With torrents, I'm able to find a vast selection of movies and shows that really aren't available anywhere else. Obscure cult classics, pre-Code movies, and so on. This really seems to be a power play by Hollywood executives that is more based in making profit for them than supporting creative artists.
Edit: it's interesting to see this get downvoted. I'm curious what peoples reasonings for downvoting it is.
So people turn to alternative methods. Not because they can't afford it, but because it's often the only way that they can even access it.
On the disc it said I'm not allowed to copy it or RIP it however they put a lot of effort into revoking any decryption key in the wild a free and open source player may use to play the content.
After about 6+ hours of trying to get the BD+ virtual machine to work on VLC i gave up and just torrent-ed the damn thing.
I own the discs and I could probably RIP them but it's so much easier to just torrent it.
DRM is a complete waste of time and the only reason they still insist on having it is so the can control where the content gets played and prevent free solutions from being able to play it.
They get to charge you for the content and the company making the players for the right to play Blu-Ray discs the cost ultimately being passed on to you again.
My other random perspective on torrenting/piracy is this: the industry will often use the price of the digital good * number of downloads as the figure for the loss of profits. However, this gives them way too much credit. They don't have the magic oracle or the distribution system to price each sale individually so as to extract the maximum amount of money from every buyer (Alice thinks the movie is worth $6.82 while Bob thinks it's worth $9.13). I argue that if there is a million downloads of a movie off a torrent site, that does not mean a million lost sales. I imagine it's closer to 0 than 1m. Basically, if most of the people downloading the movie couldn't get it for free, they simply wouldn't pick that particular movie.
1) Nobody cares about you, the customer. You are a number. You are one in millions. Nobody cares whether you can get the entertainment you want. The entertainment you want is going to be held hostage, and people as a whole will demonstrably pay the ransom. If you're in charge, there's no problem in sight.
2) Your job and bonuses are tied to keeping numbers high. The industry isn't in a catastrophic tailspin (yet), so the safe thing to do if you want to keep your job is to keep doing what worked before, which is hold tight to content and punish those who "steal" it. Business as usual, and it seems to be working.
3) The law around this is extremely complicated. You need a team of lawyers to navigate the minefield of licensing, and nobody wants to do anything too risky (see point #2). The wrong licensing deal can quickly ruin your multibillion dollar enterprise. Even if you wanted to create an awesome product like the one you propose, it would be a herculean effort to get everyone together for it. Not worth the risk, not worth the effort.
The solution seems simple until you look behind the curtains.
Gabe Newell
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/114391-Valves-Gabe...
However, the MPAA doesn't want my money. I'm not going to go buy a DVD player and go down to the store to rent a DVD with unskippable piracy warnings and only be able to watch it on the TV every time I half-fancy a movie. It's not even the price, it's just that the hassle isn't worth it. Therefore, the MPAA can suck it.
I feel completely morally justified in downloading a movie when the creator/distributor won't make it available to me, in the same way I think it's fine if someone from a country that doesn't support a payment system I use pirates my software.
There's effectively two models:
* The Netflix model, where a large group of people effectively pool a small amount of money each month and buy a big batch of content. You end up paying for some things you don't care about, but you also probably get some stuff you do want for cheaper than you could get it by yourself.
* The iTunes model, where each person decides what content they want and pays for it directly. There are no bulk-discounts, so individual content pieces are more expensive.
Your argument seems to be that you want the unlimited content selection of the iTunes model, but you want to pay for it like the Netflix model.
Which is fine in the "I want a pony" sense, but seems to ignore economic reality.
This, a million times.
I have Amazon Prime, a NetFlix subscription and an AppleTV.
I'd have happily paid $5-$10 to watch 'Interstellar'. But none of these services offers it in my country. On BitTorrent it was just one click away, so I watched the BitTorrent version.
It goes like this for almost all new movies. I really don't understand why they don't want my money.
May be me, you and some others have the benefit of doubt that we will be good Samaritans, we won't resort to piracy unless the payable content is not available.
That really doesn't absolve tons of other people who abuse free content through piracy while having alternatives.
You'll need to provide evidence that downloading actually leads to lower profits before anyone can tackle that question.
The hypothesis that "People who download content buy less because they're getting TV shows for free. If they couldn't download they'd buy instead." might sound fine, there are some problems with it.
* People might be spending 100% of their entertainment budget on TV shows already, so they couldn't buy any more if they stopped downloading. Stopping those downloads would lead to zero additional profit.
* People might be downloading everything regardless of what it is, including a hell of a lot of things they'd never buy (hoarding mentality). Stopping those downloads would lead to zero additional profit.
* People who download might be fanatical about the TV show, downloading shows to watch as early as possible. Stopping those downloads would lead have a negative impact on profit because those are the people who do the grass-roots evangelism that drives hype.
