Re:Netflix: Piracy is difficult to compete against and growi...
by roenxi on Monday February 05, 2024 @06:55AM
(#39260258)
> The original owner no longer possesses the commercial value of the thing.
The pirate hasn't gained any commercial value though. I'm pretty sure that "stealing" involves a valuable thing getting transferred from one person to another. Operative word being transfer. Everything the copyright holder had to start with is either retained by them or not possessed by the infringer. So it can't be (and isn't) theft.
Re:Netflix: Piracy is difficult to compete against and growi...
by rakoo on Monday February 05, 2024 @09:50AM
(#39261781)
> The original owner no longer possesses the commercial value of the thing.
Not exactly: the original owner still has all the commercial value, as decades of piracy has shown that commercial pieces still exist.
What the owner has lost though is monopoly over distribution and thus money exchange. It is possible to get the content from other places, and maybe, maybe not give some money back. The proliferation of exclusive content on numerous platforms only confirms that.
That's what you steal when you pirate.
People have been buying into shared cultures for centuries. Sometimes being able to afford access to a certain culture - and excluding those who can't - is part of the culture itself.
In a bottom-up cultures people are happy to pay because they feel part of the scene and they want to support it. A big part of that is user/costumer/fan experience and a feeling of community.
Top-down cultures feel exploitative and predatory - because they are. They separate the culture into producers and consumers and enforce strict gatekeeping of the relationship between them - which usually means a one-way financial obligation that feels like extortion, and unnecessary complications and frictions in the experience.
The real issue here is the insistence by the media-cos that movies can only ever be top-down.
The predictable outcome is there's now a shared culture of piracy in which people willingly support the pirate sites instead of the official distributors, and running a pirate site can be incredibly profitable.