You can skip the ads in Hulu? As I said above, Hulu doesn’t even take into account my replies, positive and negative, when they ask if this ad was useful to me. The ad just keep on coming.
They went to a subscription model years ago, called Hulu Plus. Now they would be just forcing it.
Oh, what a pile of bullshit. There are plenty of other sources of entertainment beyond the vapid garbage these corporations produce. Read a fucking book.
Yeah, so, you deprived another person of the money you would have paid them for entertainment if pirating stuff wasn’t free and easy. You can argue all you want that you are the cheapest of all cheap bastards and you’ll start picking your nose for fun before paying a dime for entertainment of any kind, but that argument does not apply to the population in aggregate.
I am continually astounded at the lengths otherwise rational people go through in order to justify their desire to benefit from the work of others without compensating them.
Watching the latest sitcom is not a basic human right. No one is obligated to produce entertainment and make it available to you for free - or even for a reasonable price! If you think cable TV, Netflix, Hulu, iTunes, etc. is too expensive, or you don’t like the ads, etc., find something else to do in your free time other than vegetate in front of a display for 3 hours a day.
There is simply no moral justification for pirating media. None whatsoever, full stop, end of story.
That’s fine, because copyright has nothing to do with morality in the first place, it’s a business agreement. The copyright concept is - We provide legal protection so you can make money with your creation, in return you create things for public consumption and allow them to become public domain after a period of time*. The Declaration of Independence didn’t say Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Copyright Protection.
Copyright is business, that’s why a company can spend millions of dollars buying the copyright for Happy Birthday to You, 60 years after the writer kicked the bucket. If that company shits the bed and can’t figure out how to effectively distribute their product, I’m not going to get morally concerned that they’ve lost revenue. The world is changing, keep up.
*The fact that copyrights seem to have been extended indefinitely suggests to me a fundamental violation of this concept, which makes me even less interested in the rights of copyright holders
** BTW, there’s no need to be personal about it, I don’t pirate movies or music, I just think the companies have been real dicks about the whole concept.
So did anyone mind when you made everyone stop singing “Happy Birthday” at your kid’s party?
Look, welcome to the future. Yes, I want to watch or hear what I want, when I want, where I want, on whatever device I want, in whatever format I want, and I don’t want to have to pay much if anything for it.
And so? How does that make me a baby?
As you say, getting things for free is pretty dang easy. Remember when they used to broadcast TV signals into the airwaves, and anyone who wanted could just copy that signal to their TV and watch it? And remember when people could listen to music that way too?
The fact is, copyright law worked pretty well for quite a long time. But our current copyright regime worked with a particular set of technologies that made copyright violation expensive and easy to discover. You needed an industrial setup to press copies of records or print books, and then you had to sell the media on the streetcorner somewhere. A huge capital outlay, high marginal cost of production, and high cost of distribution meant that the only people with an incentive to violate copyright would be an existing publisher, and they all had too much to lose.
But the things that made copyright violation rare and pointless no longer hold. Now it’s cheap, easy, painless. Complaining that copyright violators are scumbags doesn’t help. You can make it illegal to stand in the sun and breathe the air for free, but how are you going to enforce it?
You need an intellectual property system that is mostly self-enforcing, or it’s not going to work. This is the key point. It doesn’t matter creators get screwed, or that people are scumbags. If it’s unenforceable, it won’t work. If it won’t work, then it doesn’t matter what the law is.
I don’t really care about the moral arguments. All I know is that for Parks and Recreation to exist so that some people can torrent it, other people need to be paying the creators/owners of Parks and Recreation so that they’ll make it in the first place.
I’m willing to be that person. I’m willing to live without watching it if the creators/owners decide to only sell it in a channel I don’t care to use. And I’ll be sad when a good show is on Showtime since I’m not willing to pay for Showtime. And I’ll be sad when I forget to DVR an episode of something and it turns out not to be available at the show’s site, or on Hulu, or anywhere authorized by them and so I’ll just hope for a rerun or live without.
And if in the end we all move to torrents with no guaranteed revenue stream for the content owners/creators then I’ll eagerly wait to see what that visual entertainment world looks like.
So they work to make it expensive, difficult and painful.
Digital Rights Management, SOPA v2.0, corporate agreements between providers and content creators, etc. Then people whine about how unfair it all is.
When I first read this, I thought you were joking. Do you not realize how childish this sounds?
You want things that take significant time, effort and money to produce, but you don’t want to pay for them, and since it is difficult for the producers to enforce the law, you think it is okay to violate it.
“But Moommmmm, I WAAANNT IT!!!”
These were not free, they were paid for by advertising. Still are, for the most part. I suppose another one of your petulant “wants” is that you don’t want to sit through 15 minutes of ads for every 45 minutes of programming.