* People download because they believe the content has zero value. Without downloads they'd just watch something else. Stopping those downloads would lead to zero additional profit.
The question of whether downloading actually harms industry or not had not been answered.
Profits seem to be much more strongly connected with quality/popularity rather than the rate of piracy.
For example, I'm 26 years old (so one of the younger generations), and I think it's absolutely immoral that copyright terms prevent me from using art that was produced more than 50 years ago. I strongly oppose any copyright term longer than 28 years; and I'm only open to one longer than 14 years if a strong economic (statistical) case for it can be made.
In my experience, adults generally don't steal things, even if no one is going to catch them and even if they really want it. And consequently most people grow out of piracy. Not everyone of course, but enough for me to believe there's still a future in selling IP.
If you could pay a fee and get whatever show/movie you wanted, whenever you wanted, without region restrictions, and in the original language, I think we would see a drastic reduction of piracy. Some people will download pirated movies just because, of course, but I think we would see a drastic reduction of piracy if paid content was just more convenient.
In other word, distributors need to shape up. Of course, it's easier to blame consumers and try to enforce stricter DRM instead of improving the quality of service...
My company has a pretty impressive black "market" for US/UK TV Shows, Movies and selected software. We also have a party-disc where everybody can upload their mp3 collections. Especially TV Shows are a run pretty much everywhere. My girlfriend shares Shows with her yoga group. They just switch USB sticks.
We grew out of Game sharing and porn. But who downloads porn illegally these days anyway...
I bet Kickass is back up before the next one goes down, seems a bit more like Road Runner and Wile E Coyote.
HINT: drugs won.
Also pirated products are genuinely better - games can be modded, no activation. Tv shows are simultaneously released and so on ...
Of course we have some attempts at cloudwashing software, but I doubt they will be successful. The benefits of cloud are tiny compared to the freedom of having code run on hardware you control.
The question is: is that a bad thing? Because in that case, a download does not equal a loss of sale.
So how will this play out? The companies will figure out, sooner or later, that if they provide a reasonable service then people will pay for it. Until then, TPB / bittorrent will remain the only source for a rather large group of people.
Devil's advocate: so? Why should anyone have to provide you with the entertainment that you want? Why shouldn't they be able to exercise their right to sell their product to whoever they want - and leave out whoever they don't want? What possible justification could there be for that level of entitlement? What moral justification could there be for saying: sell me your product, or I will take it? How far does this go with IP? If a web designer refuses to sell me their design, am I free to take it? At least with tools like Photoshop, you can claim you "need" it to do work and make a living. Nobody needs a TV show.
I pirate TV. Some of the shows I could (and do; I also have Netflix) get legally and some I couldn't, but the fact of the matter is nobody "owes" me their TV show and I could just not watch it. And I would just stop watching, if the cost of all the TV shows I wanted to watch ever exceeded $10/month and piracy was too difficult/risky. I'm not kidding myself, the reason I pirate is because it's both cheap and convenient.
Honestly I'd probably be better off not watching TV anyway. :)
I'm probably going to get down voted for this but when your excuse for piracy is you can't watch some TV shows your excuse is weak. Not being able to see those shows is going to have very little impact on your life. Certainly not enough of an impact to justify theft or copying without permission. TV shows are not a 'tool you need'.
I'm fortunately in a country where most stuff is available. There is still a lot that is not though and occasionally I may turn to piracy (until it is available at which stage I buy it). I don't try to justify this though as it is a poor justification for piracy.
/s
Well that is sort of true. But that makes it harder to keep up with if you aren't tech savy / into the pirate scene.
The media companies just don't another Napster situation where everyone and their mom knew how to get all the songs they wanted.
If we look at morals...
I always enjoyed the story in the bible where Jesus broke several loaves bread and a few fish and shared it with a massive crowd. No one cared about the poor fishermen or farmers. Why then is it morally objectionable to share software in the same manner?
In other words, unless people fine it morally reprehensible we will always have something like this going on.
There will never be a parable that makes people care about piracy.
http://www.opennicproject.org/
EDIT Anyone that thinks the U.S. Government didn't pressure the various governments involved to do the actual takedowns is naive.
Then yesterday I used kickass torrents to download Mac OS Mavericks, because Yosemite is a piece of shit but Apple doesn't make Mavericks available any more, and torrenting was the only way to downgrade my OS.
https://www.modern.ie/en-us/virtualization-tools
The VMs you get from there "self destruct" after a month or so but thats good enough for most testing purposes.
It's excessively dumb that Apple makes it this hard, but it can be done.
They usually redirect all their old domain names to the current one, so they would need to change that, it didn't happen by itself.
The people whose salaries are generated by not admitting their jobs are pointless?
