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While obviously, that doesn't excuse piracy, it definitely plays havoc with the marketplace.

What's there to excuse in piracy? Piracy isn't theft: theft implies somebody being deprived of a copy¹. Piracy is making a copy against someone's wishes. Often greedy wishes.

This is especially true when downloading content that has been released overseas but not in your country. The production company can't possibly lose any money because they haven't released it yet in your country: you possibly couldn't buy it and shove those shiny euros down their throats if you wanted to.

There might be laws in effect that kind of try to incriminate and impose penalties for pirating but a law doesn't equal ethics.

The copyright proponents want copying a movie to be illegal because it might constitute a lost sale to someone who might try to sell that movie in the future. However, if everything worked the way they propose, nobody could ever do anything legally because it just might constitute a lost sale for someone else who might try to sell the same thing in the future.

¹) It has also been established recently that depriving of a potential sale doesn't have a correlation in reality: in one particular case the potential lost sales were estimated to be more than there's money on the planet...

The intellectual contortions used to justify piracy continue to amuse. Unbelievable that this gibberish is at 10 points.

That's not really a contortion. yason just does not agree that the copyright laws are a good idea. And since those laws are man-made, he has every right to disagree with them.

All laws are human made.

For me, yes. But I did not want to get involved in religious arguments.

Actually I thought that yason provided a well reasoned argument (hence the upvotes). Your comment, on the other hand, is nothing but an empty statement of disagreement.

"Piracy isn't theft" is not an argument for or against piracy. No one is arguing that piracy is problematic because and only because it is theft.

Piracy is problematic because it is parasitic. Pirates derive value from a system to which they contribute nothing.

Lost sales are not the point. Lost compensation for distribution is the point. Piracy is not a lost sale, it's a forced sale at the forced price of $0.00.

The point about piracy not being theft deals only with the marginal cost of copies, which is entirely irrelevant to the discussion. Somehow or another, artists expect to be paid for what they do by those who derive value from their art, whether that payment is based on distribution (like the music industry) or prepayment (like Kickstarter).

If it's right for artists to expect, even demand, payment for the value they provide, then piracy is wrong.

If it's alright to extract value from people's work without compensating them as long as they aren't directly impacted, piracy is OK.

That is the debate in a nutshell.

> If it's right for artists to expect, even demand, payment for the value they provide, then piracy is wrong.

> If it's alright to extract value from people's work without compensating them as long as they aren't directly impacted, piracy is OK.

I think this is a good place from which to look at piracy, but you should also consider the Kafkas, van Goghs, and Dickinsons.

Gee, is the nutshell really so small that it can only include your perspective of the debate, rather than the other side's views, or those of moderates?

In fact, the piracy is theft misrepresentation is a core maxim of the pro-industrial stance on copyright enforcement. it is precisely because people view it as dishonest deprivation (theft) that people have a problem with nonmarket, unlicensed sharing of cultural elements.

Yet such positions are rarely precisely defined (and this is true of the other side as well, mind you) - if we accept lost sales as a valid consideration, where does one stop? A slow browser in a newsagent's shop is chased out, and puts down a potential purchase. or isn't chased out, and enjoys - but doesn't pay for - several articles. An influential reviewer, having a bad day, communicates his distaste for a work without tempering his words; at a stroke, ten thousand potential sales are 'lost', the artist is deprived ten thousand times over. Copyright on a work expires (75 years after the death of the artist) - the artist is (sort of?) deprived (or rather, his estate is, or he was, back in the day). People are being deprived of something totally artificial which was granted to them and them unwaveringly, thanks to the Disney lobby, enhanced. Copyright reform has always gone in one direction and it remains illegal to format shift your own belongings in the UK. The debate in a nutshell includes people who'd like to see things swing back in the other direction, without necessarily eradicating copyright, simply because each extension of copyright (a state-granted monopoly right over what you can communicate and reproduce for the benefit of others) grants benefits to the rightsholders at the sacrifice of the commons, and of my rights to use my property (CD burners, CDs, books, etc) freely.

You've explained exactly why I don't consider "lost sales" a valid argument.

