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this post was submitted on 16 Aug 2024
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Why are you generally pretty anti-piracy?
As someone who has never had much disposable income, piracy has helped me and countless folks enjoy things we otherwise would not have been able to realistically afford. It also helps make educational material far more accessible, particularly when it comes to textbooks, academic papers (i.e. SciHub thanks to Alexandra Elbakyan), even complete semester university-level lectures.
If wages were higher and media was offered in a format that was a) not subscription based and b) reasonably priced, people would be more likely to buy content instead of pirate it.
Beyond that, people are sick and tired of things like their favorite TV show or my music disappearing because the streaming site lost the streaming rights to a competitor. Or an artist's discography missing a huge chunk of their music because of some record label legal nonsense.
The problem is that everything is becoming subscription based these days and it's weird to require that kind of committment if you just want to listen to one artist's album, or a few episodes of a nature documentary.
Personally, I pirate terabytes of content and I try to buy used Blu-Ray 📀 discs and CDs every now and then. I have a nice external disc readers/writer connected to my PC and an elaborate multi-output audio setup, but most people don't have a disc reader these days. So the problem is instead of just giving people the option of purchasing an actual file like an MKV, FLAC + MP3 files, these companies insist on forcing a subscription as the only feasible option since they know 99% of people don't have or want to deal with disc readers and physical media.
I get that your comment was less about anti-piracy and I'm kind of going on a rant here, but I really hope my comment helps you better understand at least some of the reasons why people pirate stuff. Even when I did research science, we'd all use SciHub because it was a million times easier to just go on there and search for one or several papers, instead of having to use our login credentials to get into several different databases for multiple papers in different fields. So so so annoying!
I think with piracy, there are many measurable and immeasurable benefits felt by society because of piracy.
I'm not the original person in the thread, but I'm pretty anti-piracy. However, the bulk of my media spending is on musicians (with direct buying from an artist being my primary means of purchase).
With that said, I absolutely understand why so many people pirate movies/tv. Streaming for those is an absolute shit show.
The thing that kills me is there is no way to buy movies/tv shows without DRM. I don't want my content locked to some service that can dissappear at any point.
Music, Games, books/comics, all have DRM free options (although games are more miss than hit in that regard).
Yeah, definitely a place where society is lacking.
I agree with (and experience) the problems surrounding access to media that you described, but I would also describe myself as pretty anti-piracy. You can be anti-middleman and anti-rent-seeking without being pro-piracy. While piracy circumvents the problems you mentioned, the question it leaves unanswered is how the creator of the pirated media will afford basic necessities like food and shelter. Alternatives to streaming are scarce, but they do exist-- especially DRM-free music and books. These are not static systems. The market will follow the money, so if folks buy into the false dichotomy of stream vs pirate, industry will continue to invest in DRM and anti-piracy measures and creators will continue to submit to streaming services / media silos. I'd prefer a system with as few layers as possible between creator and consumer. Piracy only offers a solution for the latter.
Under the current capitalist system, they don't. Scientists often have to pay the publisher to have their work published, often receiving nothing in return. Services like spotify pay next to nothing to creators that aren't already at the top.
There will be no solution to this problem until the underling source (capitalism) is dealt with. Piracy is just a stop gap that fucks over the CEOs and shareholders until the problem is dealt with. An before anybody brings up indy games/music/etc bought directly from the creators, that's a different story obviously.
Thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts. My only source of income for more than a decade has been creating media that people stream or watch in theaters, so I must disagree. Under the current capitalist system, people do get paid, but I'm with you that it's exploitative. People commonly burnout and run themselves ragged trying to make ends meet. I know I did.
I'm skeptical that piracy hurts CEOs and shareholders as much as you think it does. Piracy is nothing new-- CEO wages and capitalism doesn't seem to care. Those with power can increase prices on paying customers, decrease employee wages or headcounts, and/or start legally pursue pirates. The latter being least relevant to my point, but with digital steganography, watermarking, intrusive tracking, and corporate-friendly laws (see post)-- it's worth making clear that CEOs and shareholders have plenty of tools already in place to make themselves whole. Heck, pirate from Prime Video and Bezos can increase AWS rates and extract it back from most folks via services they (or their families) do pay for.
Not to say it's hopeless. I'd like to shine a gigantic spotlight on your last sentence:
That's the way forward. Heck, toss it on a jellyfin server and share it with a few close friends and family. The knowledge gap to do that is shrinking. When many folks know someone who knows how to host, they can start pooling their resources.
The false dichotomy of stream vs pirate mentioned in my first reply could be rephrased as: spending money and attention on media giants vs spending just attention on them. Why not spend neither money nor attention on media giants? Save it for individuals and small teams making cool things. That creates a market and draws in more people to make more cool things and does more damage than piracy. Personally, I don't see anything on Disney+ (or prime, netflix, etc) worth prolonging the current state of media, so I don't waste any time on it. I've come across a lot of good books, music, and inexpensive hobbies to fill the void in the meantime.
TL;DR: Current state of media sucks, but pays more than pirates. More pirates not paying is not as effective as retraining money and attention. If a pirate occasionally goes through the extra steps to pay someone instead of finding a torrent link, they're still dedicating significant time engaging with the winners of the current capitalist system instead of seeking out and boosting better, lesser known options. It drags out the current state instead of nurturing existing solutions.
If that's the case, then it sounds like people aren't getting paid. At least not a living, stable wage, which was sort of the implication.
And this may at least be in a very small part be a good thing, because it incentivises creators to switch to direct from creator purchases, which we're both in agreement is preferable.
It still does seem to hurt them though. Because if it didn't in some way hurt them, then they wouldn't give a fuck about piracy.
Sure, the CEOs and execs just pass off potential lost revenue to buying users, but they can only do that to an extent. At a certain point, people are gonna say "fuck it, I don't care to pay $80/month for music, I'll switch to something else".
At a bare minimum, piracy is an ever present threat to their business model, that if they push too hard with prices, everybody is gonna ditch them for piracy. Because at the end of the day nobody has a pathological need for any particular media. And if someone really likes a particular type of media, they'll find some other way to get it without getting price gouged.
I think we're in full agreement of this section here. Fuck the current system.