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I think its important to consider the audience for torrenting. When I was a teenager, the majority of the content I consumed was downloaded for free. I think this was hugely helpful in shaping my taste and mind.

I would assume a large amount of illegal downloaders are being done by teenagers who have the most free time to consume, and the least amount of resources to consume.

This.

I like to think back to when I was using Photoshop 7 in 2003 - I was 12 years old. My parents sure as hell wouldn't shell out money for software, even if I asked for it for Christmas. I asked, and asked, and asked.

So I pirated it.

Today, while I'm not a designer, I think back to how it exposed me to the world of the web, and doing what I'm doing today. I am <positive> that 90% of the kids entering colleges for (and this is an example) graphic design, who have already done design, have pirated their copy of their softwares.

And this leads to more sales down the road for Adobe, har har har.

That assumes that the torrenters have access to a version of netflix that has that movie, mine in the netherlands for example does not.

Yes, content is one of the most annoying problems, and there's no technical reason it has to be.

You can always torrent a film in just about any language and get high quality as soon as the film hits the stores in the country of origin, sometimes before (those preview audiences). And yes, I'm talking about across the board, films from the US, south america, european countries, - surely asia too though I wouldn't know (mainly just watch films in english/spanish/portuguese). And watching it in the original is something that makes the film better (unless Bafleck is acting in it).

I have a netflix (IMHO the best alternative out there) account and like the service, but when a new episode comes out they don't get it immediately you have to wait for films, this can actually be a really long time and you don't get "every" voice over just the ones for your country, so if the relatives are visiting who just speak spanish and you're living in germany well you know what forget it, if you want to watch the movie the only way to do it is to torrent. Also europe is really problematic for some reason, if I drive 2 hours to poland and access from a polish IP netflix denies all streaming?

Honestly, I think anyone would be willing to pay easily more than $8 mo. to be able to just stream any film/episode in any language/dubbing at any time. I think studios should concentrate on making that possible over this dns crap.

Europe is problematic because different countries have different distribution companies because the audiences expect things in different languages - posters, marketing materials, subtitles, voiceover tracks. All of these are paid for by the national distributor. It's very hard for outside distributors to break into a national market because they don't have the leverage with the theater chains and TV broadcasters, or the translators and actors in the case of producing soundtracks in other languages.

Studios don't really have the leverage to do much about this because they are dependent on national distributors to collect the revenue and often to put up the money for the production cost ahead of time(eg distributors will put up a few million Euro in advance to buy the rights to a film with a popular star and a good story based on a trailer shown at a prestigious film festival. This is why the Cannes film Festival is a big deal; not so much because of all the stars, but because that's the event where EU film distributors look into what studios want to produce for the following year and sign contracts to buy the rights).

It sounds to me that you want a single global marketplace that all films are sold into and that delivers direct-to-consumer from there, but there isn't any single media company in the world big enough to do that - and if there were, it would be run into problems with authorities in the US and EU for restraint of trade, price-fixing etc.. You would basically be removing the rights of producers to negotiate their own prices and have a sort of industry communism, which would give the few biggest studios more power than they have now.

I'm European, non-native English speaking, yet I'm not waiting for a single one of "different languages, posters, marketing materials, subtitles, voiceover tracks"

So they can already release it before all that. Then do that stuff afterwards to get more viewers.

Well, part of what the national distributors are paying for is the exclusive right to distribute the film within their territory. Cash up front front from an established distributor looks a lot nicer in the business plan than possible future download revenue combined with having to do your own advertising in each language market. If you can't pre-sell the exhibition/video/broadcast rights, then essentially you have to borrow at a high rate of interest to compensate people for the significant downside risks.

The fact that producer, consumer and distributor interests are not aligned doesn't mean they're oppositional. Consumers aren't incentivized or sufficiently experienced or organized to provide forward financing in most cases, distributors aren't incenitvized to give away free copies because they're trying to recoup their risky investment.

