Quote:
Originally Posted by Caged Great
It's actually evolved beyond a moral issue of theft and intellectual rights. It's about a group (RIAA) that are fighting the fact that people want content that fits easily into their lives instead of trying to provide that content in exactly the manner that was fitting in 1930.
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I think it's still somewhat moral...there are two morally ambiguous sides claiming the moral high ground, neither of which make too much sense in my mind. I'll preface by saying that I'm an ex-pirater, stopped as of 3-4 years ago.
Again, I think the problem lies at the core that two sides think they're in the right and are doing dubious things because of it. The sellers, in this case, are indicating that they think they have the right to throw down penalties and clear cut things. I often deal with this subject in the field of gaming, so the topic of Digital Rights Management (DRM) shows up a lot...a system which ultimately hurts the fair consumer than it does the pirater. And when that doesn't work, they try even worse version of DRM (Diablo III has been often hailed as a landmark in this regard, having such disrupting DRM that I've seen many people intentionally destroy its rating on sites because of the it). In that sense, this is the equivalent of your comment on RIAA.
At the same time, this seems to be an excuse for a percent of the populace to just take whatever they want, regardless of the issue. The holy grail of statistics, in my mind, has always been "if all the complaints and reasons to pirate were thrown out (accessibility, pricing at whatever level you want, middlemen, no DRM in the case of games), what % would still pirate"? As we can see here, we're seeing a lot of people who aren't in that percent...people who've stopped pirating as they have legal alternatives. Personally, I disagree (I would believe that we have to make an all-or-nothing type of choice, that a stronger message to the company, instead of indicating that there is a market for them to sell to and entice them to attempt to put in further restrictions to attempt to force me to by, show them that there is no market period for their product as is), but that's something I won't get into as of yet. But at the same time, you get quite a few people who think that any price is too much to pay for a movie, game, or TV show. Go basically anywhere on the deep side of the internet and you'll find some. I have absolutely no problems with the companies trying to stamp these people out. At the same time, they're making real problems for others, so I have few problems with people telling them that it's hurting the lawful consumer more than the pirater. I disagree with the method (piracy) in this regard and think, in basic economic terms, that it won't work as you're creating a false increase in supply line that is a carrot for these systems more than a show of disagreement, but I don't mind the message being sent.
Unfortunately, the stat I so desire is a pretty difficult metric to find as of right now, but if we could find it, I think we could answer how many people, in my mind, are self entitled to a good. The problems lie in the massive number of moving parts. I mean, we hear organizations punch out bias numbers all the time, but there's so little stock I can put into them because of the spin they desire.
An interesting example of this in the gaming world is the Humble Indie Project's "Pay what you want" system that they offered once upon a time. While I won't bring up the pricing (as you can argue the "actual" sale equivalent in pricing is over their worth at the time), the takeaway is that 25% still decided to pirate the game. They stripped virtually every reason you would want to pirate...price, big name companies...basically everything, and a penny was too much. Unless a quarter of downloaders don't want to register their credit card online (which seems odd provided that Steam uses that as its most common payment method), there's got to be something behind that stat. This is where companies want to step in I think.
Of course, in this model, I make an assumption that entertainment is a good, not a right (and that therefore, someone with more money is entitled to more entertainment than another person with less money). Often, I find when I disagree with people, this becomes a core problem.
Sorry if I've contradicted myself. I'm writing this with a time limit and my general thoughts on this are probably triple the length. I'll try to review this sometime.