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>these points make him appear as an avaricious 10 year old who deserves anything he wants.

Pretty much exactly what I was thinking. I give him credit for his honesty, but holy cow man.

Starting off with the car rental analogy was strange. If he wanted to prove his point, he should have said "every time I need a rental car I steal one".

But after starting off with "I called the rental company to voice my displeasure" (paraphrased), he then goes on to describe completely different behavior for online property where he just steals it instead of calling and complaining.

To me this comes off as the ranting of a lunatic who can't see how his own argument fails the sniff test right off the bat.

There is simply no reason to steal this stuff anymore. All the music you want is $10 a month. All the movies are $8 a month. Both are available on just about any device you own. It's not the year 2000 anymore.

All that said, I have no love for how these industries are lobbing to impose more draconian laws to combat a problem that is already illegal. Their IP is protected without new laws. They should work with the tools they have.

> Starting off with the car rental analogy was strange.

The car rental content was speaking to a different issue than his media consumption content. This was his reasoning for speaking publicly about it not his reason for downloading instead of buying. He had a bad experience with a car rental company and rather than just silently taking his business elsewhere he called the company and complained. That action made him realize that instead of just silently downloading content for free he should speak up to content creators as well.

> All the music you want is $10 a month. All the movies are $8 a month.

This isn't exactly true. Some movies are available for $8 a month, with restrictions, staggered releases, device restrictions (hulu), etc. Spotify, Pandora and the like let you have access to music on demand but it's still not available everywhere and they still have limited catalogs. Not nearly as bad as the movie/tv catalogs but still limited.

$18/mo may not give you all music & movies, but it will give you more than 720 hours' worth of material worth watching/hearing.

I don't disagree that for many people these services provide plenty of content worth watching/hearing. I stream in excess of 200 hours of pandora per month. We use Netflix for kids movies/shows quite a bit and my wife gets the few shows she's interested in from Hulu including some older shows. For my in laws they love the Roku I bought them and their ability to get older content. They maintain a DirecTV package because they can't get most of the newer content they are interested in at all. I personally find Hulu and Netflix to be extremely lacking. I'd be more than happy to pay more for a better selection of content but it's simply not available. The amount of worthwhile content being available is entirely dependent on your personal preferences.

I think technical people largely over state the value and amount of content that is available via these services and really that's all I wanted to draw attention to.

> Try doing the same thing with a consulting company. If I get their advice and dislike it, does that mean I don't have to pay them? Better yet, what if I really like what they have to say but I still think it's too expensive? "I'm only going to implement half of what you told us, so we'll only pay you 50% of your fee."

As a consultant, I can't tell you how many times I've heard the, "Hmm, yeah, you did great work. How about I pay you 75% of what we agreed to?" You typically only see it out of folks who have a very myopic view of the world--those that are sure everybody else is out to screw them. I hate getting those clients. It's a sour relationship from start to finish.

I can imagine there are plenty of those types out there, but I was trying to make an analogy of people claiming to pirate because they only like 2 songs off of a 14 track CD. (as in only using 50% of your consulting work, so I'll only pay you 50% of your total)

Well my point is that I think the people that attempt to take the moral high ground on pirating are similar to the folks that do that to consultants. Almost every one of these rants I've read comes off as somebody convinced that there are people in suits smoking cigars that are trying to screw every last one of us.

This is just one point though, taken out of context.

There are many others dealing with restrictive use & ease of use. What if you paid full price for that Porsche, but then all of a sudden, you drive into another country and the engine fails because it was designed to just because you are in another country and some other Porsche dealer owns the exclusive rights to that country?

I take his overall argument to be about consumer rights & ease of use. Yes, content providers don't have to make things easy for us, but we can subvert their system until they realize the mistake they're making. All the legislation in the world isn't going to make piracy go away.

Things like this already happen.

If you own a Nissan GT-R and bring it to Japan, it's capped at a top speed of 111mph. Using GPS, the car knows if you're at a racetrack, and then the speed limiter is bumped (or removed, I forget).

Also, if you "own" a Ferrari FXX you truly have no say over it. You're essentially paying to drive it. Ferrari holds onto the car for you and you can only drive it at approved race tracks.

You present a valid point, but it's covered in the article by this statement:

>This is exactly what the internet did: it took control away from you and gave it to me. If you don't like it, then sit in your basement and create your content for your love of the craft instead of for profit. But if you want to sell it to me, you're doing it my way.

Like it or not, the internet has changed the world (including sales of digital stuff) forever. That is a fact that can not be changed or ignored.

If you are not in content creation (like Porsche), then the stuff you make and sell is not yet affected by the internet, so it doesn't really apply to you (yet).

Let's say that there are many wealthy buyers who can easily afford to buy a Porsche. However, Porsche sets up a dozen dealerships in remote corners of the desert, each separated by miles of dirt road. Each dealership has a couple of models, but does not readily publish what you'll find at each dealership. If you manage to find the dealership carrying the Porsche you want, you have to use Western Union to wire transfer money to the company before you can take possession of the car. Finally, if the dealership you bought the car from goes out of business or loses their contract with Porsche, your car disappears overnight without notice.

I can't afford to buy a Porsche, but I am both willing and able to buy content. However, I often spend 15-20 minutes looking at the various online outlets for a particular movie or television show, credit card in hand, and find that Amazon (or Ebay if it's out of print) is my only option. I know Hulu, Netflix, iTunes, and Amazon Instant would love to sell me that media - it's the content owners who prevent me from giving them money.