In any event, the debate about copyright is indeed much larger than the debate about piracy. I was restricting my thoughts to piracy (and really piracy for the purpose of obtaining new media, not for doing things with paid-for media that you should be allowed to do) and whether or not it is justified. I should have made that more clear.

If you feel I am still missing something, considering my narrow focus, please let me know. It was not my intention to exclude any reasonable perspectives or bias my post to my own views.

This is definitely the case here in Australia.

Apparently Australia has one of the highest TV piracy rates in the world due to the fact that TV networks here would wait a very long time (6 months or even more) between a show airing in the US and when they would show it here. Its slowly getting better here in that networks are doing "fast-tracked" shows that air a couple of days after the initial airing in the US, but this still only tends to happen for shows that are new and anticipated, and doesnt happen for older shows. I honestly cant understand the slowness, but there must be some reason.

Yeah, Australia is actually where the friend of mine I mentioned is at. It's good to hear some of the times are improving, maybe the companies are finally catching on that the delays just drive people to download...

I think traditionally, the delays are due to contracts with local providers. So for example, a local Australian television station might negotiate for the rights to say, the tv show House, but they get a cheaper rate by waiting 6 months or more likely, Fox doesn't even give them the option of showing it sooner...

Why would it be in Fox's interest to offer it for cheaper if it's shown six months late?

The idea is you charge a high price for other channels to show it immediately, but drop the price later on so that you can still get some revenue from channels that can't afford the initial price.

That's why NetFlix was greeted with open arms by the TV networks at first - because they could make money from their shows that are sitting in their library that they weren't selling on DVD and syndicators weren't interested in. Now that NetFlix is as huge aas it is the networks are getting greedy and want to grab the whole cookie back again thinking consumers will pay first-run rates for third-run content.

The case is similar in Canada. I think this recent article by Jesse Brown reflects the reality for a lot of broadband-connected Canadians with similar viewing habits to broadband-connected Americans: http://www.torontolife.com/daily/informer/from-print-edition...

Wow the comments on that article feels like being in a separate universe were everyone seems to find a crappy analogy that doesn't make any sense.

That's the case for almost all countries outside the United States.

Heck, where I live iTunes doesn't have a single movie, tv episode or video on offer. It's easy to loose to piracy when you don't even try...

wow, where do you live, if you don't mind me asking :)

It's so in Latvia and I'm pretty sure in several other small European Union countries as well. For iTunes there's at least an unofficial way to get an US iTunes account, but it's not simple and convenient enough for an average user.

Denmark.

But the jokes is that there isn't (last time I checked) even any Danish produced stuff, even though some of it has received Emmy awards and has been sold to e.g. the BBC (with subtitles not less) where it is crazy popular.

Lots of other stuff from stream for free from the Danish Radio and Television homepage, but not even that was available.

Indeed. Friends of mine report downloading and watching dvdrips of movies that still have to arrive to the cinemas here in brazil. Sometimes the distribution channels go crazy for some odd reason, and you find things like sunshine cleaning (from 2008) premiering in brazil in 2011.

I know Fox has a big habit of using the European (specifically the UK) market as a test ground for products.

Futurama, Simpsons, Family Guy, American Dad, Firefly; I bought them all on release. If they'd have come out 6 months late, rather than (usually) a few months early, then I'd have likely pirated them as I wouldn't have waited that long for DVD quality as the UK was atrocious at that time for decent reruns and no DVRs.

One of the old ideas of globalization was that it makes things cheaper for the US and Europe by doing jobs that we see as "beneath us" economically. Its also a way to skirt laws and minimum requirements of safety by repositioning that 'dangerous' manufacturing in India or Bangladesh.

Now, these companies have been doing this stuff for quite a while now. The people in the US would grumble about children workers and unsafe conditions. Yet those very goods would still be bought. This was the whole idea behind globalization: make more money by exploiting the difference of economy of foreign nations. (Note)

Yet, when the masses finally have access to what the large corporations have had for quite some time, they throw a fit. This battle now is only over music and videos. Just you wait and see the world war of a battle over devices like RepRap.

(Note) After thinking of this, I have a great analogy: Globalisation is a Stirling engine for economics.