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Comment by eli | Hacker News Reader

The question isn't whether it's possible to charge anything. They're not compensating the content creators. If I steal cars and resell them for a fraction of their typical price, does that prove the car industry is broken?

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Except when you steal a car, the owner doesn't have it anymore. If you would manage to clone a car and then resell it for a fraction of its price, it would mean the car industry is broken.

If the price of a movie were composed out of the cost of the materials for the DVD, this argument would be correct. But the price is needed to compensate the people who made the movie. (I don't say that current movie pricing is equitable.)

Content creators deserve to be paid for their work. Taking it without payment and without their agreement is stealing.

> Content creators deserve to be paid for their work. Taking it without payment and without their agreement is stealing.

I wonder how much Hollywood share its revenue with the content creators, not actors but more like writers, filmmakers, and all those that _create_.

are there numbers somewhere?

EDIT: s/studios/filmmakers -- thanks icebraining!

How much does Hollywood share with studios? Which Hollywood are you referring to?

I agree this car analogy is flawed because it correlates a movie to a car as if they are both goods. Media is actually a service (a recorded performance). This not only causes this analogy to break down but your underlying argument that because the owner still has a copy it is therefore acceptable.

Ok, lets say I instead decide I don't like how companies sell their cars, so I 'protest' by stealing a copy of the schematics for the new 2016 model of some car. I construct and sell them for the price of materials, meaning I make no profit from them. Many people who wouldn't have paid 100k for the car now get the car for much cheaper. I'm robin hood now, right?

I think you want to argue with an answer to a different question. Gp asked about monetising - that's getting people to pay the service provider. What happens to the money later is a completely different issue of artist compensation, contracts, etc

I'm not claiming it's legal or a valid business, only saying that the service will not be free soon. If they get paid afterwards, than it's probably something distributors should look at in the future.

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