I agree that the current system of copyright law has its problems, but like most laws, it is the best of all the flawed alternatives. What alternative do you propose?
Just as an example, the latest season of Mad Men cost approximately $30M to produce. If it were legal for you to watch the show without paying for it, where would that money come from?
Except that only works if it works. Which it, you know, doesn’t.
And how do the creators of Parks and Recreation get compensated if you don’t watch it? It seems to me they get the exact same compensation if you don’t watch a paid-for version and if you do watch an unpaid-for version, namely zero. Seems to me the difference between zero and zero is zero.
I understand the need to compensate the creators of works that you like, in order to incentivize them to create more in the future. Not watching them doesn’t do that.
Except if you don’t watch it, they have no reason to expect you’d compensate them. I find your point there to be rather bizzare. Similarly private universities should just let everybody sit in on classes for free since the school would be just as compensated as if those extra people just didn’t go to the class.
Or if I told my employees that I wasn’t going to pay them any more since then they’d be just as compensated for their time as if I weren’t employing them.
Doesn’t really work. Seriously. Most of the time this stuff is broken before it’s even released.
Essentially sells the internet. I’d rather the entertainment industry completely died and I had to go watch bad singers in noisy bars or something.
Also doesn’t really help.
Good ideas they’ve got, do you have any?
I think we need to let the free market work this one out, and that does NOT involve ridiculous levels of legal protections for content creators.
Can you rephrase this? I have no idea what you’re talking about.
Maybe you are trying to argue that “It is okay for me to pirate stuff because I don’t really like it enough to pay for it anyway, so no one is losing.” Do you really need it explained to you why this is bullshit?
Who the fuck said I thought it was OK to violate it? Of course it takes time, effort and money to produce shit. Yes, yes it does. And so? Just because I take time and effort to produce these brilliant Straight Dope posts which I am so well known for, does that mean I can charge people to read them? No I can’t, because they have other alternatives. If I start slapping a price tag on my posts, I’ll find out that I have zero customers. And so I get nothing.
This is called supply and demand. Price isn’t set by producers, it is set by producers and consumers.
Who gives a fuck how much money it costs to produce? They aren’t entitled to anything just because they spent a lot of money to produce a TV show. There are plenty of shows that cost money to produce that I can watch legally without paying. On the South Park website you can watch every show they ever made, for free. So am I ripping them off by watching for free?
However, even though creators aren’t entitled to anything, what is true is that we need some system to incentivize the furtherance of the useful arts and sciences.
What sorts of incentives? Social approval maybe. The same reason I spend a lot of time here. You suckers created the content on this website for free, and I can read it for free, and no money needed to change hands. Yes, I’ve given a pittance to support the infrastructure on this site, and sometimes have been exposed to advertisements. But none of that money made it into your pockets, yet you still contribute.
However, even I can recognize that we’d have a vastly poorer media landscape if people just created stuff for fun. So what’s wrong with advertising? Or what’s wrong with a Netflix model, except for everything? The only problem with Netflix is that they don’t have everything ever created by everyone. I’d gladly pay a modest monthly fee for access to everything ever created. And if I have access to everything, who cares if I copy it? Who cares about DRM?
Again, the only problem with Netflix is that it’s not everything. There’s your alternative system. Everybody gets everything “for free”, in the sense that you don’t pay per view, you pay a flat fee. And that fee can be inserted into your monthly bill from your service provider, so we aren’t limited to a particular subscription service like Netflix or Hulu. And the ISPs track usage, and pay a couple of cents to the content owners every time a particular song or movie or show or photograph or game is streamed. Radical disintermediation. And limit copyright to 20 years (or X years) after the creation of a work, after that it’s public domain and you don’t get royalties. If you can’t make enough money in 20 years to justify the creation of a work, then don’t bother.
If this means poor people won’t be able to afford anything except public domain media, then we can have free service supported by extra ads or taxes or charity. Maybe a nickel of everyone’s monthly fee goes to provide free 3-D porn for disabled orphans. Or the orphans have to fill out a consumer survey before every session.
From the standpoint of their business model, once a customer decides to no longer spend money on their product/service, whether or not they ultimately get service (through an alternate source) is irrelevant. The business needs to make sure that they continue to provide enough value that their paying customers continue to pay, rather than walk away, or to go an alternate source.
The competitive landscape has changed, you’re no longer simply competing against a rival media company, you’re competing against costless online distribution. It was years after Napster came and went before there was a viable online music store. Why? Because the music industry was still mourning the death of vinyl, instead of looking toward the future of music distribution. Then they got mad that people were getting the service they wanted (digital music download) the only way possible, the illegal way.
Certainly they are not “entitled” to make all their money back. But are you arguing that they are not entitled to try, by charging a fair price for it and hoping enough people will buy it?
