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Piracy is simple: when you make your product more convenient than piracy, people use it. Steam is popular for a reason - no crap, enormous game selection.. it’s just better than pirating. Netflix used to be the same - great selection, no ads.. now look: terrible selection and price is too high.
Also maybe it's their job to come up with a business model that everyone doesn't hate. If they'd just syndicate to all streaming platforms, piracy wouldn't be a problem for them.
1000 people on a feature film, you're looking at about $70 million in salary. That's peanuts to you?
> If one out of 100 people donates them some money, they come out ahead.
In other words, you're conceding the point that they would be deprived of something if everyone pirates their work.
It's quite a leap from that to "I personally think that an animator's salary is too high, and I have the right to benefit from the fruit of their labor, therefore it is morally acceptable for me to enjoy this film without paying anyone" or whatever.
If I would pay to watch it then yes, but I'm not going to pay money to a streaming platform only to watch ads.
A significant portion of piracy is opportunistic as far as I’m aware, in that people say “well, since it’s free I’ll grab it”. The opportunity cost is effectively zero.
What I’m getting at is that if you have 100 people who pirate the film, perhaps only 5 of those might have been willing to pay to see it, if only there was a convenient opportunity to do so. No money was lost through the other 95 - their decision was between ‘pirate’ and ‘don’t watch it’.
Of the remaining 5, yes, it’s lost revenue, but that’s because there likely wasn’t a convenient service with no ads at a price where people think they’re getting value. It’s all about convenience at the end of the day - if it’s more convenient to pirate it then your service is going to suffer. You have be more convenient.
The point of my question was to note that, if everyone acts like pirates do, then the people who make the thing make zero dollars, which would hurt them greatly - they will be deprived of something meaningful. So the idea that piracy does not do this at all is false.
Pirates violate the terms that the creators ask in exchange for their work, and get to enjoy content at no cost to them by free-riding off of people who pay, and then try to argue that this is Actually Fine because they weren't going to pay for it anyways.
"I wouldn't pay for it anyways" is an unfalsifiable hypothesis, and it's a bad moral code anyways: the only difference between me doing an Actually Fine thing and an Actually Bad thing is my own personal judgment about whether or not I was going to pay for it.
>if it’s more convenient to pirate it then your service is going to suffer. You have be more convenient.
So you are conceding that the service will suffer if people pirate?
Regardless, that's completely separate from the question of whether or not mild inconveniences give you the right to enjoy non-essential-for-life fruits of the labors of others without compensating them for it.
This was the claim. I said what I said to point out that if everyone acted on this belief for a feature film, there would be a thousand people who ultimately don't get compensated for their work.
You are right: not everyone is able or willing to pirate. Piracy is only able to exist because of these people who pay for art. That's definitely true, and definitely different than the claim that no one is being deprived of anything.
Also, "the pirate was never going to pay" is a far more imaginary thing here; it's an unproven claim (especially since it's often paired with "pirates would pay if it was cheaper/more convenient to access).
Regardless, it strikes me as a particularly arrogant kind of entitlement for you to violate someone's terms to enjoy their thing while telling them you think it's worthless.
I dunno man. If you're gonna benefit from the hard work of others without compensating them, so be it. It's the pretension that you're doing something other than that, for motives other than pure self-interest, which really bothers me.
What motives have I claimed?
Am I wrong?
The only way people try to make this work logically is to talk about how a digital good has a nominal real cost - but that's a very different argument.
So once again, they can't lose imaginary income.
If they are, then you have an argument. If they aren't, then whatever that price is covering other than nominal real costs is being stolen in this case as well.