Re:Swiss Government: Downloading Movies and Music Will Stay ...
by jrockway on Saturday December 03, 2011 @06:27AM
(#3307509)
Arguing about "rights" doesn't mean anything. It's just as easy to say "if content creators won't sell lossless music files, they don't have the right to create the content."
Really, the market is just being efficient. Right now, people want X. They could buy X for the price of a plane ticket and a CD and spend 36 hours of their time to obtain it, or they could download a torrent and be done in minutes. People are going to do the second one, regardless of the fact that they have no "right" to. Why? Because it's easier, and humans are lazy.
As soon as every piece of music ever made is available from one store as lossless files, then there will be no excuse for music piracy. But as long as the middlemen want to segment the market artificially, the market is going to fight back. It's the recording industry middlemen that are hurting the artists, not the pirates. The pirates are just correcting the market.
(The same goes for movies. Get rid of bullshit DRM like HDCP and region coding, and suddenly your sales will go way up. People don't want to buy a special player / cable / monitor combo that supports strong cryptography. They want to watch a movie. So don't do that, or the pirates have you beat on features alone, even though you created the content. That sounds fucked up because it is! Movies are not designed to prop up failing consumer electronics companies' bottom line. They are designed to be watched.)
Really, the market is just being efficient. Right now, people want X. They could buy X for the price of a plane ticket and a CD and spend 36 hours of their time to obtain it, or they could download a torrent and be done in minutes. People are going to do the second one, regardless of the fact that they have no "right" to. Why? Because it's easier, and humans are lazy.
As soon as every piece of music ever made is available from one store as lossless files, then there will be no excuse for music piracy. But as long as the middlemen want to segment the market artificially, the market is going to fight back. It's the recording industry middlemen that are hurting the artists, not the pirates. The pirates are just correcting the market.
(The same goes for movies. Get rid of bullshit DRM like HDCP and region coding, and suddenly your sales will go way up. People don't want to buy a special player / cable / monitor combo that supports strong cryptography. They want to watch a movie. So don't do that, or the pirates have you beat on features alone, even though you created the content. That sounds fucked up because it is! Movies are not designed to prop up failing consumer electronics companies' bottom line. They are designed to be watched.)