Additionally, with german Amazon Prime I mostly dont have access to the original movie - I hate german dubbed versions

But, I torrent as well to safe money. We have different price structures, lower income, higher taxes and higher prices for media content and often technical goods like Apple Computer: if a given iPad costs 700$ it will cost me >700€ we have often less money to spend

I'm on my tablet, just checked Netflix. Turns out The Master is unavailable in the UK. Presumably I could work around that, maybe even legally for now - but it's an obvious weakness with the argument about Netflix. Sure it's affordable but these media companies seem determined to keep their archaic licensing systems in place to the detriment of any service that tries to be legal.

Feel free to buy it from Amazon UK for 4.85 instead: http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/offer-listing/B00A6VGLQK/ref=dp_o...

This is pretty much a perfect example of the problem though. That example is a DVD - presumably the hypothetical torrent would be high definition, probably worthwhile for a 2012 release. Now to be fair I could get the Bluray for £4.06 used. It'd be £6.62 if I wanted to watch it on Friday (of course I can't get it delivered tomorrow even with Prime) so if I wanted to get near the convenience of Netflix I'm close to paying another month, for one film.

On another note about formats I have no way to watch a Bluray at home. I could buy an HDTV and Bluray player but I'd rather not. I'd also rather not be restricted to laptops that have disc drives when I shop for a new one in the future.

I won't use the term restricting freedom, but I'm clearly losing options in the future if I buy that. Immediately I lose it being in HD unless I purchase new equipment and going forward I have to worry about what will inevitably be legacy formats.

It's not hard to see why if I wanted to watch that film I might find the legal options lacking.

Yup that is the trade off. If you are looking to watch newer content in HD via streaming, Netflix if it ever gets to this point is going to have to up its pricing. There is a reason Netflix is so cheap, and that reason is also why so many people complain of lack of brand new released content.

You are right, there is no perfect solution for the motion picture industry. Technology has undermined their business model. That doesn't mean we should allow them to sculpt our laws in order to unnaturally perpetuate their dominance. If your business model relies on restricting the flow of information, you are at complete odds with the internet, and you are doomed.

Yea, but if they go away completely, so does all of our entertainment. So I surely hope there is a middle ground somewhere.

That argument was made when the first recorded music came out (people won't buy sheet music, they'll just listen), when audio cassette recorders came out (people will just record from the radio, they won't buy LPs any more) and when MP3s arrived on the scene.

In all cases the industry adapted. The film industry will change and adapt to the new world.

We'll always desire entertainment and someone will always find a way to do it.

in fact, this is already happening with online entertainment such as some youtube channels (think stuff like https://www.youtube.com/user/geekandsundry , which started with 'the guild'). I believe TV and long form media will not be around for long, replaced by dedicated on-demand media that caters to very specific audiences, and there being thousands, or even tens of thousands of them.

TV talking heads, episodic/sitcom, and documentary material will indeed be hugely changed by this. You could get started making a decent quality 'internet TV' program like the one you linked to for only $1-2000; indeed I've toyed with the idea of doing a little cooking show because that's something I have pro experience with.

Serious longform drama...not so much. A simple 90 minute feature film that meets normal commercial expectations (ie doesn't look all weird an experimental, just tells a straight story like a detective mystery or something) requires about a month of photography and a year of post-production work and a budget in the low 6 figures, which means most people won't get paid. Of course you could try bootstapping it by making the thing in small chunks but that almost invariably ends up being at least twice as expensive.

There are ways around this, but you also have to ask yourself why most startups take cash from venture capitalists rather than relying on organic growth - doing it piecemeal is very very slow and many consumers will not have the patience for you to make incremental progress towards the goal.

While I would buy music or movies if I could, in most cases I don't and use torrents because -

1. Most content is not available in my country (including services like Netflix). As one of the goals of my life is learning about various cultures through their movies, I would rather pirate than not watch.

2. Even if content is available, they are heavily censored. I refuse to watch this censored stuff.

3. The price is outrageous. I am not going to pay for stuff whose price is equivalent to the dollar amount after conversion.

also english content is presented in russian language only copy. i prefer watching movies in their original language with subtitles but this option is not available, neither is netflix - which I still use via vpn - which is technically puts me in a breach of contract.

