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Comment by Stunting | Hacker News Reader

It's stealing, specifically from myself and others in my industry that you haven't heard of that. Making movies would be impossible to be without your

- Lesser Known actors - Assistant Directors - Stunt Coordinators - 2nd Unit Directors - Stunt Performers

and I'm sure there are others. Residuals factor into our income, allow us to qualify for health insurance, empower our unions, and provide a stable income to continue working in an unstable career.

All so we can make better entertainment for you! When you pirate, you're stealing money from us.

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But... you don't own the copyright to the movie. The studio does. You were paid a wage for a job.

You can accuse the pirates of limiting your potential for future earnings, but that is not the same as stealing from you.

my contract is directly related to the post box office profits of the movie.

Fair enough, but still, depriving you of potential earnings is not the same as stealing.

If I can't buy something for a price that's worth it to me, I will just watch something else. It doesn't mean I'm going to pay more for it.

You get the same amount of money either way.

If you choose not to pay for their movie and watch something else, you are correct that you didn't steal from them. You did steal from someone else just like them though. If you pirate their movie, then yes you did in fact steal income from them. The act of choosing to pirate that particular movie changes it from a matter of potential income to a loss of actual income.

Right, so that isn't stealing. It is in fact what I advocate strongly. If more people did that, more content they would enjoy would be provided at a reasonable cost.

But extracting the value of watching something without paying the fee for that service...that's stealing.

Not to argue either way about piracy, but it sounds like you might want to work on getting a better contract.

ha. You are not wrong. The winds are shifting and I'm optimistic that i will be able to individually garner a better contract over time even if my union fails to help with it.

Well when you spend your money you are literally stealing it out of the hands of my and my friends in banking.

In this example, the banking provides the service of a safe place to keep my money until I spend it. That's what I pay for, in the form account fees and the banks ability to leverage my saved money for their financial gain.

100% the opposite. Bankers make their money from the flows of cash streams. Putting my cash under a mattress or setting it on fire steals it out of the hands of your banking friends.

This may be a regional difference, but we make most of our money on fees. Cashflow isn't actually worth that much in the current economy.

Not that it matters though, I was trying to make use of the "common knowledge" that banks make money from your deposits, and that therefore you spending your money instead of depositing it in a negative return account is costing us potential revenue. I know that's not how banks make money, but it's the culturally accepted explanation for how banks make money.

How much of your money has been taken from you? Not hypothetical money you think you might have been entitled to, but money that was actually yours. How much was taken from you?

around anywhere from 2 - 25 cents per viewing per consumer. Over the course of my career that can break down to easily 7 figures if I was to work on say the original Star Wars.

Not hypothetical money you think you might have been entitled to. The truth is, not a single cent was stolen from you.

did you extract the value of the entertainment without providing the fee? That's stealing money from me.

If you weren't gonna watch it, don't watch. The argument being made is you in fact, do want to watch it, you just don't wanna pay for it. That's stealing.

If it's any consolation to you, I've almost certainly never seen a movie with you in it.

Did you steal any content that was behind a paywall? If you did, you have taken money out of my industry and made it more difficult for it to be a viable career path in the future.

Your industry pretty much stopped making movies I care about, so I don't care if your industry curls up in a ball and dies.

If I didn't pirate it, I wouldn't watch it, so you're not losing anything in my case. Additionally, if your work is actual art rather than mediocre filler content I probably bought your merch, which I definitely wouldn't do if I was getting raped by a streaming service, so if anything odds are you're coming out ahead. Beyond that, if I'm pirating, people start conversations about TV shows I don't feel compelled to hijack them by talking about how all streaming platforms are bullshit, which I totally would do if I wasn't pirating.

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