(a) Those who download stuff illegally instead of paying like 0.01% of their disposable income per year for it whilst making about as much money as those who have created the content.
(b) Those who download stuff illegally instead of having no access at all or paying completely unaffordable fantasy prices for it whilst making only a fraction of those who have created the content.
In which group you fall depends mostly on where you were born. And this is not primarily a debate about inequality as much as it is about infrastructure. There simply is no Netflix in most parts of the world that gives you reliable access to a huge movie library for peanuts.
So when you say "you weaken the case the rest of us" you should be aware of how "you" and "us" can mean very different things depending on who says that to whom.
The vast majority of people will be using this to watch movies they don't feel like paying for. There might be a handful who genuinely can't access it, who have no way to legally pay for it outside of handing over a substantial amount of their small wealth, and they paradoxically also have access to an internet connection strong enough and a computer powerful enough that can handle streaming these movies. However, they do not represent the vast, vast, vast majority of users.
Accidentally, an average price of a DVD movie is also around $20. So yes, there are places where fast internet is affordable, yet movies are not. Unless you want to watch only one per month and give up your internet instead.
There is also a matter of TV series, which you have to wait 1-2 years for (poorly dubbed) in TV or on DVD.
Of course we are probably in something like the top 10% of wealthy places to live in. I can only imagine that situation in poorer countries resembles the one we had when internet was just kicking off and hardly anyone had connection. There was (illegal) business model of downloading movies (from Kazaa or weird warez forums), burning them on CDs and selling for the locally acceptable price.
Guess what - unless the price of virtual goods is adjusted to the local standards, and the availability increases, piracy will be there.
Even then, while that situation is certainly more excusable, you're still the minority. That site isn't made for the Eastern European lower class who can't afford to buy a DVD. It's made for folks who have the money (which means they can purchase and maintain a computer as well as a monthly internet connection) but who don't feel like spending it.
Plus, I'm fairly sure iTunes has movie rentals in most Eastern European countries.[0]
Also, my country is in southern Europe, not part of the EU yet.
> The vast majority of people will be using this to watch movies they don't feel like paying for.
I think this is highly biased towards your own ideas of how someone could use such service. You are, in fact, projecting[0] your own probable scenarios to large group of people you have never met, living in countries you've only heard of in the news. That, sir, is unfair. You should not stick with generalized opinions and prejudice, mkay?
Maybe put.io is really the new youku.com
The only reason why broadband may cost that much is because it's localized and one can't simply buy EU broadband in US. There are actually good reasons for broadband prices to be affected by local economy, since labour and materials may have different cost there. That's not the case with DVDs, which cost the same (pennies) to manufacture.
But maybe I should have put more emphasis on the problems with availability rather than money. Having a choice of spending my $20 on cinema tickets or a DVD, sometimes I would choose latter to watch something at home. But here DVDs are released only when the dubbing is ready, often after a year from the original release. I could get to this content earlier online, but I don't have Netflix here, nor Play Movies, Pandora and many others. There were problems with DVD releases that were solved in two ways: by VOD with reasonable monthly fee or by torrents. Saying torrents are for the greedy is just a good excuse to prosecute piracy instead of improving the market.
There's also a huge population of people around the world who get access to movies, TV shows and other media only after a significant delay and use this kind of services to get access to that media on the day it is released. Those living in the US may not realize it but there's no amount of money you can pay to get the hit TV shows on the day they are released in Europe and other parts of the world.
There's a pretty penny to be gained out of these would-be customers if the media distribution companies can figure out how to monetize zero day world wide distribution. It is not a technical problem to solve. Every day that this problem goes unsolved, the content industry loses money.
A little anecdotal evidence: out of the two american tv shows I watch, the other one can not be viewed from my home country at all, the other one will be available with a delay 6-12 months and a horrible dubbed soundtrack. Would I pay a reasonable price to get them on the day they are released instead of the clumsy torrent service I am using at the moment? Yes I would.