#2 is a very good reason, but isn't the problem there with the country you live in rather than with the MPAA?

All I am saying is it does not matter. I may be unethical, a criminal or immoral - but unless the three constraints to consume content legally are removed, I will do the wrong thing.

It sounds like you're implying that paying for Netflix and using bittorrent is mutually exclusive. If the content on Netflix were better (it has everything you would ever want to watch) and less restrictive (want to watch offline?), and content creators were fairly compensated, why would a rational consumer chose anything else and why would a content creator not advocate for this scheme?

I love streaming subscriptions for the convenience factor but I find they fall far short of their promise due to "incomplete" content and restrictions of artificial scarcity-and I say this as a supporter of these services and the model used.

The profits are still largely going to the middlemen, and from all indication (that I can see), the content creators are still being shafted.

How do you mean 'incomplete' content - you mean not getting access to all the extra features on the DVD, or not having a great selection of films so you can watch anything you want? I agree that the latter is problematic, but that's why I asked the question in the context of a film that is available through multiple streaming services. I would like to understand this better.

The profits are still largely going to the middlemen, and from all indication (that I can see), the content creators are still being shafted.

As someone who works in film, I have to tell you I'm really tired of hearing this. Of course whatever Netflix pays to the original distributor goes to the distributor. From there it is split with the producer and the producer distributes into other profit participants, like investors or actors who are due residuals or whatever. Bear in mind that the main distributor often advanced some or all of the production costs, and all of the marketing costs (which are usually 50-100% of production costs). As well as that, less-successful films are often cross-subsidized by more successful films (especially in international distribution) as part of the deals distributors negotiate with producers.

Now it's not the case that every distribution deal is fair, but most of them are a lot fairer than people seem to imagine, and sticking it to a distributor in some way does nobody on the creation side any good whatsoever. I like distributors, they have fat checkbooks. I don't think people outside the business realize that they front a lot of the money that pays for movies to get made in the first place. Dealing directly with thousands of theaters and hundreds of different media markets is an awful lot of work; producers would like to focus on making more movies than trying to manage all the logistics, accounting, and collections of the distribution phase.

I wrote a long reply that wasn't too relevant, but I do want to say that I appreciate you expressing your opinion on HN. You add an excellent P.O.V. (one that I do not agree with) but I appreciate your ability to remain an even tone and express yourself. Especially with your experience in film.

Now, for the record, I will continue to pirate as long as it's more convenient than buying/streaming. Doubly so when I consider the MPAA/RIAA philosophy antithetical to that of the internet, or of my own personal beliefs. Triply so when the limitations (regional exclusivity/locking) negatively affect me without providing any clear benefit.

You're welcome. I don't lie awake at night worrying about the morals of piracy (much :-)) but I do spend quite a lot of time trying to figure out what viable alternative business models there are. It's clear there's a great demand for video entertainment, but it's a very different sort of product from something like a game in terms of how it's consumed, so paradigms like freemium or MVP are often not applicable or useful.

This is fantastic. Thank you for taking this perspective! Content (high or even low quality) pretty much sells itself, especially if we had less content. Think about how low quality much of 50s TV/etc. was much lower than modern shows.

Is industry's biggest concern (I ask you b/c you sound like you're in the scene) that current revenues are impacted by piracy? Or are they worried about the future if piracy becomes even easier?

My perception of the content industry is that they're snakes in suits. On one hand, they're crying poor, about how actors and musicians aren't getting paid b/c of piracy. On the other, you hear about Hollywood accounting, and label-slanted recording contracts. Then I read about how much money is being made overall.

I try to support the arts. I buy premium content from niche sellers who wouldn't be able to write if it weren't for their small (usually < 1k) subscriber lists. But without more transparency from the content representatives, I assume there is plenty of money in the industry. Complaining about piracy seems like they're crying because they made $1 billion instead of $1.1 billion, while still pumping out absolute trash (by and large).

