Data yearns to be free -- sharing it and copying it cost nothing. Shows are just video data. Forcing real-world, scarcity economics, in a realm where the only currency of the land is plentiful, seems strange to me.
There are so many other ways to monetize media content, and yet we keep going back to DRM and publisher-controlled walled-gardens. It's a complete and total shame.
> Data yearns to be free -- sharing it and copying it costs nothing.
The latter part of that is true (setting aside quibbles about bandwidth and storage not being absolutely 100% free), but here's the thing: back in the days of physical media, of books and DVDs and CDs and what have you, the bulk of the price was never the physical media itself. The paper and plastic was never the valuable part.
> There are so many other ways to monetize media content...
Maybe, but just about all the ones that I've seen boil down to one of three methods:
- charge people directly for the content
- give the content away for free and sell ads against the content
- give the content away for free and make ancillary sales (e.g., merchandise)
Charging people for content doesn't require DRM: essentially all digital music sales are now DRM-free, for instance, and many ebooks are, depending on the publisher.
Also, two other observations.
First, while music publishers were always unduly whiny about the ability to record music at all, burning CDs and making mix tapes did cost money; it may have "felt" just like putting your entire music library up on Napster, but unless you had enough money to just hand out thousands of CDs of other people's music on street corners, it wasn't. It's not really super surprising that digital music piracy made those music publishers a lot soggier and hard to light.
Second, "data yearns to be free" sounds like a rephrasing of "information wants to be free," and I think it's worth remembering that the full quote from Stewart Brand went on to say "Information also wants to be expensive. This tension will not go away." Technology may let us reduce the marginal cost of reproducing anything that can be expressed as data to zero, but that doesn't make everything that ben expressed as data valueless.
We may have DRM and walled gardens, but media distribution is much more consumer friendly than it used to be.
There are many services that offer streaming at a flat rate, where you can watch or listen what you please and when you please without being subjected to third-party advertising. You can also subscribe and unsubscribe with ease, without paying additional fees. Contrast that to prior decades where none of that was true.
There are other services that offer perpetual licenses (I am hesitant to call them purchases) of books, music, videos, and software. You can access that content across multiple devices. In some cases you can even legally acquire it without DRM. Contrast that to early digital media. I remember floppy based software that would disable the installation media once it was installed to a hard drive. You could not re-download your music in the early days of iTunes, and they were considered consumer friendly.
I doubt that many people actually expected information to be free. What they wanted was for information to be convenient and cheap. As for those who actually did want information to be free, there are options out there that respect the creator's wishes (creative commons licensing, open source, etc.).
Free is nice, yes. But money isn't the only reason for piracy. Downloading is easier and frequently faster than ripping the DRM off myself.
Media companies have abused laws and rights that are supposed to encourage and enrich society not diminish and stifle it.
They're beyond redemption at this point. The whole industry can burn at the stake for all I care. Netflix included. (Why does it matter what country I live in again? Why do you remove access to certain shows st random?)
The only media I pay for willingly is books and that is purely because amazon did such a great job of rejecting the authors guild and creating an atleast seemingly competitive market.
If media companies want my money they need to stop suing their largest customers.
They need to stop lobbying my government to enforce their governments rules.
They need to respect fair use.
They need to understand that it no longer costs anything to produce a copy and they are more than capable of finding a business model that works through the use of product placement. Hell they could run ads on their self listed torrents and I wouldnt bother reripping or looking for one without the ads.
Theyre way too focused on producing profits and protectionism than where they should be focused. Creating great entertainment and enriching society.
I pay because I don't want video blogspam and advertorials. There's lots on QVC that you can watch if you want to support that style of content.
Media companies are aggressively litigious bullies and the way they conduct their business is at odds with the interests of the public at large. Not speaking for the others but I have no tears for cry for losses incurred by actors like that, especially not "losses" of digital media licensing opportunities.
The real solution isnt ignoring copyright like i do. That is just all i have available.
The real solution is to reign in the timeframes copyright and patent law lasts for.
Have it only long enough to recoup costs of development and provide some level of capital for the next innovation. Not an indefinite stranglehold on information for the benefit of only a few.
The thing people seem to argue is that these businesses have a free right to profit off of society. They dont, society should demand something in return.
The effect is so intangible for the large media funded projects as well, pirating your local struggling musicians might be another story, but is that really much worse than the current streaming model what you get paid a few thousand dollars for millions on streams?
Remember, there's a big selection bias on that impression.
After all, the people who think it's none of their business if X at work is sleeping on the job don't post about it on social media.
That's basically what I did with a certain popular TV series. I'd torrent the individual episodes, then buy the DVD box sets at the end of the season to pay for it. When it became clear that the writers didn't actually have any idea what they were doing (which was a topic of no small debate at the time), I stopped buying the box sets.
Whether I stopped torrenting it is neither here nor there, but let's just say that the peer comment ("The last season wasn't something I enjoyed, it was something that happened to me") really rung a bell with me. Later, the same story repeated itself with another popular show on a different network, at which point I just disengaged with TV for good.
You could argue that season 8 was rushed, that some battles made no sense, that they botched the Night's King, or that Daenerys' character development was ruined by the abruptness -- though I think this too will play out similarly in the books -- but Jon Snow's resurrection was neither pandering nor the fault of HBO.