If I am not living in the US and want to watch a hulu series I have zero choice but to pirate it or use a shady vpn.
But a lot of pirates like to complain they cannot purchase it according to their specific demands.
People used to complain that they had to buy cable to watch game of thrones. They wanted a solo steaming service. Go look at old reddit posts, pirates would proclaim that they would subscribe to that instead of pirate.
HBO made exactly that. And now the complaint is that it costs too much. Or they don’t want to pay for Barry or Veep episodes they don’t want. But they’ll stop pirating if they could just buy GoT!
I think the vast majority of piracy is just because they can get it for free.
Additionally, if the content is just not available in your country yet, then at best, you would be morally/ethically justified in pirating now and then paying later when it’s allowed.
I've hoisted the black flag plenty of times in the past, but let's not pretend it's anything other than theft.
In Australia it can become criminal if the violation was of a commercial nature.
You're saying this is the moral and legal option, but the copyright holders lobbied hard to make this illegal. That's why there are no stores in my country offering imported DVDs for sale. It's illegal to import these if you're a business. I have to go to a foreign company and import the disc strictly for personal use.
So, I get a DVD / BluRay from a different region. How do I play this? The shop where I bought the player is forbidden, by law, from telling me how to convert my player into a multi-region player.
People aren't saying "I want this for free". They're saying "allow me to pay for it". They're also saying "the easier it is to pay for something the more people will pay for it".
participating in culture is required by many, esp. the young. If they can't easily get it via a legitimate means, piracy is the default.
Not watching it is not an option.
If you create a culturally relevant work then prohibit people from legally participating, you probably deserve disparagement and the forfeiture of your rights.
Unless everyone pirates it.
In the past, when localized media is the only option, locking out regions from purchases wouldn't have been an issue (since nobody would've known about it).
But now the internet exists, and information being global means that literary media must also be global. To be denied an opportunity to participate in its consumption is to deny the right to participate in cultural exchange and communication. I think that's wrong, and therefore, this justifies piracy for those individuals who would otherwise be denied due to cost/availablity reasons.
i m sure the complaints exist. I m also sure that english works is more popular than non-english works (due to english simply being the international language). My view isn't anglo-centric at all - you can make the same argument about anime.
I watch anime on crunchyroll, but i used to use torrents. The illegal method is the only option as a high-schooler who cannot afford the prices required to get a DVD set. I m glad that crunchyroll has worked to a legal means for this media.
The argument here is that streaming companies (esp. disney) is attempting to restrict their works, which has significant cultural impact, by making _their_ streaming service the only way to consume this work. This mechanism makes the price of the media higher, and people would need to pay multiple services to get the full coverage of all media they need to consume.
This is be being unable to buy the show in Russian, in the united states. Region locking doesn't just prohibit US content from being played elsewhere, it prevents Americans from seeing a lot of amazing things produced around the world just as readily.
There is a big difference between failing to facilitate (not making a translation) and actively preventing participation. Your import example to avoid piracy is not a great example because they DRM and or geolock those physical copies as well to prevent exactly what your solution is. The only legal recourse to access that media would be to travel to the country of origin and consume it "on site."
Or maybe it is? Different people have different views on what counts as rights and I've yet to hear of a case of God clarifying which group of people is right. Some people believe it is their God given right to keep others from modifying their own equipment in certain patterns by sharing information. Others disagree.
Consider libraries. If I built a file sharing system that allowed only one person to watch the movie at a time, but allowed as many people as wanted to watch it if they were willing to wait their turn, how is this any different than what a library does? Yet that would also be considered a form of piracy. Is running a library not a God given right.
'Copyright infringement'? 'Piracy' is a bit of a loaded term.
Given that importing is often intentionally blocked by region-locking, it’s a straight choice between “don’t get it” and piracy.