An example of someone who is hugely successful, funded by people like me, and is doing it absolutely right is Louis CK. He has been mainstream, but never made much money doing it (check out his email archives, he talks about this). Now he just sends me a very genuine email with news and info, clearly written by him. The links go to a site where I can buy and download the mp4 of his performances, no restrictions, $5.

He is even transparent with how much he made over time, and how much he distributed (as bonuses!) to the people who helped make his success possible.

The content sells itself. I just want someone genuine to explain to me, with facts, why piracy is bad -- and that would require an honest examination of Hollywood's books.

In the case of film, unlike music, most deals for distribution at least resemble fairness to the creators.

So you can strike that off this list of problems.

I've been meaning to ask, could you drop me a line when you gt time? Thanks. Email is in my HN profile.

But people torrent things anyway, even when they are instantly available. I mentioned to someone the other day that The Master (a film that did rather poorly at the box office in 2012 but has maintained a good level of audience interest over the longer term, like many art films) has been available on Netflix streaming since July and is also available on other services like Amazon Instant Video, but you can see 25-30k people torrenting it on popular trackers.

To make your point about rewarding creators, it's necessary for you to demonstrate that these correspond to lost sales, and you haven't done that.

You do realize that collecting is a goal in itself for a lot of people, right? The guys I hung out with in college made it their sole purpose in life to "own" every piece of software ever written for the Apple II. But that doesn't mean that their actions cost Dan Bricklin, Richard Garriott, and Paul Lutus very much. Probably 95% of the products they pirated, they never even ran.

It's unlikely that the 30,000 people torrenting The Master are devoted but penurious fans of P. T. Anderson. You need to look for alternative explanations.

Also, as others have pointed out, Netflix isn't available in many places outside the US. There is absolutely no one to blame for that but Hollywood. Now that we've seen the intellectual and ethical caliber of the people running the studios, a lot of seemingly-paradoxical things are starting to make sense.

If a film isn't available by streaming in a particular country, it's generally because the distributor in that country made exclusivity for a certain period a condition of financing. International presales often provide a significant chunk of production finance, without which the picture doesn't get made in the first place.

For the time being at least, this exclusivity must be assumed to have greater economic value to the individual country's distributor than whatever amount Netflix or one of the streaming or online delivery services is offering.

BTW the proposition about rewarding creatives is in the original article, I'm just not clear on the thinking behind it.

A good point re: presale of international distribution rights. But that system clearly doesn't serve the end user, so you can't be too surprised when the end user finds ways around it. It just goes to show that "Hollywood" thinking isn't a uniquely American hangup.

> You can always invent another excuse for why it's more convenient to Torrent something than pay the paltry $8 or $10/month for Netflix, ie the cost of a few cups of coffee or about an hour's wages in a low-paying job. This method rewards creators and is clearly affordable.

I actually think the opposite. I believe content piracy has gone down because services like Netflix and Spotify have come out and simplified consumption of media. These services has several advantages to torrents compared to the one disadvantage (it actually costs money) - Cross platform support, unlimited media in the tap of a button, etc. If the movie industry created something like Popcorn Time and charged $15-20/mo for unlimited movies, I'm sure they could get millions of subscribers.

There is not much you could do.

A whole bunch of people in this world cannot pay the $10 a month for Netflix. Yeah, perhaps many in Western Europe and Northern America, maybe some bits of Asia, too can, but this still leaves millions with access to the Internet that can't pay.

Also consider all the kids and teenagers out there without a credit card.

Additionally content on Netflix seems quite limited, depending on location, so that's another problem. Bittorrent has everything.

It's a very hard to solve problem.

I do not think there is a way out of this, I would simply leave it be. In time, as more people will earn more money the piracy rates will drop.

Aren't they making enough money?

A whole bunch of people in this world cannot pay the $10 a month for Netflix

Netflix won't allow people in many countries to sign up! Look at the grey areas in this map http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Netflix_area.svg

Removing geo-location blocks for content would be an awesome start.

