I don't know when everybody got so entitled that they were willing to go through whatever means necessary to get access to content otherwise unavailable to them, but it boggles my mind how comfortably everybody seems able to justify it.
I'm trying to think of a time when people were not happy to consume whatever content was available to them. The history of media technology has been the history of people duplicating works other people wished they wouldn't. Historically many famous authors had their copyrights ignored an unauthorized works distributed.
> go through whatever means necessary
That's a melodramatic way of describing "google it, click the first likely result, click a button, wait a few minutes".
> it boggles my mind how comfortably everybody seems able to justify it
In this case we're talking about people not being allowed to purchase content. This isn't a dirty hippy waving an "information wants to be free" sign, it's a frustrated professional being told their money is no good if they want to watch the new Game of Thrones season everyone is talking about. I'm not saying they're right, but it's not hard to see how they're able to internally justify it.
I'm currently in a small non-US country, and I have a US netflix subscription that goes through a proxy, which my girlfriend, in particular, adores. If Netflix forces us onto the very mediocre local version, my girlfriend will be upset. And she's going to torrent the shows she wanted to watch so she can follow the developments and talk about them with her friends in the states. Does that boggle your mind? Is the a terrible entitled person? Maybe. But I think it's pretty universal.
After doing all that, if they expect a group (e.g. a non-US country, or students who can't afford cable) to stop participating in the bought-and-paid-for culture that can't be avoided, that group will find a way to participate anyway.
It's not entitlement to want to be able to participate in the dominant cultural trends (made dominant by consolidation and advertising).
That sounds pretty entitled to me.
Since when does one being able to talk about yesterday's Game of Thrones episode become some kind of divine "cultural right"?
Circumventing the content creators wishes just because you can do so without getting arrested, because you are too cheap, or some other nonsense excuse is entitled.
Few things that are crucial to this:
- digital content is copyable for pretty much free by its very nature;
- we're talking about copying, not stealing
- we're talking about information, creative content, which kind of works differently than physical items
Expecting to create a piece of information, give it to some people and then still being able to retain exclusive control over that thing is what sounds entitled to me. It infringes on other peoples' right to process what reaches their senses and do whatever they like with it.
Intellectual property is an ugly hack created to make creative works compatible with market economy. The absurdity of that solution finally became visible as the marginal cost of copying the medium dropped to almost zero. Yes, we need the hack because many content creators need to get paid (and to believe they will get paid if they invest time in creating), but ultimately it's a problem with the economy. Ultimately, we should strive to fix it on the economy side, and get rid of the IP altogether.
Also, if we're comparing divine rights with each other then sorry, culture > capitalism. Humanity is better-off this way.
Game of Thrones is not "information". It is not a basic human right. "Humanity" is no better off if you can watch it now or in a weeks time.
More like I want to pay to watch today's Game of Thrones and I don't see why I'm not able to do so.
If anything, this should push production houses to work better with rights distribution. In India, that's already happening with "Premier" channels which run seasons alongside US counterparts. For shows that appear on now Premier channels, I have not torrented a single one. I am also sure that if not for rampant torrenting, this would have never happened.
Internet is a great leveller. Take a deep breath, let it in. By the time we all have gray hair, this will be long sorted out. You can't lock down IP by country in 2016. If you built a system that loses money if it leaks internationally, it's your fault. Next, try to build a business model that has more chances of survival than chances of sand retaining in your fist.
The real problem is that people still expect a century old business model to work. If it doesn't, they lose their minds.
If a tree falls in another part of the world, and nobody saw it, nobody visited that forest for 10 years, nobody wanted to use that wood, did it really fall? Did American oak planters lose money because of it?
What artists and moviemakers could do is, sell the right to see contents before others. Assuming that DRM is cracked and leaked after some time and will inevitably fall into the "public domain", users would not buy "a song" or "a movie", but the lifestyle of watching it directly out from the factory, while others would have to wait until it's cracked.
When the season 2, 3 and 4 of Arrow aren't available in Europe, we know that Netflix isn't selling the lifestyle of being up-to-date with fashion.
They'd work on commission. They'd work on crowd-funded commission. If you want a movie made, you pay for it yourself. If you want to watch a movie that's already been made, why shouldn't that be free? The work has already been done and paid for.
