https://outline.com/6XShGU

https://www.billboard.com/amp/articles/business/8545169/2013...

Still, there probably needs to be some legislation around piracy, even though it seems to not affect sales much.

It felt like the Internet would solve all these problems, like you'd be able to experience culture from any part of the world however you liked and at the same time as the rest of the world. Sadly that never happened. It's much better now but it still feels like the media is crippled by old local distributor deals. The fact that e.g. Netflix offers different movies for every country is something that honestly does not make any sense yet everyone accepts it.

When I got my first Kindle 12 years ago my Amazon account was registered with my local European address so the books available in store were all complete trash romance pulp novels. Once I simply changed my home address to some random location in New York I suddenly had access to hundreds of thousands more titles. The Internet never delivered on its promise.

Almost every single person I knew back in the day who installed Limewire/Kazaa/Bearshare, bought an R4 cartridge or modded their Wii went from buying at least a couple of pieces of genuine media each year to never buying one again.

That being said, perhaps a more useful metric for calculating lost sales would be how many people acquired the technology used for piracy, rather than how many times they used it.

It'd be interesting to find out of film companies have studied this idea. Presumably there is some limit where blockbuster "viewing parties" with N or more people would make less money for the film than some fraction of those N people going to the cinema. They can't (yet) DRM living rooms.

The reason I love computer science and tech and excel at some parts of it, is simply because I could access any book, pirated. I have a huge will to learn, and piracy was quite literally the only means to learn. Once I worked and got on my feet, I started buying a lot of the books that marked my learning (because nostalgia and also great resources), and if and when I can, I always buys the books.

Let's not talk about movies. My town STILL has no cinema. Nearest one is 100Km away, and costs about 15$ for a ticket. So if it wasn't for piracy, I would've probably never watched Iron Man, and never dreamed of having my own Jarvis, and hence never taking up speech recognition and deep learning. Again, now that I can, I had periods where I watched 3 to 5 movies a week in the cinema, because I have the means to.

I believe people are more likely to buy books/movies when they can. But for those who can't, I believe it's almost always a net positive to society to give them access to those resources.

Around the 00s I was into Polish Rap. Buying a CD in Germany from a polish Artist was something that you just couldn't do. So the only option I had was to download it.

Later when I wanted to buy the CD I couldn't because either the store did not had it or it was sold out.

If I wanted to watch polish tv shows or cartoons I either needed to later download them or my family needed to record them on VHS.

In this regard the Internet helped when it comes to Music.

But when it comes to tv shows and movies... Its a mess and you will end up with 10 subscriptions and hope that you find that show.

I also think that with movies and tv shows, piracy and will come back because of that reason alone.

Growing up with more money to spend, I bought legit copies of those games (and more) from GOG just feeling nostalgic. Heck I don't even play them.

Now I don't play pirated games, simply because the potential problems (virus etc) outweighs the cost (I usually wait for Steam/GOG/Epic sale anyway).

Same thing for software.

For books.. during uni time I usually borrow books from uni library, and make a copy for personal use (so I can highlight the pages). I guess that's piracy.

Like FIFA games. I've never bought one even though Ive been playing for years. But I grew up with no money to buy them amd when I did have the money, the game was all about microtransactions. So its still a no.

My biggest problem nowadays is not that I can’t afford the things I love but that there is hardly anything I actually want. But when I do I often get multiple copies, whether it is on different platforms or to share the joy with friends.

That being said the effects of piracy are both severe and negligible due to the quality. While it probably doesn’t affect big corporations at all, the small indie people sometimes suffer catastrophically from it.

Is there a way I can give away my novels as "pirated ebooks" to a German audience without having to seed a torrent and without making this easily traceable back to me as the author?

It would probably even boost sales and also help people with less money, I just don't know how to do it. :(

"You can only watch this two months after the US release", "This isn't available in your country", "You need an internet connection to watch this", "You can't watch this on Linux", "You need to pay for 170 channels to watch one", "This that one show you want to watch requires a £12.99 monthly subscription", "You will pay cinema prices but will have to supply the TV, seating and only get to play it back once", "You will pay new-DVD prices but won't be able to share it with a friend"

We pretend that the surge of Netflix, Prime, Disney online services means this is getting more open, more free, but it the same game via a different medium.

Piracy still offers a better service, less bullshit. If they stopped treating people like criminals, yes, they might lose some cash, but they'd also pull in the people they've lost to years of abuse.

The commercial internet never did. Don't forget about Torrents and lib gen rus. They're part of the internet too.

> The fact that e.g. Netflix offers different movies for every country is something that honestly does not make any sense yet everyone accepts it.

People "accept" it because it's convenient and they are not aware that there are other options. How would you suggest people reject it?