You know Netflix isn't available in all countries?

I do, but I left out the numbers for foreign-language versions and other data, because I don't want to load the question down with too many caveats. We all know that some people torrent by preference than because they lack any other means to view the film. I'm just trying to figure out how the MPAA is supposed to turn those people into paying customers.

Steam has the answer. Make paying for content easier and more enjoyable than copyright violation.

Easier: see netflix, amazon video, et al. Contradictions include region lock-in, unavailability of streaming version (physical media only).

More enjoyable: un-skippable advertising is a big one that drives people to torrented content that's an overall better experience. Charging Hulu so much they still have to play ads. Not allowing people to share content.

Oh yeah, and fair pricing. Steam has a huge amount of revenue in older content that's had significant price drops. MPAA should look into that.

OK, but I'm talking about a film that is available on streaming media (Netflix and Amazon, within the US at least). And there are no ads or anything if you watch it that way. There's a reason I picked a single example to study closely, it already addresses several of the things you mention.

Oh yeah, and fair pricing. Steam has a huge amount of revenue in older content that's had significant price drops. MPAA should look into that.

??? Old films are already cheap, on the whole. Do you want the MPAA to set price controls across the industry? Because that would be illegal in the US, surely you've noticed several high-profile cases about price-fixing by Apple etc.

I think that people who are happy to watch only the content available on Amazon/Netflix, are not the people whose behavior you want to change. So your case study is IMO starting with flawed assumptions (that people who are content with existing streaming services still pirate content).

I'm not assuming that. I'm asking why people who have access to extremely affordable streaming services but who choose to torrent anyway do so. Why should the creators of film X be penalized for the unavailability of film Y on a streaming service by people who are downloading film X?

I mean, I get that people would like a streaming service that had every film that ever existed available instantly, but there isn't any way to force such a thing to come into existence without essentially forcing everyone to license their work to it, and while it doesn't exist some people are always going to cite it as an excuse not to pay for anything that is easily available. And again, my original question was what you would expect someone in the MPAA to do on behalf of users.

> why people who have access to extremely affordable streaming services but who choose to torrent anyway do so.

I think the only real answer here is unavailability of content in a sufficiently convenient/appealing form. But you've already written off unavailability of content as a reason you want to deal with, so I don't think there are any remaining answers for you.

Regarding pricing, Disney is a good example of a company who are highly restrictive of when and for how much their content is available. I wouldn't be surprised at all if this translates to higher piracy rates.

And I meant MPAA members, not the industry org.

Ah, I see. Well, you're quite right about Disney, but they're actually rather exceptional. Most films that go out of print or become hard to find do so because they're just not very popular, and the apparently-tiny audience isn't enough to offset the costs of bringing it onto a new platform (which can run into tens of thousands - QA requirements are very specific and if you don't meet them exactly it costs the streaming operator nothing to refuse it).

I used to pay for netflix in the US and access it with a VPN when I was living in China (a country where most content is only available through pirating). I did this both for convenience and because I wanted to pay for the content I was consuming.

But eventually I got tired of having to jump through hoops because of region locking and other inane rules decided by the MPAA and equivalent. I'm now in France, Netflix has a rather poor catalogue (I joined this month to check it out), The Master for example is not available (and I don't know any easy way to stream it).

So, instead of bothering to jump through hoops, I just download it on Bittorrent. It's quick, it's easy and it saves me time. It's also more confortable using Mplayer or Plex to play a video than any of the streaming website players.

When you say that 25-30k people torrent the movie, I'm sure there's a lot of people in my case. And excluding the foreign language versions won't help because a lot of people in Europe download the original version.

I left out the numbers for foreign-language versions

You know Netflix isn't available with the same content in English language speaking countries?. Or that there are English language native speakers in places where Netflix isn't available?

Netflix does NOT allow you to download high-quality movies/tv shows. That is why it fails to give me any reason to use it.

> Imagine that I worked for them and you were about to torrent this film, exactly what is it you would want me to do for you that would change your mind?