It’s great that South Park is available for free directly from the producers, for whatever reason (isn’t it ad-supported?). That’s their decision, and of course I am not arguing that you are ripping people off who are willingly distributing their stuff for free
But when someone spends money to create something and tries to recover that money (or, gasp, make a profit) by selling it, you are ripping them off if you watch it, read it, consume it, etc. without compensating them.
What is stopping someone from making a TV show on the basis of “social approval” now? Not current copyright law, certainly. You can find a bunch of amateur productions on Youtube, produced on that basis. Hint: they suck.
So, you think a law should be passed mandating that all content producers submit their content to some kind of central, government-mandated repository, and the only way they can be compensated is through this sort of government-run system, that would pay a flat rate or something? Because the only way this system would work is if it were mandatory for all creative work. Otherwise, you would still need protection for people who tried to distribute their work through conventional means, and you’d still be bitching and whining because your favorite TV show wasn’t available through the Federal Entertainment and Media Consumption Management Agency (FEMCMA).
If you really think this is how it should be, you are crazy. Remember that copyright law applies not just to movies, TV, and music, but to software applications, video games, books, textbooks, etc. This is just not a sustainable solution for copyright law.
If you don’t think a law should be passed, and are just expressing a vague desire that “things should be this way”, well, you’re already pretty close with Netflix. Yeah, they don’t have absolutely everything. Tough shit.
I’m not sure what point you are trying to make, in the context of the entertainment/media industry. The industry has already embraced digital distribution. The iTunes Store has been around for a decade. You can’t make these tired arguments any longer. I can start watching any show I want on iTunes within 5 minutes for about $1.99, listening to any music I want for $0.99. What more do you want? People are still pirating shit because they’re too cheap and dishonest to pay for it. That’s all there is to it.
The “value” produced by the entertainment industry is in the content itself, not the distribution. If people are able to get the value without paying for it, how can the industry survive at all?
Without making it illegal for customers to get the product for free without paying, how is anyone supposed to compete with BitTorrent?
Well thank god the entitled pirates are pushing us towards it, huh?
That’s not going to happen. They’re going to continue to push for protection after protection and they’re going to be more successful than unsuccessful in their efforts. So perhaps YOU should be thinking up alternate ways to assuage them if you don’t want to see this happen.
Of course it wouldn’t be mandatory. People could still try to distribute their works in the old fashioned way, it’s just that the government wouldn’t help them do it. If someone copied your unregistered work and watched it, then you wouldn’t get any royalties. If someone copies your registered work and watched it, you would. But if you put up a website and if someone paid you $x you’d let them download your work from your website, well, fine. I imagine lots of creators would have a tipjar on their website that would work just as well.
Yes, it would apply to everything, including software and books and so on. Download a FEMCHA registered book, and the creator gets a couple of nickels.
The point is, copyright law doesn’t exist to benefit the creators. It exists to benefit the public by advancing the useful arts and sciences for the benefit of the public. It turns out that a very good way of advancing the useful arts and sciences is to incentivize creators, and it turns out money is a pretty good incentive.
When people can easily illegally download whatever they want with no consequences (and they can), then how the heck do we compensate creators? Making it illegal to copy stuff won’t work, because, remember, it is trivial to illegally download whatever you want with no consequences. You can try to enact some consequences, but they’ll be random. You can throw a few people in jail for piracy, but you can’t throw 25% of the country in jail. It won’t work. It will fail.
What exactly is entitled about wanting to watch whatever I want whenever I want? I understand it would be entitled if I demanded that the taxpayers give me a private movie theater with a vast library of movies and music and books. Actually, it turns out my public library does in fact have a vast catalog of…movies and music and books, and I’ve watched hundreds of movies for free that I’ve borrowed for free from the library, listened to hundreds of songs, read hundreds, more like thousands of books and magazines. All perfectly ethically according to you. Because I didn’t copy them, I just borrowed them. And I did it with permission.
But the creators got screwed. It was legal, it was ethical according to your lights, but the creators got an extremely small fraction of the compensation they would have got if I’d bought the book or movie or CD. The creators really did get screwed.
You only think public libraries are ethical because they have been around for hundreds of years, and predate the existence of vast media conglomerates. But what’s the difference between borrowing a CD, listening to it once and returning it–and borrowing a CD, copying it, returning it, and listening to it once? Yeah, the copying. But there’s no moral salience to the copying. The exact same outcome. One legal and ethical, one illegal and unethical. Both exactly the same.
Since it’s already illegal, the real question for media companies is “how do you compete with BitTorrent?” I can pretty well guarantee that the answer isn’t a bigger paywall for content along side of finger wagging ads about the immorality of pirating.