So then finish your analogy. If that was the status of the Porsche market, would you then feel justified in stealing one and leaving the money?

This analogy really doesn't work at all. The factory does lose money on factory time and employee wages. The music company doesn't lose that time when a song is pirated. This is the same old argument of copying vs. theft.

What this guy (the OP) is doing is showing the straight economics of the situation, morals removed. It's a realistic viewpoint because for most people, morals go out the window when they cant see the face of who they wrong. And thats even assuming they see file-sharing as "wrong" to begin with.

Like it or not, this guy is accurately describing the current landscape as a whole. This is what content production companies have to deal with.

>The factory does lose money on factory time and employee wages.

Fair enough, but I can just as easily say I refuse to pay for the design of it, however, I will pay for materials and manufacturing costs.

The difference that lets the air out of your analogies is that there's no marginal cost to the producer of a digital good when somebody pirates. Since the pirate provides the bandwidth and storage himself, the creator loses nothing through the pirate's consumption.

I agree that the "why I pirate" guy is an entitled asshole. But he has a valid critique: the people who control content distribution often act like entitled assholes as well. His basic point is that because power has shifted, he can get away with it now and they can't. With a subsidiary point being that he's not a tightwad: he's glad to spend money on digital content as long as they make it easy.

Whatever his (substantial) moral failings, I think his message to content creators is basically accurate: if they want to be in the business of selling content, they're going to have to pay attention to what customers want. That's good advice for anybody starting a business, and especially good advice for people who want to survive a giant upheaval. Their old model is failing; finding a new model requires unlearning much of what they know and starting fresh.

>there's no marginal cost to the producer of a digital good when somebody pirates.

The factory loses nothing either if I'm giving them money for some parts that they happened to buy. I don't feel the time they spent manufacturing these materials is worth anything, just like how this guy thinks the time a movie studio spent editing their films or audio isn't worth anything.

When the movie studio filmed a bunch of scenes, the raw film is useless alone until it was edited. Likewise, the parts are useless until they were machined and assembled together.

Both have overhead in the processes. One may be more than the other, but the underlying principle is the same.

The difference with a factory is that they would have invested labor building the physical car you took.

If you're looking for an analogy to cars, it's that your friend bought a Porsche you liked, so built a copy of it.

Also, your assumption that the guy thinks movie editor time isn't worth something is false. Despite my lack of monetary compensation, I appreciate the time you took to write your post, and the much larger amount of time YCombinator took to build this site.

Right, but in both your examples there is still a physical good.

As your parent noted, digital goods are free to duplicate. If you want your argument to hold, you need to require that the film studios never allow their IP to end up digital.

(and that is quite backwards.)

Ok, then what about a DVD? You could say the same thing of a car vs movie by giving them the $.1 for the DVD itself, not the content on it.

Regardless, it doesn't matter whether it's a physical good or digital. Both physical goods and digital goods require time and money to make. When you buy a Porsche, you're not just buying the materials. You're paying for the engineering of those materials. Just because the format of the final product isn't a physical good in terms of online piracy doesn't mean there was no effort put into it.

I'm not sure I follow you.

A DVD would still be (inefficient) digital distribution. Why would I pay for that either (in the, "Why would I buy that?" sense, not the "Why wouldn't I steal that?" sense)?

The massive trouble I have with your point is that until you have consumed an entertainment product you have no idea whether it's a Porshe or a Skoda. I can't take a movie for a test drive. I can't take an album for a test drive. They'll give me clips which they've picked, but they're picking them to paint the thing in the best possible light. You can't even rely on other people's judgement because taste is taste.

I reached my breaking point after buying albums that were dross with a one or two decent songs. I think it was JJ72 or Bush. And with movies after seeing that James Bond film with the guy with all the diamonds in his face. I paid for that?

So no, I don't really see your point at all. It's actually that he's grown up and said enough is enough, I want to stop buying a Skoda while you're telling me its a Porshe. If I get something for free and it's a Porshe I'll be buying more of your damn fine stuff sir. Maybe I'll get a Skoda but I won't feel ripped off as I already have a Porshe from you sitting over there. I'll just feel disappointed.

If an artist puts out a CD, making a good-faith effort, you haven't been "wronged" if you don't like it, any more than you're "wronged" if you go on a first date and don't click with the person. That's life. You're not guaranteed to be entertained. That guarantee is not possible for anyone to make. Even the movie Titanic was a massive hit, yet is considered a schlock fest by many. You can't please everyone, so it's not really fair to penalize someone for not doing so.

Hell, the song you like today, you may hate next month. The song you hate today, you might love ten years from now when they lyrics are suddenly relevant to your life somehow.

And okay, a CD might suck. But it was probably the best they could muster. Creativity's like that. There's probably not some "fantastic Bush tracks" hiding on a server that they held back for some reason.

It's not like if Porsche intentionally, and deceptively, put a Skoda drivetrain in a Cayenne to increase the profit margin at the customer's expense.

Bollocks. Absolute nonsense. Every movie is the next summer blockbuster. Every band is the hottest thing since X. Just look at the very selectively picked quotes they put on the adverts and the back of the DVD sleeves.

They are intentionally, and deceptively, putting a Skoda drivetrain into a Cayenne.

And then getting pissed off when you try and test-drive it.

"Every band is the hottest thing since X"

Yeah, I don't listen to shite music that gets marketed that way, let alone 'Bush'. Do you actually let movie blurbs guide your viewing? Or buy music because of hype? Really?

Lucky Charms aren't actually magically delicious, either.