Pirates? Hollywood Sets $10+ Billion Box Office Record

I don't think you can distill the world down into "Good vs Evil" -- it would be easier if you could.

What I do think is that power has an innate tendency to protect itself and concentrate and the mechanisms by which it does this _anywhere_ are all strikingly similar -- i.e. if you put them all in a pot and boiled off the water, you would maybe 3-5 different ways for doing this.

Yes, that would be true if movie torrents were "dubious", but the vast majority aren't. You don't have to be a genius to find a genuine copy of a movie, indie or blockbuster, on torrents. It's actually quite straightforward.

Though no one wants to talk about it, this is the real reason why Steam has succeeded in such a big way where services for other types of content haven't, and is one of the reasons why I don't think movie and music piracy can be reduced to the same degree Steam has cut into PC video game piracy.

Pirating and installing a video game can actually be quite difficult. You have to use keygens, cracks, and patches to remove the copy protection - executables can be difficult to use and may be deleted on accident by antivirus software for containing malware (because cracks and patches are used to do things seen in malware - modifying other executables, for example). Many people may not want to deal with that.

More importantly, you also have to manually torrent and install updates - a true pain in the ass when games these days are often released with many bugs intact, since updates can easily be issued over the internet. And equally important is that you often miss out on multiplayer features that require a genuine key.

As perhaps a reason why they'd do this. Some of us are on bandwidth caps. Watching/downloading too many HD movies can put you over your monthly cap pretty easily.

I actually like that they give the user the choice.

Why not? Are you happier if they instead say "Rent for $4.99" and nothing else?

Most products come in multiple price points, do you also dislike the fact that there are cheap/expensive models of computers, cars, TVs...

It's just madness. I want to think about what film I want to watch, not about whether I'll spend the money.

The ironic thing is that my monthly spend would be somewhere around 40 or 50 Euro if the prices were at stupid-la-la-thinking-land levels. Somewhat of an improvement from the big, fat €0 as at present.

Disney have been involved in a number of weird IP protection stuff. They developed a cassette that could only be rewound with a special device. It was supposed to be a "watch once per payment" mechanism. They also developed a DVD that would oxidise slowly once it got contact with air. They'd burn a movie, seal it in a special case, and ship it to people. Once you opened the packet you'd get about 2 days to watch the movie.

http://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-patent-uses-kinect-...

EDIT: Hey, don't shoot the messenger.

I would pay $30 USD to watch a movie from my couch that is currently in the theaters. Maybe a couple friends are over (another couple) but that total is 4... not 40.

I would bet major releases would see people throwing parties at their homes. But then again, is it a problem? Maybe raise the price a bit?

Of course they can enforce this with digital books, but they shouldn't be able to, and people should protest against it.

How on earth can you say this? New tellings of old stories are a — the — foundational element of human storytelling since the dawn of time.

Can you give an example of a story whose ending can't be reduced to a few possibilities given the beginning? That doesn't make people shout "What a tweest!"?

I've bailed on films where half the screen was out of focus or, inexplicably, they were using the wrong lens and everything was crunched. Sometimes all you have to do is point it out and they'll fix it, other times they'll refund it no questions asked.

If they don't feel it financially, they won't care to fix it.

Along with digital projection (not much work to do), that means there might be one or two operators for a dozen screens. The projection room also has noise blocking, so no one is listening or looking when you shout. It's more likely that the ticket/security crew outside the door listens and calls the operators, but you have to shout really loud :)

I've sat in a cinema where the volume was so high the audio setup was saturating unless that was a quiet, whispery scene. The film was really good, so we stayed. Although silent, I took action: it was the last time I went to a theatre since three years.

I don't know. If you want to separate 'greed' and 'entitlement' I would say that someone pirating a dozen movies is certainly full of entitlement but I wouldn't say they're any greedier than the person that buys the same dozen movies.

Which is exactly the point: why should we pay them any credence when they attack the Internet or claim that new technologies will kill them, when all they need is an iota of creativity to figure out how to remain profitable as the realities of the market change?

"The MPAA may be greedy, but the hordes of people taking music and giving excuse after excuse as to why they shouldn't have to pay for it is pure greed (and entitlement)."

It is not really on the same level. On the one hand, you have people (mostly teenagers and college students) who want immediate gratification and do not have terribly much money available, who are getting their entertainment in the most convenient form available to them. On the other hand, you have people who could have a comfortable retirement at any time, who are engaged in a coordinated and well-planned strategy to extract that maximum amount of money possible from every conceivable source of revenue, who routinely bribe politicians into passing laws that promote their business interests, and who have been working for many years to destroy the most important communications tool ever developed in order to avoid having to change an immensely profitable business.

Really though, the greed argument is silly. We expect corporations to be greedy; the purpose of a business is to make money, not to be nice, and we accepted that fact long ago. Unfortunately, there is this weird expectation that individual computer users are supposed to be thinking about copyrights before they perform one of the most basic computing tasks possible. Copyright was never designed to be a form of property, and there is no way for a system that requires a judge to decide what is or is not a violation to be applied en masse. If we want to continue to use copyrights to ensure the availability of and to promote the progress of art (let's not kid ourselves about science -- scientists do not need copyrights to ensure their access to published work in this day and age, and copyrights now serve only to restrict access to scientific research), we need to reform the entire system: copyright violations need to be treated like parking violations, with a small but still annoying fine that must be paid whenever a person is caught. Even the MPAA realizes that the lengthy court proceedings needed to decide copyright cases are just not appropriate for the case of downloading; why do you think they spend so much money and effort on DRM?

"They don't have to sign a contract, but they choose to."

The problem is not just bad contracts; the movie industry is notorious for its deceptive accounting tactics, which are designed to deprive artists who signed seemingly good contracts of the money they are entitled to. We are talking about a deliberate effort to avoid paying actors, scriptwriters, and others involved in the creative part of creating a movie their share of the profits by claiming there was no profit, that the movie was actually a loss, by siphoning enormous amounts of money into shell companies for nebulous services. Sure, the big-name actors are not the ones who suffer, because their agents know better than to sign a contract that promises a share in the profit; they get contracts that promise a share of the revenue.

The MPAA cannot be taken seriously when they claim that downloaders are the reason up-and-coming artists and actors are making so little money while they continue to engage in that sort of accounting practice. It is difficult to make the case that every downloader would have paid full price had they not downloaded the movie; it is not difficult to show that artists lose money when movie studios lie about the profitability of a movie. Hollywood accounting predates downloading and even home taping by many years; artists suffered as much before as they do now, and they are suffering for the same reasons.

Don't forget the support costs as well; they end up with double the number of people to support, but for the same amount of money.

However, if you have a pretty unknown franchise/game with maybe a potential of 1 million users at $60, then lowering the price to $30 may very well double or triple your market.