BitTorrent Has More Users Than Netflix and Hulu Combined--and Doubled
fastcompany.com
fastcompany.com
I fail to see how this is a meaningful statistic in any way. How many "users" does FTP have versus Netflix?
If you want to download it because that is the format/medium you prefer then download it (from bit torrent or whatever) and then afterwards go and pay for it by buying the DVD even if you never watch it.
(If you are going to pirate and claim it's ethical, you need a more reasoned argument for it's validity)
(Perhaps technically a grey area yes, but you are saying you are willing to pay, so why not pay?)
Perhaps even better would be to download it, and then send a letter + payment to the studio and explain that you wanted to pay for their excellent film but also wanted to download it for convenience. If enough people did this it might encourage them to provide the service you want.
For example, last week I wanted to watch the latest Season of Dexter which had just finished, I'd have had no problem paying for it but I couldn't, it's not available, so I pirated it.
As you seem to be willing to pay, why not pay? Just post a cheque to the publisher, or by the DVD later when it comes out.
I'm guessing the answer is convenience. I suppose that makes sense.
I doubt it. It's clear that the only thing the studios respond to is their bottom line. There is simply no way Netflix streaming, Spotify, etc would exist if it weren't for piracy. We'd still be buying high-margin CDs and DVDs.
Saying "Your product wasn't available in the format that I wanted, so I torrented it and gave you this money to compensate you" is hardly going to convince them to change their ways. They might sue you though: there's lots of money in that.
I occasionally torrent movies and TV shows, but I have a Blockbuster account and I always check them out once they're legally available months later and return them unwatched, since I've already seen them. That way I figure the content producers still get a paper trail of paid demand or ratings or something.
If they were available on demand, DRM-free NOW so that I could watch them when and where I want, I would happily just pay for them and not go through all this bullshit.
Also, at what point did he claim that it was ethical?
This is a silly comparison in the first place, BitTorrent isn't just used for television shows/mainstream movies. Of course it's going to have more users...
Sharing content hardly involves ethics. It's more about economy.
EDIT:
What I meant is, it's not ethically wrong per se; it's only considered bad because it's bad for the economy in the long run.
I wanted to make a point. Defending that point would take essays, which I'm not in the mood to write right now.
Refer to RMS's essays:
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/misinterpreting-copyright.html
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/reevaluating-copyright.html
The only 'questionable' act involved in sharing is violating copyright. I don't think of that as a crime or even as an ethically questionable act.
Not really. It's ethically wrong because the creators and distributors of the content want to charge money for it and by pirating you're refusing to pay for it. If they wanted you to dance for it, or send a photo of you wearing a hat, it would still be ethically wrong to pirate it and there'd be no effect on the economy.
/sarcasm
To take your example to an extreme, is it unethical to trespass on someone's property? Is it unethical to look at someone's property from the street? Our concept of ownership would suggest that the former is unethical, the latter is not, but is that just because we have artificial ideas of ownership?
My ethical system includes IP ownership. I think it is unethical to use GPL code without releasing the source, for example.
James Madison, who wrote most of the Constitution, and Thomas Jefferson, who wrote most of the Declaration of Independence (and who were both later elected to the office of President), thought that IP had no basis in reality. http://classicliberal.tripod.com/madison/detached4.html and http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/a1_8_8s12....
You have poorly defined what "ethical" means. So far the only clarification you have made is that legal and ethical are too different things. Some people disagree and define "ethical" as "law-abiding" which means that copyright infringement is unethical.
To be clear, I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm just saying that there is a degree of relativism to your statement. Just because you don't think that copyright infringement is unethical doesn't mean that people who do are wrong.
I'm not really a proponent of moral-relativism but ultimately I have to accepted that ethics are a human construct and as such disagreement will arise over its precise definition. For example, I think eating meat is unethical but most people don't. Does that make me wrong?
Not per se, but:
It's unethical to invade other people's privacy.
If you had a telescope with a special vision ray that could see behind walls, it would be unethical to use it to see inside people's homes and bedrooms.
/sarcasm
Bittorrent Inc. wasn't trying to make any of those points though, they were just trying to say hey look at how huge our reach is! Except that reach will be considerably diminished as soon as you're taking money (or charging it) to promote some content to your users.
Personally, I think P2P is a non-issue in the future of content delivery. Bandwidth is cheap and getting cheaper and torrents provide a significantly lower performance and less reliable channel than hosted servers. I am loathe to use torrents even to pirate content, I'll be damned if I want to pay for it and let you abuse my outbound too.
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/networking/the-internet-belongs-to...
Is Bittorrent perhaps including in its statistics all the programs that use their protocol to distribute software updates? IIRC, both Steam and World of Warcraft use Bittorrent behind the scenes.
Netflix likely has a large chunk of US users. And likely streams a larger portion of the content in HD.
Wow, a service available world wide, is twice the size of two that are US-only, one of which is not free.
Big surprise.
Unfortunately that's not possible. Most of the content isn't available and if it is, it's usually only available in a crappy german translation.
These artificial barriers should probably be factored in before doing such calculations.
I'm talking about the home video offerings (DVDs, Apple's iTunes store) which often only provide the dubbed versions.
Same goes for games by the way, but there, thankfully, there's Steam which actually allows me to play the games in the original language.
If I paid 20$ for every episode or movie or show I've ever watched, I'd be in a huge financial crisis -- I would not gladly put myself in that position.
I'm not the kind of person who spends all his time watching TV shows, but if I was, I probably wouldn't mind paying that much for it.
But that would be out of convenience, not out of a moral obligation.
I've paid for some steam games, but I still download games from bittorrent (even games that are available on steam).
I've paid for some games because I wanted to support the developers, and I'm not just talking about indie games here. I paid for Valve games (HL2 series) because I felt they deserve it. I felt like they were nice guys.
That said, I wouldn't mind paying $10-20 per month so that I don't have to both with downloading and tracking what I have and haven't seen. Also, the majority of the people that I know that use BT for movies/shows would pay that.
Someday, the content providers will understand this and focus on providing a better, cheaper service to their customers.
It could work on my iPad while I'm on the way to, or in the mountains.
It could work when my connectivity sucks / is saturated.
It could have the things I want when I'm ready for them.
Most people don't know what bittorrent is, and even if they know, they wouldn't know how to use it. And even if they knew that, they couldn't tell legit content from viruses.
It sounds very zen, but it's Steve Jobs' opinion:
> "We're going to fight illegal downloading by competing with it," said Jobs. "We're not going to sue it. We're not going to ignore it. We're going to compete with it."