And if the asshole companies don’t get paid, the artists don’t get paid, because in general those assholes pay the artists. So yes, some of the artists do care.
Legitimate question: how is pirating that much different than say, subscribing to Netflix and abusing their steaming service? Do they pay a small royalty tax every time someone accesses the content? If not, I don’t really see too much difference other than the fact that the “someone” who had to pay for it (the original uploader) is a company with a subscription base rather than a single person with the ability to upload a torrent to a tracking site.
The person who created the content is most likely getting paid based on the number of downloads. They made a deal with Netflix. Netflix made an educated guess based on their models of how many movies people watch. That’s a business decision that companies make every day. The content people should be allowed to make their own business decisions in the same way, and they have (with Netflix). They can make good or bad decisions, but it should be up to them.
You’re not abusing their service unless you are violating the terms of your contract. Using it a lot isn’t abuse.
Well, one hardly has incentive to go to Amazon to buy any song that can be found on Youtube, since it’s pretty easy to convert any Youtube video into a file suitable for an mp3 player.
Or so my friend tells me.
There are at least threfoure incentives for purchasing music found this way - 1) a desire to support the artist, 2) a desire to possess the associated artifact, 3) a desire to have something in its entirety without a bunch of hassle, and 4) (this is a big one) a desire to have a high-quality recording instead of something that sounds like it came to you over amplitude modulation in rough weather.
Have you actually listened to a video on Youtube recently? E.g., this sounds just as clear to me as anything I’ve ever listened to on a CD player. (Warning: Black Dog, may cause you to jam.)
I downloaded that youtube video using RealPlayer Downloader, then opened the resulting flv file in Super© to get the audio properties:
Audio Format : AAC
Format/Info : Advanced Audio Codec
Format version : Version 4
Format profile : LC
Format settings, SBR : No
Duration : 4mn 55s
Bit rate : 116 Kbps
Channel(s) : 2 channels
Channel positions : L R
Sampling rate : 44.1 KHz
Resolution : 16 bits
Stream size : 4.09 MiB (42%)
Whether this is sufficient quality I can’t say, but it sounds fine to me.
Not always. Comcast for instance has an interest in “On demand” video. If you can get that from a torrent, you won’t buy their “on demand” service. If Comcast is your ISP and cable that would be a conflict.
They just move the domain name as well. A very well known torrent site was Example.Com and now it’s Example.ME
You find out easily enough when your stuff stops working and you go to investigate.
The Japanese P2P are very secure but they are annoying as all get up 'cause of the way they operate
An artist must charge what I think is fair or else stealing it is moral.
bit rate is a little low. CD uncompressed bit rate is 1411 kbps. With lossy compression of 7 to 1 you get a bit rate of 192kbps. Most of what I’ve been listening to is at least that. The difference isn’t huge though until you listen to them both. The higher bit rates sound cleaner and have better definition.
edit - never mind - that’s for mp3 encoding, aac is more efficient and gives you better quality at lower bit rates.
You needed to see it? :rolleyes:
Sure, it’s easy, but so what? I’ve never bothered. Buying is even easier. I feel no COMPULSION not to buy. The 99 cent cost of a tune on Itunes is no barrier to purchase for me. You pick up a few tunes every week and after a while you’ve got a huge collection and it’s all legit. Youtube gives me the opportunity to listen to the tune in its entirety, sometimes several times, and figure out if I want it in regular rotation on one of my playlists. The Warners Records people (I think that is who’s doing it) who regularly shut down videos on Youtube are idiots, shooting themselves in the foot. If I cant check it out there, I won’t be buying it, that’s all there is to it.
The sound is good enough to listen to when I’m at work, but the video is still pretty bad. Even the “HD” stuff on You Tube looks terrible using a projector. Most of the time, I’m watching it on a small window on a monitor, but the few times I’ve used it on my projector, I wasn’t impressed at all.
Well, sure. Absolute requirement for proper nerding out. Specifically, I wanted to check out some of the early dialog with Michael Caine’s character w/r/t Ariadne in order to confirm or refute my general impression of just what the heck happened.
The point is, I paid to see it in the theatre and I bought the BluRay. (This is natural, because it’s my favourite movie of 2010.) The MPAA will insist that the they’ve suffered economic harm on the grounds that I also downloaded a dodgy copy off the internet, which is isn’t really a supportable position. I think for most people, their entertainment budget is pretty much a constant. I still go to the movies, and I still buy movies and TV shows on disc. The flow of monetary energy from me to the industry is the same.
Of course, I don’t claim that I pay licensing fees for everything I download, and don’t expect to. I recently grabbed a little b-grade sci-fi thing called Monsters, and it’s been sitting in the queue for
a couple of weeks, as a back-up. I’ll probably watch it, eventually, though the reviews are mixed. Who knows how that’ll go? Maybe it’ll become clear after a half-hour that it’s a total waste of time (like Paranormal Activity.) Maybe it will surprise and impress me, (like Splinter, which I’d never have heard of it it didn’t appear on a unnamed Nordiic torrent site,) and end up on my shelf in all its hi-def, special-features-laden glory. One thing is certain: after reading the reviews, I waffled whether or not it was worth downloading to give it a shot. There’s no way I would gamble actual money on it. The actual loss to the MPAA is $0; any claim to the contrary is based on pataphysics.
The point is, no one here is going to believe that you are, in any way, representative of the typical movie stealer. Most people steal because they do not already have what they are stealing, period. The “most people pirate something they already have” excuse is even more unbelievable than the sign you see posted in head shops “For The Use Of Tobacco Products”.
Maybe “Most People Pirate Something They Already Have” is unbelievable, but do you really believe people don’t use sites like Youtube to preview something they are thinking of buying, or to discover something they might buy?
Oh, I have no trouble believing that, but this business about converting Youtube into a downloadable file “so I can decide on whether or not I want to purchase it” is just so much bull.
Of course it’s bull, as it is unnecessary. You can listen to a Youtube video over and over again on your computer to decide if you want it or not just by accessing it. Why go to the trouble?
And why go through the trouble(and obvious danger) of spending who knows how much time bit-torrenting a movie file from a large group of anonymous yahoos when you can buy the damn thing?