The work has already been done and paid for, after all.
Personally I disagree, I don't think the current model is so broken that it can't be fixed. Although some things about it are just plain dumb. The primary part that is almost comical in this case is the bit where content owners refuse to make the extra money that they could so easily make by selling/renting to the millions of people that want to pay them and instead spend a fortune on "public relations" and copyright trolling.
Digital files have none of these.
The rationalization here was that the work was already done, so why shouldn't it be free?
It's a silly rationalization and I'm pointing that out.
You'll need to add yet another caveat to your original claim to make it work.
The fact that the business landscape wouldn't tolerate this as a legitimate method is a failure of ego and imagination, not something inherent to the system.
If you have a point, you need to find a better way of making it.
I expect and tolerate a certain level of lawbreaking from teens and pre-"settling down" young adults.
Categorically, I put piracy somewhere among underage drinking, using soft drugs, and irresponsible vehicle operation. The pettiest of petty crime. Do those boggle your mind too?
I don't expect anyone to inherently respect IP law in the portions of their life where they're broke. Unless someone close to them makes money off of copywritten material.
We're not talking about food though, we're talking about Orange is the New Black, which is far from a necessity.
Beyond that, if I thought it was just broke teens pirating, then I probably wouldn't feel the need to speak up, but it's not nearly limited to that demographic. I have six-figure-income, grown up friends who swap pirated seasons of TV shows and in-theater movies with each other on Plex.
You're much safer going 59 than 80, even if everyone else wants to go 80. You're in front of them; they see you and take appropriate action.
Speed doesn't kill, speed differentials do. You should not go drastically slower than the speed of traffic for the same reason you shouldn't go drastically faster than it.
At least on trips I've taken to the US, people there seem a lot more inclined to stay within the speed limits than they are in Europe. Take a trip on a UK motorway where there isn't heavy traffic, and you'll find at least 50% of people are going over the 70mph limit.
If a person take it upon themselves to eliminate the disadvantage from being poor by accessing culture illegally, which has no harmful impact to anything or anyone physically, then I don't blame them, especially if they are a child. Its not their fault that the incentive model of culture demands that poor people must be denied access in order to force rich people to pay.
You really don't.
Love/belonging includes feeling a part of society. In today world where culture is global (especially for so called millennials) consuming that culture is part of feeling that you are part of society.
And most people are very happy (and very able) to pay for that. So why not sell/rent it to them?
You don't need to eat with white people if you are black.
You don't need to get married if you aren't heterosexual.
You really don't.
Also from the international perspective, consider if shows were available in California, but not Nevada. Artificially limiting an information product due to geography is a quaint 20th century idea.
Yes, but you are an American who largely has legal access to the content at a reasonable price in relation to your income.
That isn't true of some guy in Mexico who makes $5k/year and is Region 4 with Australia.
Keep in mind this is perhaps one of the few cases were you aren't totally powerless.
Everything seems arbitrary when one does not know or cannot guess at the (usually more complicated) underlying reasons.
Hollywood along with every other major content producer has a marketing reach which is global. If people in these countries did not want to see the new Star Wars or listen to the latest American pop star it means that the marketing sucks! So what you are imaging is a world where the content producers are basically telling their potential audience to go F themselves.
There are underlying moral issues to this story. The first is censorship and blocking access to certain groups of IP blocks. Clearly this is getting written in to content licensing contracts and that's too bad. If an IP address is not doing something hostile it should not be blocked. The second involves asking extremely poor people for more money. Someone that makes $190 a month just isn't going to be paying the US market rate to consume content nor should they - and that absolutely is different than getting a below market or price subsidized physical product or item.
Somehow I'm having a bit of difficulty empathizing with the law here.
Pardon the repetition, as I already stated this elsewhere, but if you had a really juicy secret that you wouldn't give to me, I wouldn't take that either, even knowing full well that if I take your secret, you still have the secret. I respect the rights of others to do whatever they wish with their things, whether those things are property, digital goods, or secrets. If they want me to have it, they'll make it available to me. Until they do, then I have no entitlement.
Incidentally, in many countries of the world - it's not illegal to bypass geoblocking.
Wouldn't buying DVDs and the appropriate DVD player from a different region and importing them also qualify as evading geoblocking? Is that illegal in some countries?