Real, legitimate streaming services are really good. they adjust quality based on available bandwidth. they have clients for every device you own. They provide all kinds of helpful metadata like cover art, actors, content classification, playlist recommendations, watch lists, etc etc etc etc
Torrents are terrible. half the stuff is malware, the quality is all over the map, languages and subtitles are a crap shoot, you use a ton of band width, you have to manage huge files locally, etc etc etc etc
Now, if you like you can work out the intersection with countries that have access to a similarly complete selection of movies at comparable cost to what Netflix offers in the U.S.
You will quickly find out that your "handful" of people is in fact hundereds of millions of people.
Knowledge is basically free. Anyone with an internet connection and a PC made in the last 10 years (not particularly hard to come by, even with very little money) can be knowledgeable enough. Equating wealth with knowledge is foolish.
Broadband was expensive too, but 512k was something like 60$... And because internet access had so much more use than just consuming cultural information, people would prefer to get it and save on something else. Like the dvds that they would get by pirating.
Before 2002 when Broadband access was excessively rare... Most people would just buy pirated dvds from the flea market... For 5 $ or less. They where ready to pay for them... but at a lower price than what official goods where... You never bought dvd for youself except if you were wealthy or to give them as gifts.
Your options here for watching movies are (a) cinema(which doesn't work for TV shows), (b) wait for them to show up on crappy cable services, (c) buy pirated DVDs for 1~2$ a pop and (d) torrent. Buying legal DVDs is possible but extremely hard, not simply due to the cost but also the availability. If I wanted to buy a pirated DVD there are at least 3 different shops within 2min of my home in an eastern Beirut suburb whereas if I wanted to go the legal option I'd need to drive down to Virgin in downtown Beirut(15min drive) and pick from an extremely limited selection.
The only viable solutions if you want timely and not incredibly inconvenient access to movies or shows are (c) and (d). Internet connections are incredibly expensive relative to Europe or the US(50$/mo for 4mb and a 25GB cap) and yet I know a lot of people who go with option (d), mainly because traffic at night isn't subject to the cap. People will simply cue up their torrents and download them between 12am and 7am and watch them the next day. If you keep a buffer of unwatched movies/shows this can work quite well. My personal approach is to torrent to a digital ocean droplet and then download over regular HTTP overnight. Most people are not technically savvy enough to do that but they would be able to use put.io. I happen to use my droplet for other things, but if I didn't put.io would be cheaper as well.
The rest of the world hasn't got flat fee video rentals, on-demand TV services, has to wait 1-2 years to get a season already aired in the tv series home market, hasn't got the option to watch it without voice-overs, etc. This is a digital breach that decision and law-makers keep pushing for, and the result is "piracy". Later this media lobby points the finger at countries for downloading their "content". Ironic given that studios/distributors were never planning in providing that content in the timely manner and format customers wanted it in.
And my media consumption isn't enormous. A few packaged DVD purchases, Netflix account, and the movies - which is very expensive these days.
True but you can still get movies via DVD or VHS is those places. e.g. If I don't have access to Spotify it does't give me a valid excuse to pirate. I can still purchase through iTunes or buy CD's.
1) buy CD/DVDs (except the ones that are unavailable or hard to find) and rip them (assuming this is sufficiently legal) then throw away the useless pieces of plastic you just paid premium for (which in some regions equates your license), or
2) buy CD/DVDs (except the ones that are unavailable, etc) and put up with plastic crap that is bulky, unreliable and slow, or
3) not buy anything
It's ridiculous, this is the 21st century. They can fit a whole season of some serial onto a micro-SD card, but instead you want me to buy a "box set" of cardboard junk and plastic that is larger than the laptop I intend to watch it on? (which, incidentally, doesn't have a DVD drive for pretty much the same reason it doesn't play cassette tapes or vinyl records either)
Five years ago I had a fire, packed salvageable stuff with smoke damage in big cardboard storage boxes. Over the years I've unpacked and cleaned almost all of the items. The box with all my CDs? They are probably fine (I guess), but I never bothered, I just got them digitally and am happy about those things not taking up any shelf space.
Technically, it's totally feasible. of course, that only works if the content creators are willing to license the content, and that's difficult for even big players like Netflix.
