Comment by SoftwareMaven | Hacker News Reader

Comment by SoftwareMaven | Hacker News Reader

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"""it's not any different than taking money (even if it's pennies per person) out of our pockets"""

I thought you had a good comment until you got to this part. This tripe, shoveled by the mouthful out of Hollywood, is way too simplified to be meaningful. I'm so sick of hearing this without any thought to the other side of the piracy coin: access and exposure; or the side of the coin (people who would not have paid you a penny under any circumstance).

I honestly don't know if piracy reduces or increases film revenue (it appears to have helped the game industry and put Windows on 90+% of desktop computers worldwide), but it is this mantra that has led to crap-feats like SOPA and PIPA. A balanced conversation about it (and not one saying "piracy is all gain thanks to exposure") would be refreshing.

EDIT: And for the record, I don't pirate. If I can watch it legally, I don't watch it.

EDIT2: I don't care about being downvoted, but I feel like there is an argument I'm missing. If you downvoted me (or feel like doing so), let me know why. I Prefer to have my worldview challenged so I can change or expand as needed.

I don't pirate and have no ties to anyone that produces content. With that said; what is the difference between doing free coding or consulting for exposure and access? I used to own a consulting company and people tried that line a lot, even when starting out I never consulted for free to get "exposure;" why should we expect any different from other industries?

I don't expect them to give anything away for free. I also don't think they should be granted laws to guarantee they receive income. What I want is a rational argument.

The "every copy pirated is a penny out of my bank account" is too simplistic. Note that the argument wasn't even the more reasonable, but still too simplistic, "every copy pirated is a penny not put in my account".

I'm not asking anybody to give their creative works away for free. I love good content, and I'm willing to pay. I also am willing to not watch what I can't get legally and (by my consumer definition) reasonably. But framing this argument as "pirates are stealing out of my bank account" has allowed large media companies to shove insane, unconstitutional crap through congress.

As a result, when I see those simplistic arguments, I'm going to ask for a little more thought out of them. If a content creator is willing to at least talk through the complexities (better would be an honest analysis), I'm willing to listen. Anything else, IMO, is repeated propaganda from an evil source (the studios being the source, that is).

I do believe it is "wrong" to watch pirated content but like I said in another comment, the problem has two sides. People are doing things that "come naturally" to them on the internet and Hollywood is trying to map an old business model onto a distribution method that has so many different dimensions and norms that it's caused a schism between the (potential) consumers and themselves. People, then, resort to pirating a movie because it's cheaper or they want to be able to watch it multiple times.

I think Amazon's content delivery "system" as it stands, now, is a wonderful answer to this whole issue (you buy it, you can download it, and it also sits on your own S3 account accessible by all of your devices!).

Either way, Hollywood needs to innovate (or be disrupted) in order to turn all of those people pirating into monetizable consumers (I really do think that is possible, too).

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