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Comment by damon_c | Hacker News Reader

The way I look at it is that even if you have the option to not pay for things, paying for things is giving you a voice.

When I pay $4.99 to "rent" a movie or $13.99 for a season of TV, I am saying to the motion picture making world, "make more like this and I will pay".

People who don't pay for things give up that voice.

So if, as a creator, you are concerned with financial profit, it would behoove you to make things that are attractive to people like me who pay for things or figure out some other way to make money like embedding advertising in your content.

In the long run I don't know if this will be good for art and creativity and it furthers the recent increasing prevalence of people with money having a louder voice than others, but maybe this is the market based solution to this problem.

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So are you saying you try before you buy? The concept is sound but it falls apart the moment you get something free. How likely is it that after pirating a movie or an album someone goes back and buys it so they can vote with their wallet? I think pirating can be voting just the same except you're hurting the creator or distributors ability to make or distribute more of it. I Don't think that this is about whether something is worth paying for. It's about whether it's worth consuming. You wouldn't go to a restaurant, order a dish, then only pay if you think the meal was worth paying for. The meal has already been made, the effort to cook it was expended, and if enough people get their meals for free the restaurant goes out of business. It didn't go out of business because it made bad food necessarily, it only shuts down because their patrons were the type of people who thought it was okay to not pay based on their arbitrary standards of what's worth paying for. After all, by consuming the meal they've already implicitly voted that the meals were worth eating. Just not paying for.

Speaking for myself, I don't try before I buy, I just pay if there is a pay option available.

I'm just suggesting a sort of market based incentive to pay for things that one could easily get for free.

Over time, those who pay may end up getting some additional non "feel good" or convenience benefits in that they will be a preferred class of customers.

So true. All the piracy proponents like to say that people who torrent stuff also buy stuff, but in the same breath they argue that if/when they don't, it's because the movie or whatever was no good.

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