First of all, I think that this level of control over released information is something a person should not be entitled to. Not in principle, on the fundamental-rights level. If you created something and gave it away, you should lose control over it, period. This is the only way society can develop itself - it's how new art is created ("every artist copies"), it's how science is being made ("standing on the shoulders of giants").
Secondly, let me explore your example of telling a secret. If you tell a secret to someone, and then someone goes behind your back and tells the secret to me, then your gripe is not with me - it's with the person you told the secret to. Similarly with piracy, I'm not downloading the content from your servers. Someone else is offering it to me. It's not my duty to ask where did he get that information from. Please, if you must, go after that someone else.
Now I understand the need to control some of this behavior in order to make it easier for people to pay for their food by creating information. But let's be clear about it - as a society, we're doing it as a favor to the creator. He's not entitled to copy rights, it's a gift that's meant to encourage people to spend their time creating instead of earning money in another way. It's a side effect of scarcity economy. In a world where one doesn't have to pay for basic living expenses, there's little to no reason to have such control on information copying. If you created it and gave it away, it's no longer yours.
Now so that we've established (just assume it even if you disagree) that the whole IP thing is just a side effect of our economy, it follows that:
- one should not be trying to make a moral issue out of it, beyond making sure the content creator isn't completely screwed - but that's because of basic human decency
- like with all other negative side effects of economy, we need to fix it
Which means, it's the IP, not piracy, needs to go away.
Blocking things geographically didn't work in socialist times before 1990 and expecting it to work now is rather naive :/
Good luck watching A Game of Thrones 5 years behind everyone else without hearing who dies.
I haven't kept up with it, but I heard allll about a particular Stark last season (details omitted on the off chance that someone else hasn't). Even from newspapers and congresspeople on that one, IIRC.
This works well as an aesthetic device for popular culture, where the purpose is in large part to catch the zeitgeist in the short term. I don't want to sound snobbish about this - Charles Dickens was a master of this type of thing, after all, and his present reputation as a Great Writer In English Literature would amuse and appall the snobs of his day, if they only knew. The best parts of mass popular culture endure after everyone knows he's his father, or its a sled, or little Nell dies.
<vague spoiler warning if anyone hasn't seen it yet>
...
...
"THIS CHARACTER WAS ORIGINALLY MARKED FOR DEATH IN STAR WARS THE FORCE AWAKENS!"
Ok, sure, you didn't give me a name, but going into the movie after reading that made it pretty fucking obvious.
That being said, I've never been good at keeping up with popular culture ;)
Why is it entitled to work around discriminatory behaviour based on country of origin?
If I went to your physical store and you said "Sorry, no Mexicans, we only sell to American residents" I wouldn't have any issue getting the products through another channel.
In fact hopefully my actions will help ruin any attempt at making a profit by engaging in such scummy discrimination and so I actually have a moral imperative to get the products through another channel.
If you make something that people want, then make it hard to get legally, alternatives will be found.
Region locking spurs piracy, it doesn't hinder it.
People perform any number of mental gymnastics in order to justify their own interests. I'm reading A Struggle for Power right now and the 10 years before the American Revolution was basically one long exercise in mental gymnastics by both sides.
We act on our interests and justify them post facto.
But you should consider that my experience is most people view the idea that some for-profit entity owns culture or can tell them that it's immoral to share media with each other to be laughable.
Like if HN decided that any criticism of products posted here was unacceptable and someone called those who still posted constructive criticism "entitled".
I'm not saying it's that simple, but understanding the viewpoint will help you understand what's going on.
If I'm willing to pay you for it, why can't I have it? What reason is there to deny me the ability to access culture if I'm willing to pay?
Is it because I was (without any choice of mine) born in the wrong country?
Am I entitled for being born in the wrong country? That sounds more like snobbery from people born in the "right" country.
And if they really want to do illicit or unethical things, they still do it (and justify it) as long as they don't think they will get caught.
This is one reason looting happens during a disaster. This is why people cheat on their taxes.
Also, I think you are conflating entertainment with art. They are not the same in my opinion.
Even acknowledging that musicians are exempt from a lot of what I consider good arguments in that piracy is effectively a marketing cost (because piracy does help them attract new fans, who might go to shows they can't pirate, etc., etc.), it just never seemed right to me to use other people's things in ways they did not want me to.