I do remember one site that allowed me to do download SG1 episodes (about 128kbit, and this was probably cinepak or some form of mpeg1 compression) over a modem, and that was a lifeline.

When I got to Uni in Oct 2000, I could use BitchX/IRC on the lab irix machine to use a massive 10 MEGA bit connection to get voyager episodes. Compared with downloading on a 33.6kbit connection over a phone line that cost at least £2.40 (about $5-6 in today's money) that was an amazing experience.

Even recently they decided not to bother releasing Lower Decks internationally. Had to get a Bittorrent client to watch it. That's not the case with things like Discovery and Picard which were released pretty much simultaneously.

If a media company won't sell me what I want to watch, I'll go elsewhere. I paid $6 to my phone company to get a shocking quality copy of Voyager. For me, Piracy is not trying to avoid paying for it, it's about trying to get it.

They've mostly cottoned on to the fact it's a global market now at least.

The biggest issue is and always will be accessibility and ease of access and these two are hindered by outdated global licensing agreements.

If you sell be a DVD with DRM that takes longer to start playing than a copy I downloaded. I will download it. If you force me to watch unskipable 10 year old ads before I can play my purchased DVD I will pirate that movie.

Now I just rent them from iTunes when they are avaliable.

The fact that it used to be easy to access all kinds of useful data, and now you can't isn't an accident, The Internet is still the same, the governance around it isn't.

People believe they have access to free thought, speech and completely objective information. Really though, your world view became limited, bias, censored, crafted and curated.

People who truly hold alternative views are often banned from the few places left Joe Sixpack would try find important, unbiased, real (sometimes controversial) information.

The Internet was real freedom for a brief while, and it was fucking great!

Wasn't a large reaction to disney doing this during the pandemic "I already paid for the service why should I pay again"?

Outside of dating, why spend that much money if you can stream the entertainment you want on release?

This way the industry is still able to monetize and those without the resources can still get access with some effort.

I pirated like crazy growing up poor but internet savvy, but now that I’m a well paid professional it isn’t necessary and isn’t even worth the effort when I can just rent/buy.

https://www.euractiv.com/section/digital/news/german-parliam...

We have the means to sidestep these physical impediments, yet we just recreate them digitally. And in the case above, the physical actually turned out to be the solution to the digital impediment. It's just too funny. The greatest barriers in this world aren't technological - they're social, economic, and political; always have been.

Just another reminder that we're living in clown world.

That's a tad bit too simplified. There have by now been several studies/reports [0] [1] that found people pirating a certain media, are also spending most of their disposable income on said media.

Sure, there's also the "I don't want to waste my money on possible garbage" curiosity/test-drive piracy.

But a very large chunk are just people who enjoy the medium so much that they can't get enough of it. So they will spend all their monthly disposable income on it, and when that's gone, they will pirate because of the FOMO created by marketing hype around the newest release getting thrown at them.

It's very much a manifestation of the consumerism that gets glorified in most modern societies.

[0] https://torrentfreak.com/0-more-on-content-than-honest-consu...

[1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/evkmz7/study-again-shows-pir...

A few well regarded authors (Charlie Stross, Cory Doctrow and Peter Watts spring to mind, I'm sure there are others) have been commercially successful despite (or because of) releasing some of their work for free download. Might be worth looking into how they approached it?

It’s really a convenience and accessibility issue.

The big torrent alternative in the German warez scene are direct downloads from filehosters. Which means there is no real "central place" where you can just put it for widespread exposure because it's a whole bunch of different portals/forums with individual uploads.

There's a couple of well known bigger forums, like Gulli, Boerse or Bloodsuckerz, and countless "blog style" ones often specialized on certain media, those can be found on the Raidrush Toplist.

So in practice you would need to sign up to a whole lot of places and post the links to your filehosted books there.

She tried to fire him before the investigation was even done, investigations based on two complaints, one of which was already rejected at that point.

As much as I like hear work, I really do not understand what happened there and why she would do what she did there, like she did it.

Her expertise and what the PP stands for are as relevant as ever, and its getting more relevant each day. Why would she just throw all that away for herself, but alongside that try to sabotage a whole political movement?

Can we please throw all copyright lawyers into an active volcano and try to set up a system that doesn't make it intentionally impossible to legally watch the English language version of a video hosted by Amazon while in a non English speaking country? Also throw the Amazon execs who signed those licensing agreements after them.

And all those news of people's "bought" content disappearing, or accounts getting banned without a way to appeal, aren't exactly doing any good to the "legal" entertainment services either.

I've given up on music in general. I'll listen to the radio in the car, but that's it. If I really want to here a song, its on Youtube somewhere.