Re: the bolded part, unless you’re speculating on something that may happen in the future, I’m unaware of (and really don’t think) that is currently happening.
There is an agreement with the major ISPs that when the movie studios send a complaint to them citing an infringing IP address, that they will send a series of warnings before ever penalizing or divulging the infringers’ identity to the complainant.
AFAIK, the ISPs do NOT monitor your traffic and report violations at all. (That would be nearly impossibly, anyway.) It takes specific complaints to trigger any actions on their part.
Fair enough. I’ll assume you’re correct and note that, details aside, a number of people are/were still worked up about it and it’s a direct result of the “This isn’t theft and you can’t convince me otherwise ha-ha!” mindset.
Theft is not a crime because you obtained something you had no right to obtain. Theft is a crime because you deprived another person of their stuff.
Copyright Violations are no more Theft of revenue than Rape is Theft of sexual rights, or Murder is Theft of life, or Assault & Battery is Theft of personal security.
Again, many people consider it a crime for the reason I stated. Just like if I sneaked into someone’s kitchen and wrote their prize winning cookie recipe down, most people would consider it stealing the recipe. You don’t have to like it, but that’s how people see it. I was arguing against the idea that pirating doesn’t meet any layperson’s definition of theft.
Also, you’re being deprived of your exclusive, lawful, right to determine how your work gets distributed. Regardless of how it’s argued legally, I think most people see that as taking a loss just as it’s a loss to get your cookie recipe stolen and distributed.
It’s a crime to copy a recipe? Assuming you are a friend who was invited into the home (i.e. not a burglar) copying someone’s secret family recipe is not a crime, it’s a violation of trust.
We all know what piracy is, and why it’s illegal. Calling it theft doesn’t provide a better description for anyone, because you’re using a sloppy, wide ranging definition of theft that can cover any loss from any (even legal) situation.
“You stole my customer.” “You stole my girlfriend.” “You stole my show and tell idea.” Are those things illegal, or even objectively bad? The fact that someone may call it theft/stealing means nothing.
It’s certainly a loss, or at least potentially a loss, and it’s illegal. Perfectly illegal, lots of laws around Copyright, lots of crimes regarding the violation of those laws.
The question is whether it’s illegal in the sense that Speeding is illegal or in the sense that Stealing a Car is illegal. They’re both illegal things that people do with cars, but they represent crimes of very different scale.
I said most people would consider it to be stealing the recipe. Are you saying this ISN’T how most people would describe it? Are you saying it DOESN’T fall under the broad category a layperson would describe as theft?
I suppose people throw self-entitled bitch fits when they get speeding tickets as well so there’s certainly that.
Of course it does, I am just saying that the layperson category is so broad, it adds no probative value in a discussion.
But nobody is trying to make them feel like bad human beings (or fine them tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars) because they got caught doing 67mph in a 55mph zone.
Someone said no one would consider it theft by any definition, including laypersons. I said they were wrong. It very much fits the lay definition of theft and people who do it are trying to use a technical argument to avoid an unpleasant label that most people would apply to them.
I laugh at them when they cry about their speeding tickets and go on about how dare they get a ticket and shouldn’t the police be catching robbers instead of stopping them from speeding, etc. So there’s that similarity. I’m not willing to directly compare movie piracy to speeding in terms of fines or whatever because they’re two completely different things. In terms of “Crimes I’ve personally decided are victimless so I’m going to ignore the law and I’ll throw a fit if you try and stop me”, I think there’s some common ground.
This is starting to change. Adult swim used to have many of their shows available online, but now you must be a cable subscriber to see them. I am dreading the day Viacom decides to go that way.
For those who think this all pointless entitled bitching, think about this: how would you feel if you had to buy a Sam’s Club or Costco member ship to buy things at Amazon? Or you could only read the NYTimes online if you also had a subscription to the Washington Post?
People don’t illegally download media products because they don’t think it is wrong.
They do it because fuck it. It’s almost nihilism. The world sucks, there are no jobs, students loans will never be paid off and are inescapable, it’s meaningless, it’s all coming crashing down, and in the meantime you are asking them to deny themselves entertainment out of some moral duty to the corporations they likely place partial blame on for the world’s problems.
Campers, the original point of this thread was not piracy but that Hulu, by requiring a cable/satellite subscription, is cutting out many of its viewers who pay for the service by watching the commercials they show. That the Herb Tarleks in ad sales can’t sell enough “air” time to keep the channel from showing either dead air or the same damned ads over and over means there is a problem with staffing, not the business model.
Users demand the right to skip the ad, and unlike TV/radio/newspapers, the internet gives, say, McDonalds, exact data as to how many people actually skip the ad. It’s far, far easier to spend 4/CPM on a TV spot when you know that a high % of people won’t change the channel and they’ll still listen and/or watch the ad (even FF-ing through the commercial via DVR still count as an “impression”), then to spend the same $ on a medium where you have data that 50% of people (made up %) don’t even watch the damn thing.
Internet ad rates are far lower compared to physical ads. There’s no limitation on supply. There is no demand (your mom looks forward to the Sunday ads in the paper, Super Bowl ads get a lot of talk, however, nobody looks forward to a pop-up.) The fact is, internet ad revenues suck compared to “physical” (magazine, newspapers, etc) ad revenues, just as internet sales figures suck compared to physical sales figures… and still do.*
It still costs the same to produce these shows.
So we have clients who know you’re not delivering, infinite supply+minuscule demand, and a cost model that is far, far more difficult to shrink than your revenues… that’s a bad business model in any book.
*Here’s a PDF of Yellowbook (Yell Group, PLC) latest earning results. Yellowbook, for those of you who don’t know, is in the business of directories - phone books and internet directories. In addition to their core business of phone book ads, they sell a suite of internet offerings: SEO/SEM, directory listing placements, ads pushed through their iPhone apps, etc.
So, 10 years after they started their big internet push, how are internet ads doing compared to “nobody looks at them anymore” phone book ad revenue?
Even in 2011, a horrible year for the industry, phone book ads generated twice the amount of revenue per advertiser than their internet offerings. And they likely took the same amount of manpower to sell, set up, and generate the ads. And you will find this relationship across all mediums - magazines, newspapers, what-have-you.
So it is not at all surprising that Hulu is going to a subscription model. How else are they going to make it?
And yes, this footnote was longer than the original post. Sue me.
It seems to me it’s more like I can only read the NY Times online if I have a subscription to the NY Times through one of its authorized distributors. Which is close to being true - non-subscribers can only read 10 articles a month. And there are plenty of other newspapers and magazines that either don’t allow non-subscribers to read on-line or limit their access. Adult Swim is on a cable network, not over-the-air, right?
I don’t think it’s pointless entitled bitching- but I do think that people on some level don’t realize that the Cartoon Network is paid a fee ( per subscriber I think) by every cable system that carries it and therefore cable subscribers have paid for the Cartoon Network already - and they don’t want to give it away for free because that makes it hard to sell.
The thing is, there are no internet providers where I live who allow you enough bandwidth to download all your shows. You would think that they would know that an hour show in decent resolution is a couple gigabytes at least, but some of them still want you to get by on five gigabytes a month, and none of them let you have more than a couple hundred.
