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Comment by pbhjpbhj | Hacker News Reader

What percentage of people who would watch a 'cam', but not watch the movie legitimately later, would have paid? If I had to guess I'd go <1%.

What percent could, even if they wanted to pay, watch the movie legitimately in their country?

Does it matter if you watch a cam if you're not even able to pay for the movie?

The thing about movies is that they're also part of societal culture - in The West at least.

In my personal opinion copyright is all kinds of messed up, and limiting the length of copyright terms (to say 7 years from public release) first would somewhat legitimise such harsh actions.

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"The thing about movies is that they're also part of societal culture - in The West at least."

This is an interesting point. Moral correctness aside...

The content industries try as hard as possible to make their stuff "socially mandatory" via marketing. If they could make it law to consume their product they would.

So, socially: For as long as there is such a social pressure, there will be people who try to fulfill that pressure at least expense.

And financially: In a world where you have increasing financial inequality, the balance of people for whom it is "worth their time" to find a cheaper way becomes greater.

So I don't think piracy is going anywhere, until the motivations are gone. For that, "all digital copies are free" is technically feasible.(Again, moral correctness aside.)

But I don't know what the commercial world would look like to allow that to happen.

Yes, this is why I think a copyright term of ~7 years fits (for mass media). It allows recrual of costs and it allows participation in media that's still culturally relevant. Further, it allows still culturally relevant works to be remixed, worked on, 'improved' by the populous.

Currently the long copyright terms are not encouraging innovation; the same works are being resold to the same people over and over.

I agree the current copyrights are stifling innovation, and largely leveraging branding.

Marvel, Star Wars, Star Trek to name a few. These things haven't died out because they have people invested in their brand and storyline.

But they also haven't done anything super cool because they don't want to take the risk they might damage their brand. They try to make"reliable blockbusters".

camming is a concretely tangible theft.

when a movie is being sold on disk after theatre showings close out, there is already a return for investments and disk sales are just gravy.

disks are played many times lent out to family and friends watched in recap after the theatre and donated to thrift shops. a large group of people can "steal" by watching for free multiple times, but millions have been made in theatre wages paid and investors pacified.

when a movie is cammed this cuts into the revenue.

i believe in a co-existence being possible however thats short circuited by the one "free" view == one lost/stolen sale mentality.

They paid for the ticket didn't they? And even if it was a projection room cam they could have offered a seat there and yet they didn't so no material loss to claim. You can't claim that my tree falling on your grass did damage to your hypothetical Porsche and claim losses of it.

They still got their share of the fixed pie. Theft isn't infringement.

no theft isnt infringement, the infringement happens when you distribute your product. the viewing experience is what is paid for by ticket, camming subverts the sale of the experience. if someone went into a strip club with a camera and recorded the live show thats theft as well. When the dancer produces thier own disk and distributes it thats in the same boat as a DVD release and any number of eyes can experience that video when the producer gets [guess ~ 50$- 100$] for a disk sale.

Theft almost doesn't seem like the right word for it. I'd compare it more like when someone sneaks into a movie theater without paying. You could argue about whether or not the people stealing these films ever intended to pay money to see them in the first place. Studios should figure out how much money they actually lost on ticket sales to pirates who would have paid for a ticket if they had no access to a cam version and then compare that to how much they spend in lawyer fees and IP firms trying to combat it. Considering how easy it is to find a copy, watch it, and suffer no repercussions, I'd say they either are wasting their money or not spending enough.

I don't buy that any significant population watched extremely low quality cams vs paying $10-15 for a theater ticket. I think it was mostly a stupid risky prestige thing for sceners.

Theaters probably "lose" orders of magnitude more revenue to teenagers watching 2-3 films after only paying for the first ticket.

>when a movie is cammed this cuts into the revenue. //

Is there proof of this?

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