There's a huge international market for video and bottom disappear prices. case in point: every sketchy DVD store in the third world. there's lots of legitimate money to be made if you were able to sell legally to that market. The real question is: how do you manage the Price differentiation? If a movie costs $10 in the USA and $0.50 in poor, region-excluded country X, how do you keep everyone in the US from buying the $0.50 version?
If put.io solves this problem, it'll become a billion dollar company.
It is good when authors can earn money on their work, and thus it used to be that authors had a deal with the government. Tax money is spent to enforce a limited monopoly for a few years, and afterward society could the work to the improvement of all. This deal has now been completely perverted, and all works stays perpetually under restrictions.
Worse, In Sweden, we have a special deal on top of copyright. Every time someone purchase a harddrive, they are forced (through taxes) to pay for the privilege of "private copying". This deal is then again perverted through the use of DRM. Companies that do this are effectively stealing, and here the word is used correctly: They are stealing my money. I paid for something, and the other party is now refusing to give up their side of the bargain.
When asked to respect copyright, I am asked to balance the moral issues at hand. Can I, morally, support the perversion in order to get authors some money, or should I ignore copyright in order to force a change.
I dont mind,the problem is "who's getting the money?why artist A and not artist B".And it's usually the artists that need it the less that get the most of these "revenues".
Which collects money from plays and from public performances on behalf of artists.
IMO Local artists probably get more money than they'd have gotten otherwise, while foreign artists are probably underpaid (though Uruguayan revenue is very likely a rounding error for them).
I know of a person that works there, and I don't think they're scammers or mafia or anything, but the model is definitely outdated and I dislike a private organization having that kind of power (not to mention most artists never explicitly gave them representation power).
Plus the artists who create the content get a miniscule part of your purchase money.
You can rent basically any movie on Amazon, or buy DRM free music from a variety of sources. If you choose not to and torrent, you're not performing some sort of noble protest in the name of the artists. I can assure that they don't see it that way.
Note: I'm not saying that people in creative capacities think that torrenting is evil, and yes, they know they are part of a broken system. I just think it's disingenuous when people justify torrenting using this argument. You're torrenting because you think the market price of whatever content you're downloading is too / you don't feel like paying. Simple as that.
I'm not sure the set of legal mp4 torrents is very large.
He said that doing illegal things with these torrents will only give the corporations/ones in power more leeway into getting politicians to pass laws that require DRM, violate our privacy, etc.
If piracy stops people will say DRM works and they need more powers to really cement it in place. If piracy continues then people will say they need more DRM to stop it.
I cannot see how the existence of this site (or other torrent services) weakens the case against DRM.
With torrent, at least i'd know beforehand when setting my 40min* aside, that i will press play and see the damn content. So yeah, it does not weaken the case against DRM. i will agree that it strengthen it. Any engineer worth its salt would CACHE the damn stream. They can't because of DRM and silly contracts out of touch with reality.
(* and that is not counting the 5min that it takes to GET to the content on amazon player... piece of @!#)
What you say makes sense as well, I guess we're really talking about two different arguments. One logical/reasoned (look, DRM has basically failed) and the other emotional (OMG piracy! We must have more DRM!). They're kind of orthogonal to my mind.
>> In theory what you say makes sense, but then why is there still DRM?
For a whole complex of reasons, some of which boil down to exactly what you say. Maybe if nobody ever pirated anything it would go away, but I doubt it. It's too useful for other purposes - market segmentation, multiple resales for new formats or devices, preventing reasonable backups etc etc.
Right, and while I completely agree with your logical reason, my fear is that the emotional one is more prevalent and thus, the only one that will really determine future behavior.
I haven't considered "market segmentation" as a purpose of DRM - that's certainly interesting. I think the concept of market segmentation is unfair and manipulative, so I think this lends more weight to the commenter who suggested they feel a moral obligation to violate what copyright has become. Personally, I still prefer to pay for what I'm getting, and I just avoid products from companies who make that more difficult then it needs to be. But I see the viewpoint better now.
Think about how common piracy is. They demand what? 250k for each song downloaded. Multiplied by the number of songs downloaded illegally per day... they feel they are entitled to 600 trillion dollars per year. Does that sound right to you?
Piracy is our new eighteenth amendment.