a very, very expensive toy.
If I download Game of Thrones, the outcome for every single person in the world except me is exactly the same as it would have been if I had simply gone and read a book instead. HBO gets no money (I'm reading a book), and you still have the ability to watch GoT (I haven't done anything to prevent that).
Sorry, that's not entirely true actually. The outcome is ever so slightly different because I contribute to a metric that content producers do pay attention to: estimated pirated copies of GoT downloaded.
They make decisions based on that (like the launch of HBO go, which is not available in canada), and eventually, my hope is that they'll realize that there is a problem with the way they're selling their content and they'll fix it for everyone.
(Meanwhile, yes, benefit for me: I get to watch GoT).
If you would've otherwise read a book. Had the ability to pirate not been available, a non-zero number of individuals would've paid. Hollywood is stupid thinking everyone would have otherwise paid. But anyone who insist that everyone pirating would've read a book instead is making the same mistake.
It's the biggest logical fallacy to compare stealing digital content to stealing a car. It's a shame the word "steal" is used in both cases. The original owner of a stolen car no longer has his car after it's stolen. That is not true of digital piracy.
Can we instead compare it to illegally duplicating your car?
I had a rdio account once.
But it turns out he price they publish is not what they charged (at least were I live), nor was it the currency they displayed (which added a huge extra on bank charges). I was charged around 200% of the published price, all due to them not holding up their end of the deal. I called Visa and rejected the payment, and immediately closed my account.
As for HBO. It's too expensive for me. In the US it may be cheap, but it isn't in other countries. And the web-based version is unavailable "in my region".
I wouldn't mind paying for decent terms, but putting a huge amount of money to watch a single series at a time they dictate, is unacceptable. HBO broadcasts at a certain time, and I have to stick to their schedule. Awful. I've a life. Stuff happens.
Piracy is the only affordable way, and comes with a huge amount of extra bonuses (replay, pause, watch later, no installation cost).
You've decided that, under no circumstances whatsoever is it ok to pirate content. (Or, perhaps more generally, under no circumstances whatsoever is it ok to break the law)
That's cool, and that's a fair position.
I disagree. There are plenty of reasons, big and small, to choose not to follow the rules. The more pressure on Hollywood to provide reasonable options, in my opinion, the better.
But, that said, how about lets be respectful about it?
>No one is obliged to give me money -- unless they consume the content I created. At that point, they are.
Historically no, they're not. Paying for a concert before you saw it was unheard of 150 years ago, and your ancestors would have considered you a mug for giving over your money before you knew if it was going to be a good show.
The norm for human history is that you see the show first and then decide afterwards how much it was worth, hence artists passing their hat around the audience. Bad shows got no money, which is how it works for literally everyone else today. We get paid at the end of the month, not the start, and bad enough fuckups get you fired.
In your country/region: maybe. Everywhere: definitely not. The only time I got a refund at a theatre was when a film was dubbed and the ad said subtitled. I left during the first two minutes, and even had to argue to get my money back on such an obvious case.
Is that appropriate though? Just because it is done that way doesn't mean it should be. It's not that uncommon for people to pay their internet in advance, only for a line outage to go unfixed for a fortnight.
Patticularly in the US, internet access is a cage. There's often only one provider, and their terms and conditons declare service not guarenteed. What choice do you have?
Then google fibre and municipal wifi start showing up, and look how hard comcast et al are screaming.
Maybe your rent, cable and phone need escape hatches as badly as your movie collection?
I don't know. On the one hand, I don't like pre-paying for electricity considering the potentially huge fluctuations in use. On the other hand, I don't use gas and then pay for it. I eat at a restaurant first, then pay, but I buy groceries before I eat.
So I don't know. I can see phone as being a purchase of a block of X to use. The same with rent. Almost all internet comes with an uptime guarantee - say it's 99.9%, if it's down for more than 45 minutes, even Comcast will provide a credit.
I suppose it comes down to how you agree to consume it. I don't mind the 24 hour model on video rentals, when I can start that 24 hours any time within 30 days. I'm purchasing the right to watch the movie as many times as I want in a 24 hour window sometime in the next month. That said, I also believe that if I purchase unlimited video in the form of a DVD or download, I have the right to device-shift it wherever the heck I want.