I think you let it go. You can't capture all the value you create. It's not how living in a society works. All our culture is based on taking someone else's work and changing it, combining with other works and sprinkling a little of your own insight. You can trace every movie ever made back through other movies, then through songs, performances and literature, pretty much back to earliest recorded history. This is partly because "nothing is new under the Sun", but mostly because works of art are enjoyed within a cultural context. If you quote Shakespeare in your movie, you don't do that just because the words feel kind of nice. You're both basing off Shakespeare's work, and - by doing so - you're purposefully making the audience evaluate your movie within the context of Shakespeare's writings, which you probably expect to bring them more enjoyment. And Shakespeare did the same by taking from the writings of his predecessors, etc.
I like the response to the letter that 'hotgoldminer linked. I appreciate the reality, that artists want to earn money too. Personally, I pretty much don't pirate stuff anymore, and I'm happy to financially support authors (and middlemen, though I'm not happy about supporting those who are just rent-seeking). But I disagree on the fundamental moral principle. I think that expecting to be paid per copy of an information that's copyable pretty much for free is not a moral right. It's at best a temporary privilege, though one that people got used to before we had digital technology.
It is easy
There is virtually no way to get caught, only a few out of probably millions do and if you buy a VPN that number drops to virtually zero.
It is easy to justify that you are not really stealing, because one you can't practically buy the thing and two you are not taking anything from the publisher.
Of course there are also those who fundamentally don't believe in copyright being a valid agreement, at least in its current form. I count myself weakly in the last group, in that I think music and movies should be subject to a compulsory streaming license - the producers gets paid for each view, but they do not get to choose who can watch when or where.
The right to participate in local culture (and thanks to the Internet, local often equals to global) is something core to society. Thinking you can prevent people from exercising that right is being entitled.
Let's just throw the legalistic argument out in advance. It holds as much weight in people's minds as the speed limit does.
Availability is part of it yes.
Another part of it is respect, and the media industry has a systemic problem with showing any to its paying customers. Those in charge have yet to realize that all the DRM, all these systems serve to inconvenience people who want to give them money in the first place - and I think the idea that people can be chided into giving due deference to the whims of huge corporations when said corporations won't even do something as simple as sell usable product, is just a bit backwards.
Yet another part of it is practicality, and XKCD says it better than I can: https://xkcd.com/488/
People been smuggling English bands on vinyl into the USSR and making their own copies "on the bones" last time when vinyl was big (and so was the USSR). So I suggest that maybe 50 years ago?
Often, at the price and availability that is legally provided, I simply am not going to pay. At that point, the question is whether I get to consume it at all and they gain a potential fan and future customer, or I don't.
In this day and age it doesn't make sense for me to buy an indie album not available on a streaming service without already knowing that I like it. If I did that every time I wanted to listen to something, I'd be out of money. Nor am I going to drop $40+ just to watch a single season of a TV show. Once my money is out of the equation, everyone loses by me not consuming anyway.
Do you think your government should determine what you, as an adult, should be allowed to watch? Do you think a government should be able to block certain works for religious reasons?
This even includes stuff for which Netflix is the original distributor, like House of Cards, because they may have licensed the content exclusively to a broadcast TV station.
I wasn't aware that the unavailability of House of Cards was tantamount to torture, and personally, I don't see it that way at all.
Which is why at first it worked, then it stopped thanks to the Internet, and now it's working again, because everyone's moving to SaaS model. Which, by the way, is a step backwards in progress.
There are plenty of people who think that think gay people shouldn't be allowed to be married. I understand that too, and also disagree. Just because a lot of people think something doesn't make it right.
It took real people time, money and effort to make the shows that others are pirating, and to my mind at least, their efforts entitle them more to it than my "need" to watch it entitles me to pirate it.
> To the contrary, I understand it perfectly, I just don't agree with it.
I don't really understand how it can 'boggle your mind' while you still understand it. Mind-boggling implies that it's surprising to you, which it shouldn't be.
Don't get me wrong, while I do not entirely agree with your point of view, I understand it. But to describe it as mind-boggling would be both inconsistent and perhaps a bit condescending. It seems to me that it would be better to express understanding and then explain why you disagree, rather they to pretend 'being startled'.