If some corporation isn't selling the rights to view a file in your country, and it's a pain to get them the 'legal way', I think a lot of people would look at the situation and think-
"well, nobody's going to prosecute me for this. Even if I think piracy is immoral in general, this entity has made it a pain for me to get their product without pirating- they obviously aren't counting on my money. They've waived their moral right to complain about me not paying to look at their tv show- and in the lack of enforcement of the law, that moral right is all that matters to me. I'll just pirate it. If they don't want my money, they won't get it."
If the content holder is not making their content available in a reasonable way, they should have no such protections.
People used to say exactly that about music, and then Spotify came around - along with multiple DRM-free download stores. Now these things are very much seen as "God-given rights" by many.
Yes, video is especially complicated because of how costly it is to create in the first place - this is why the closest thing to a plausible solution is going to come in the form of disruption from below. Some sort of "Netflix 2.0", focusing on a somewhat more heavily-curated experience than YT does today, and skimping on challenging technical details - maybe not even providing full-HD content of any sort! Vimeo could easily enter that space.
It's also not media producers god given right to gouge customers and have the government enforce a monopoly on their products, or to even exist. Ideally we can reach a compromise that suits everyone, but at the moment it's media companies that are over reaching, they'll even happily gimp their own products so that pirated versions are better.
There are people who pay for HBOgo, do so through some forwarder which makes their credit card appear to come from a US bank, and then have to find a VPN service to actually watch it with.
Multiple steps in this transaction - completely unncessarily due to the nature of the underlying technologies - cost the consumer money, to circumvent protections implemented by HBO (or more likely whatever BS contract their parent company signed), for the express purpose of preventing the consumer paying HBO to lawfully watch their content.
No loss has occur.
We’re willing to pay.
Following the letter of the law isn't always the right thing to do.
I mean piracy is not that big a crime especially if there's no legal alternative (and the legal / convenient alternatives to piracy have been the biggest deterrent), but if you replace "media" with idk, "consumer electronics" it becomes a different matter. I know, physical goods vs virtual ones is a big difference, but is it, from a legal standpoint?
[Thing] isn't for sale in their area, they want [thing], therefore they're justified in stealing [thing] rather than just not having it.
Is entitlement not involved in that reasoning? What is the motivation for illegally obtaining something if not feeling that you deserve to have it? The owners of the content and the distributors are wrong?
Physical theft is always criminal.
You also have the choice to not watch it until it becomes available in your country
If someone is forced to wait another week, or in the case of films, another few months, the movie could very well be spoiled by reading some online discussion. Fan-based communities move very fast. While they do try to censor spoilers immediately after a new release, the censoring dwindles down rather quickly.
By the time a new film is available in your region, you may have already stumbled across some very severe spoilers which would inhibit your experience.
The better solution, IMO, is to make content available globally at the same time - eliminate regional distribution for online content.
We could ask people to behave per our moral expectations just because they should, but generally you'll find most people who make such a request themselves disregard morals when the cost benefit analysis approaches a similar analysis.
Stop being friends with such people.
But publishers, studios, whatever you want to call them, don't get tired to tell us that users are not willing to pay for the content etc., but that's simply not true.
Most often it's about the hurdles to access the content. Be it scattering over half a dozen platforms, restricted access to specific markets or whatever.
They are the ones creating the problems that people find (more or less legal) solutions for.
I don't steal playstations out of shops, regardless of how fun it could be, because it's illegal and I'm likely to be punished for it, and because I have some moral qualms about it.
Piracy? You're not going to be punished for it, and it's qualitatively different from taking a thing away from someone. With no enforcement, all that stops people from pirating all the time is the comparative inconvenience and moral qualms.
When the entity involved is some big, faceless company, and it's a lot more convenient to pirate than buy (even disregarding the money you'd have to spend to buy!)- you could imagine not having any more moral qualms about piracy.
There isn't a natural right to consume content produced by companies who seem hell bent on making it difficult to access that content.
There's also no natural right for them to prohibit me from consuming, or to gouge me, or to push for horrible legislation with their unfair amount of influence.
No, there's not.