> No one is obliged to give me money -- unless they consume the content I created. Then, it's my call, whatever business model I pick.
Buskers are giving their content away for free.
You don't have the right to attend their concert, just because you don't like the website they're selling their tickets on.
Would it be a good thing for society to allow you to pick a business model where you blare your music from loud speakers and then pay large burley men 50 cents to collect 1 dollar from anyone within earshot, on the premise that they heard your music so thus owe you?
I've never accidentally watched Game of Thrones, or unintentionally been within earshot of it - I had to explicitly choose to include that programming.
That's probably a fair assessment, but a bit beside the point: if they were watching it on their television that fails the analogy as the cable company wouldn't be shaking me down for it. As a matter of fact, I have an HBO Go subscription via iTunes and I don't watch the show - I mostly got it for Silicon Valley and some movies, and I wanted to support what I think is a move in the right direction.
While I do follow your logic, and really don't disagree on a principle issue, I do think it's important to note that the concept of copyright and payment is a 'forced / legally created' scarcity problem. As in, the only reason there are laws that dictate creators get paid is because there are laws on the books that say so. It's a tricky subject, and a delicate discussion I think, but fundamentally important to keep in mind that barring natural scarcity, there's really no fundamental law of nature that indicates a creator must be compensated for creating.
The law may say they are, but the law is clearly impotent and I personally don't remember having signed the Mickey Mouse act, so no I don't think anybody owes Hollywood anything, especially because Hollywood was built on piracy.
I feel this black/white scenario of "pay us for content or its illegal" ignores the reality of the market. There are plenty of social dynamics in play that are conveniently ignored.
Music pirates in particular tend to buy more music than non-pirates. I would wager this holds true in any media-field of pirating (but perhaps not software pirating). [0] There is a reason for this!
Pirates are enthusiasts. They love the content they consume and are likely to pay/buy things they really enjoy/enjoyed. Due to not having an unlimited income they pirate some things. For music pirates - there is a good chance that the music they are purchasing is from the same music label as the music they are pirating.
Pirates are also likely to tell their friends about a show they enjoyed. Pirates are also likely to buy merchandise from shows they enjoy.
For example - an extremely large portion of the American market for Japanese Anime-related goods is because of pirated fan-subbed anime. Shows that would have never been released or heard of in America and thus led to 0% revenue from America are pirated and their merchandise purchased. The number of figurines from おれいも for example. Or the number of だきまくら purchased from American-fans.
This simply can't be denied for the anime market in particular - and many fansubbers eventually get hired by the studios. Some studios try to shut down the fansubbers but most allow it to happen because fansub groups largely do not sub anime slated for an English release. It's an unspoken code of sorts of "Support the official release" - and since many anime fans don't necessarily speak Japanese, if someone isn't translating it for them they can't/won't watch it.
Pirating is beneficial for the anime scene. It's likely more beneficial than harmful for music for similar reasons. I'll concede that for Movies/TV Shows it gets a little iffy (do enough people buy merchandise who wouldn't if they hadn't pirated the show to see it?)
Then we can also look at video games. Amnesia: The Dark Descent or Minecraft. Games that were heavily pirated and the creators even went so far as to say "If you can't afford to play our game. Pirate it." Why? Free marketing and free publicity means more sales. It made economic sense to let your game go viral that way. What might be $20 in a lost sale to a pirate might win you $80 in 4 new sales from his friends (even if another 6 of his friends just pirated the game)
If you don't let him pirate the game you just lost $80 in sales and free marketing/publiclity from 7 people which likely lost you even more in sales.
Which brings me to the important part: Pirating doesn't mean a lost sale. It means free marketing and free publicity from someone who wouldn't have been a customer. If you can convert a "non-sale" to a "promotional consumer", why wouldn't you?
The economic spin usually given to pirates is it is "costing sales" which is, frankly, bullshit. They make more money off suing mass pirates than any "lost sales", so it's beneficial for them to keep pirating illegal.
