What about media from other countries? I enjoy QI, but to watch it on DVD I’d have to get an all-region DVD player to watch the first 5 in the series. I can’t watch anything streaming from British sites, but there are short clips on youtube.
Legally I suppose the expectation would be that I buy the special DVD player, right? But there are clips that QI has put up on youtube at no monetary benefit to them. There are other British TV shows I’ve watched full episodes of on youtube, like Never Mind the Buzzcocks and Screenwipes. Is that stealing?
What they own is the copywrite to the work. Your not taking that away by making an illegal copy. Similarily, if I tresspass on your land, I’m not “stealing” the land, though I am doing something illegal.
So I’d say the answer to the OP is that they aren’t stealing, but they are illegally violating the copywrite. The law doesn’t care whether they wouldn’t have paid for it anyways, or if they can’t get access to the movie any other way. One can argue that those might make it more morally defensible, but it doesn’t make it any more or less illegal.
The networks know that people are watching programs on DVRs and skipping through commercials. That’s why they’re introducing more product placement in shows. Sometimes it works well. Other times, it’s laughably awkward. They’re doing other things too. Like when the NBC series Friday Night Lights was up for renewal but the ratings hadn’t been very good, NBC worked out a deal with DirecTV to first broadcast the episodes on satellite, and then months later on network television.
Listen, on the rare occasions when I stream something illegally, or download an mp3 without paying for it, I know with 100% confidence that I am not costing the rightful owners of that material a single penny. I have no problem spending money on media that I want, to which my CD and DVD collection will attest.
But I would never consider what I was doing legal, or in any way not copyright infringement. Just because nobody is getting hurt from it (which in your example isn’t even true) doesn’t make it legal.
Until you went on some bizarre tangent about stealing a dinosaur skeleton, which has absolutely nothing to do with copyright infringement. He didn’t say he didn’t see the movie because he couldn’t afford it. He said he didn’t pay to see it because reviews said it was bad, and was asking how downloading it for free is any different than watching it on TV for free. Nothing to do with being able to afford something or not.
I didn’t think the OP was about not being able to afford something. I quoted the part of his post where he suggested that the fact that he was never going to pay for the thing suggests that he couldn’t have stolen it.
Then I said that can’t be the rule that defines stealing, because people steal things all the time when they aren’t going to pay for them, like for example because they can’t afford them. Because if I can’t afford something, there is also
but I doubt the OP would ask how it could be considered stealing if I walked out of a store with it.
In the interest of full disclosure: I draw my paycheck from a major movie studio, so I’m not an entirely disinterested party to the conversation.
That being said: The movie is a product of somebody’s effort, and it’s obviously worth something to you - at the very least, the time and effort spent pirating it, and the time spent watching it. In other words, you acquired something of value without compensating those who created it.
The value of a movie viewing drops over the lifetime of a movie. From the tickets on premiere night via matinee, PPV, DVD, prime-time cable and finally unattractive timeslots on obscure channels. That’s market forces in action, and movie producers bank on this fact to recoup the investment. It is their choice how to gauge the market and when to drop the price.
But you wanted the product at its most depreciated price without waiting for its actual value to drop - and you acquired it in a way that absolutlely keeps the creators from getting any compensation.
I won’t necessarily call it stealing, but I’m not about to call it fair or honest, either.
Wrong. You cost the rightful owner their lawful royalties for the copy of their product you stole. You have no right to that music/video/whatever unless you acquire it legally.
If every act of piracy literally cost the copyright holder money, then I can think of more than one artist whose work I would download 24/7 in order to bankrupt them so humanity might be spared of any more of their performances.
Let me rephrase. When I download or stream something, by my actions I do not deprive the studios of any money they might have otherwise had. Or put another way, if I looked for something to stream and was unable to find it, my alternative would not be to purchase it, it would be to watch nothing at all.
None of this is disagreeing with your point in particular. I’m claiming no right to the media, and yes, technically speaking I do “owe” them (although how do you figure out how much someone owes for watching a stream of a live TV show?).
Is there a distinction between downloading movies versus TV shows, music, etc.? I do not believe in downloading movies or computer games illegally, but it feels like TV shows or music are (slightly) different. Not legally, of course. It just seems like movie and especially game piracy is a major problem that deprives studios of huge amounts of revenue.
i think the resistance is the very idea of copyright as a concept, as applied to something that is easily replicable. why should one pay for something that could be recreated so easily, where demand meets an endless supply?
i’m not questioning the need, just trying instead to illustrate the difficulty in accepting the term ‘stealing’ as applied to copyright violations.
a crude analogy would be like trying to copyright a cooking recipe against home use. you know if it were halfway enforceable there would be an RIAA for chefs.
I just wanted to say pirating movies still in the theater is a waste of time anyway. The quality is almost always crap. If you can’t wait for something to come out on DVD or Blue Ray it’s probably worth paying the 12 bucks, because it seems it is ‘that’ important to you.
Once they’re out on DVD the better quality burns come out on bit torrents. But then you could just as easily get the DVD anyhow.
I tend not to watch anything I’m unwilling to pay for, if it isn’t worth my money it probably isn’t worth my time either.
I tend to only use bit torrents for films I have trouble finding a copy of, mostly foreign films that haven’t been released to the states, I’ll still purchase them at a later date when the become available. Also If I miss an episode of a current series and their replay/on demand takes over a week I’ll download it and feel slightly imorral.
Replication isn’t creation. The Harry Potter movies cost hundreds of millions to create, yet once they’re digitized, identical copies can be recreated at essentially no cost.
And with no concept of copyright, anyone can distribute copies. It’s just that one distributor - in this case, Warner Brothers - is saddled with a humongous bill to pay, and that is going to hamper their market position just a bit. So without copyright, why would anyone go to the colossal amount of trouble it is to create a modern movie? Sure, there are nice movies out there produced on a shoestring budget, but for the big display pieces, you’ll never make your money back on donations.
And admittedly, I can see some merit in the availability argument.