Alright, let's brainstorm.

How about movie companies put up several movie ideas, we vote on which ones we want to watch by paying ahead so they can produce it, much like a kickstarter project, and then once it's done it's already paid for and they can release it for free online?

Oh that's right, it wouldn't work because there's no litigation involved and so it's no fun!

(What I'm trying to say is they're not interested in solving this problem, even though several solutions exist, despite sibling comments here saying that no solution exists).

Please downvote the solution above as it incentivizes transparency, public scrutiny and more choice, while creating a more targeted product with guaranteed success (since it's been paid for and returned profits in advance of its making).

Please go on with your other solutions involving more lawyers and copyright protection schemes. I didn't mean to distract you.

I can't downvote replies to my own comment you know.

You can't create art that way. (Well, you can, but it will be bad art.)

Also, the moderation is extremely weird in this particular HN story. I wouldn't take it personally.

You can't create art that way. (Well, you can, but it will be bad art.)

I'm curious as to why you think that? There are a lot of really great projects on Kickstarter that would fall under the umbrella of "good art" (games, films, etc). Unless you're speaking subjectively, of course, and you don't like what is on offer.

If you look at film video projects on Kickstarter, it's mostly documentaries - for which this model works OK because documentaries are often about something that has an interest group already attached, as well as much lower production costs and quality expectations - short films, which are raising small amounts and generally just using Kickstarter to funnel donations from friends & family, or instructionals, which aim to produce educational content. It's not at all good for feature films. There are some crowdfunding sites that are a bit better but the more friendly they are to features the more likely they are to be targeted within the industry. I laid out some reasons in another post above, I should have mentioned that those are all narrative feature-specific things.

> You can't create art that way. (Well, you can, but it will be bad art.)

There's a group of people called Commercial Artists that would disagree with you and laugh at your ad hominem.

Well, Amazon does something like this for their original content (competing ideas that members of one of their subsites vote on), but with the difference being that Amazon puts up the money. Also, some existing production companies/distributors have been willing to handle pictures financed this way. Contrary to what you might imagine, nobody likes litigation except a subset of the many lawyers that work in Hollywood, and on most projects no litigation ever takes place.

The crowdfunding model can work to some degree but it suffers from three limitations.

1. It's not good for really big sums, like millions of dollars - not least because of SEC rules, but let's face it, that's a hard amount of money to raise more than a year in advance of release from the general public. For the same reaosn that many people would rather torrent than wait to buy or rent or stream a new film, asking them to pay up front and then wait around for the film to get made is not going to be easy either.

2. Besides the large sum, another reason it's difficult is that many of the jobs involved in film production are highly specialized and it's not obvious to a potential kickstarter buyer how the money is going to be spent. You probably don't want to throw down $15,000 for a 'Honeywagon driver,' for example, without the honeywagon there won't be much exterior shooting because that's the unglamorous line item for the delivery, maintenance, and removal of portable toilet facilities, the cost of which really adds up when you have 40 or 50 people who need to use them. Each othe sub-categories on this page generates further pages of accounting stuff and legal documents: http://www.indieproduction.com/sample-budget-top-sheet.php

3. It's especially not good for films that don't tap into an existing franchise, like a sequel or continuation of an existing series, or with the involvement of famous actors/directors. Few people are eager to invest in someone's first project or a film about subject matter that they're not familiar with, not least because few people know how to evaluate the quality of a script or estimate the credibility of a film proposal. So while you could probably find people willing to crowdfund, I dunno, Jaws in Space, you're going to have a harder time with anything original.

4. It's going to be a lot trickier to get it into theaters if you are also going to be giving it away, because theater owners won't want to take the risk of playing to empty seats. You'd still be able to do a limited release or make advance ownership of the tickets part of the crowdfunding reward, but then you need to include the theater's overhead costs and effectively rent the screen from them which is going to drive up the costs.

I'm not innguest, but I'm curious, why is this downvoted so much? I get that the idea is somewhat impractical, but at least it's original and creative, surely the kind of idea we want to encourage.