I dispute that in the realm of video games, infringement has been demonstrated to be a net positive. Concrete examples abound of game developers who have quantifiable damages by infringement. [0]
The examples cited all resulted in servers being overloaded due to piracy which is a fault of not authenticating who is connecting to the server. This is one facet where pirated copies can do harm and I will concede that.
Had the pirated copies been sold - the same server issues would have happened. Though they would have had more resources to handle the situation and it would turn out better for everyone (especially the iOS devs who had to go offline for 4 months to deal with the situation).
However, "offline" games (ie. solo campaigns) or distributed servers (ie. minecraft) that do not connect to a centralized server won't take away company resources. The idea behind piracy is that nothing is being stolen or taken, only duplicated. Taking away server resources has a negative impact and although it is also considered "piracy" I would consider it closer to "theft" (the same as stealing a physical server might be!)
Without arguing over semantics of the meanings behind the word 'piracy' - will you agree with me that the shared issue of all of your examples was unpaid server space being 'stolen' by pirates? We may disagree on whether lost sales matter or don't matter in this scenario, but I hope we can both agree that the stolen server space was definitely an issue.
The Gamasutra article where money was spent on making piracy harder doesn't give any metrics for a meaningful conclusion to be drawn.
Did Spyro 2 being cracked in a week actually harm sales at all? Difficult to quantify. How about the profit from the next Spyro? Was it more or less profitable? If it was less profitable - was that a result of spending money on piracy protection? If it was more profitable - was that a result of adding piracy protection or because the Spyro series had surged in popularity after the success of Spyro 2?
The answer is difficult to quantify, especially without relevant metrics given. What was the cost of adding the piracy protection? Can you quantify "popularity growth" between the two games? Can they estimate how many people would have bought the game if they could not pirate it?
If I may go into a slightly related tangent for game devs.
Some game devs spend a lot of time and money trying to prevent people from modding their games. Some game devs make it easier to mod their games or even encourage it.
If a mod gets popular and gets a community growing around the game - is it doing good or is it doing harm? Assuming that a large amount of the community growth is from people pirating the game to play the modded version (and assuming none of the above server issues)
There are 2 sides with difficult-to-measure metrics.
1) Is the mod and the pirates playing it bringing enough attention to the game and free publicity/advertisement as to onboard new paying customers?
2) Is the time and money spent on preventing such a mod community from growing going to cost more than potential "lost sales" of pirated copies of the game? In addition, what is a "lost sale" and how are they measured?
To expand upon the issue of "lost sales" a bit:
Plenty of pirates argue that if they could not pirate a game - they would not purchase it either. I fall into this crowd. Outside of the stupid amount of money I've spent on League of Legends, I've only spent money on games I originally pirated. I purchased the game, purchased DLC, or purchased merchandise related to the game. If I could not pirate the game - I would not bother playing it, telling my friends to buy it, or buying merchandise from it (since I wouldn't know I liked it!)
By allowing people like me to pirate you actually win an otherwise lost sale. This is what makes these metrics so hard to quantify. Too many game studios consider all piracy to be a lost sale when people like me are the exact opposite. Without piracy we would have been a lost sale.
So it comes down to "which game studio/game dev do you want to take their word for?" Many of them attribute their success to piracy of their games. Some of them say piracy killed their game.
Without quantifiable metrics... how do we know the "killed games" didn't die simply because they were bad games that, piracy aside, nobody wanted to purchase?
From a business perspective, that's the far more likely scenario than the good games that the game devs claimed piracy helped selling well regardless of piracy because ???
TL;DR
My argument is that piracy doesn't kill bad games due to lost sales. They don't get any sales because their game is bad and few people are willing to pay for it. On the contrary, popular pirated games still do amazingly well because they are good games that people are willing to pay for even with the availability of pirating. To myself, makes more sense from an economic perspective for gaming media.
Anything else assumes that because content exists, people have the right to consume it -- for free if they can work out how.
Let's be clear: I fully agree that Hollywood needs to catch up, and make content accessible in the way that Popcorn time has. But I don't have the right to consume content illegally, just because I find their business model inconvenient.