this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2023
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The nice thing about pirates is that they keep the cost of media down. The streaming services we have today wouldn't exist if not for all the rampant piracy of the 90s and 2000s.
ROFL.
Piracy is going to cost streaming media over $100BN over the next few years. It’s great to move goalposts when it makes you feel better about what you do- but…
Sooner or later, someone is going to need them back where they’re supposed to be so they can align better with reality.
Naw, figures like that are bullshit. They assume that everyone pirating something would buy it, which they wouldn't. And besides, that's not what I'm talking about anyway.
When Apple came out with iTunes, a good chunk of the media companies refused to play along because they had a better profit margin with physical media. Napster was a thing by then, but the media companies thought they could beat it into the ground with lawsuits and threats. It didn't work. It was an extremely expensive game of whack-a-mole that generated constant bad press.
Piracy forced them to cooperate with companies like Apple, Pandora, and eventually Netflix to make media accessible and cheap enough that people wouldn't pirate it. The only effective way to fight piracy is make it easier for people to get what they want without having to pirate.
So next time you watch a prime-time-level TV show at 10AM on a Saturday without having to pay $25 or drive down to the local rental store, remember that pirates are the ones that made that possible.
In the future I can see media going the way of Kickstarter.
Season 1 is free, high quality production. Season 2 needs to hit $10-20 million on not-Kickstarter, and if it passes they send you a novelty USB containing seasons 1 & 2 (as well as give it away for "free" on Netflix or a streaming site).
But it's a lot harder to price gouge in under that model. The show Friends made literally billions of dollars, and that's a hard sell for a Kickstarter model.
I dunno, the current system seems to be working. Kickstarter-style funding campaigns do happen for media, but I suspect that form of funding is too unstable for the major content producers to rely on.
That would be much better IMO than copyright as now understood for both artists and society at large.
ROFL…. You’re NOT the good guys in this.
I never claimed pirates were the good guys. The media companies aren't the good guys either, as evidenced by their behavior towards their customers. In this conflict, there are no good guys.
The customers are the ones that benefit, though. That's the point I'm making.
Someone drank the koolaid.
The source for your ridiculous figure is the lobbying arm of an industry notorious for mistreating workers and sacrificing everything including quality of product and basic human decency for the maximising of profits. It also has tons of corrupt influence on politics and media even by the alreeady rotten standards of American legal bribery.
The reality is that every dollar lost to piracy is a hypothetical one as there's far from any guarantee that anyone pirating something would have bought the media rather than pass it over completely if not able to pirate it. In fact, there's a compelling argument to be had that word of mouth as a result of piracy often benefit a show, movie or even game much more than the, again, completely hypothetical, loss of sales hurts.
Besides, the one you're replying to is right: streaming as we know it today started as an effort by studios to maximise profits by making legitimate viewings easier than piracy. They've of course fucked THAT up by now, by acting like a streaming service is the same thing as the TV channels the vast majority of people happily abandoned.
Like in politics, clueless boomer (and forgotten generation) dinosaurs are in charge of a world they no longer understand, to the immense detriment of all the people they're supposed to serve except (some of) the money men.
Agree to disagree.
You can't just agree to disagree with reality. Whether you think that their demonstrably false statements and predatory actions are acceptable is a matter of opinion on which we can agree or disagree, but that they're doing it is indisputable.
I will however accept it as an implicit admission that you have no counter and honor your request to be allowed to be wrong about it in peace, assuming that you don't have any more industry propaganda to regurgitate.
I’m pretty sure you don’t dictate reality kiddo. I’m disagreeing with YOU.
I'm not dictating anything, I'm describing well-documented industrywide actions and refuting known propaganda from bad actors.
That's the beauty of objective reality: it's true whether you agree with it or not.
Lol… k. Apologies for raining on your little pirate parade, but you’re not the good guys. You never were.
There goes the bullshit binary thinking lol. I never claimed that all pirates are invariably right about everything, as that would be preposterous.
That being said, though, the abuse, profiteering, propaganda and gaslighting that has infested the entertainment industry like a cancer is much worse than anything pirates ever did.
K.