In the same way that I understand the appeal of, say, scientology (e.g., You are a superior being, and with just a little help, we can make you far more successful, rich in pocket, body, spirit, blah blah), but it still boggles the mind that people fall for it.
I understand the appeal to self-justify taking something from another that you want more. I understand the appeal of copying something you don't own, or can't buy, which doesn't physically "take" anything away from the owner. I understand those things just fine. What I don't understand is how low the lack of respect for your fellow man has to be that they can create something, not give it to you, and that isn't a deterrent from just taking it anyway.
Even if I accept the argument that it doesn't take anything from the owner (which I don't), and that a given copy of data is nothing more than a secret a friend won't tell me, I still respect other people enough that I'm not going to dig through their things until their secrets are mine.
I could defend my point of view by saying that I would simply not download certain things if there was no easy way to do so, but clearly we disagree on this issue. But arguing that it's 'simply' lack of respect for your fellow man and 'simply' taking does not do the issue justice.
Either it is as simple as you say, and all of us who pirate are lesser creatures than yourself (which would be convenient to conclude), or it's not as simple as you say. I don't really see how there's a third option, and that's the problem I had with your comment.
As for the rest, it's very possible that despite how much thought I've put into it, I'm completely wrong.
Offtopic, but your focus on the word "simply" made me wonder if I'd said it. I hadn't, so I'm curious as to the focus on it.
To me, if someone creates (or has) something unique, and doesn't want someone else to have it, then they should not. It doesn't matter to me whether it's freely available on the pirate bay, or locked up in their sock drawer; they created it, not me, and if they want me to have it, they'll either give it to me, or make it available to me to purchase.
Anything else violates their wishes on their thing.
That is, if you and only yourself have it, it's of course immoral for me to coerce you to give it to me, or to take it from you against your will. But if you give (a copy of) that information to a third party, the third party now owns a copy, and should have the same rights about it as you have. Which includes giving that information to me, for free.
There's no other way for it to work that makes sense. Just like you don't have a right to tell something to someone and then issue a gag order, you shouldn't have such right to any other form of information.
Of course, exceptions are being made because of the economy, but then let's be clear - piracy is bad because of economic reasons, not moral ones. Morally you're privileged by being able to limit distribution of information in the first place.
This is an extraordinary amount of personalized respect to give faceless companies who are literally only acting as they do in order to extract the maximum amount of money from "content" they did not create.
> To me, if someone creates (or has) something unique, and doesn't want someone else to have it, then they should not. It doesn't matter to me whether it's freely available on the pirate bay, or locked up in their sock drawer; they created it, not me, and if they want me to have it, they'll either give it to me, or make it available to me to purchase.
That's what I would call an argument that comes across as 'simple'. Self-evident, almost. But because so many intelligent, moral people disagree, there's probably some element in there that you're oversimplifying (from the perspective of those who hold a different point of view). Not acknowledging that is what bothered me, but of course it's fair enough if you hold this view and express it as your perspective.
Anyways, I do see your point, and I do respect it. The way I see it, nobody can fault you for choosing to be more 'restrictive' or 'narrow' in your ethical framework (where 'narrow' is not meant as an insult)!
However, copying no matter how perfect isn't the same kind of infringement under law or common morals.
If someone peeks at your house, then builds a perfect replica on their own land then you may be sad that you lost the uniqueness of your properly without their paying you for the privilege of copying it... But it's not "piracy", and will hardly cause a pitchfork mob to form outside your neighbors newly copied house.
if it's not otherwise available then how is pirating not 100% harmless?
Publishers should be aware at this point that they can either start dropping barriers to content access or people will just find another way.
Is that discrimination the worst thing in the world in the context of entertainment media? No. But then again, neither is the resultant piracy of the media in the first place. Swings and roundabouts, both sides are at fault here; there is no particular moral imbalance in favour of the distributors.
Especially when torrents are readily available in HD and fiber internet connection rather widely available.
Also since most of the streaming licensing deals kinda forget about most EU countries except the 5 biggest ones, the sympathies towards the copyright holders are kinda running low. You can show a middle finger to people in a country so many times before they stop caring about your copyright licensing deals.