This is often suggested on HN anytime there's some minor issue with streaming. Piracy isn't a solution to anything. Yes, there are issues with intellectual property, but most of the issues aren't with movies/TV/art. Without people paying for these things, studios won't invest vast sums of money in them and we wouldn't have the vast amount of high quality content we have today.
I feel like you're describing a huge win here. The idea that our culture needs media juggernauts for some reason is absurd. The "vast amount of quality content" I experience from day to day comes almost exclusively from small creators, creators who's content would in many cases be a hell of a lot better if it wasn't encumbered by onerous copyright laws.
I agree with you, but I wish there were more effort from big-name directors or producers to crowd fund their film or series.
Imagine for example something like the Expanse being crowd funded. That's about $3.5 - $5 MM per episode - a huge amount. And then it takes a year or more to see the content. And the Expanse wasn't really that expensive in the scale of things.
Unfortunately, until a better model emerges, the media juggernauts do serve a function in the marketplace as financiers.
By now, I figured we'd have a lot more visual media being 100% CGI. That would have allowed small creators to ride the collapsing cost of hardware.
You're probably pushing more triangles in ten seconds of a modern video game at 4K than in the entire run of Babylon 5's groundbreaking CGI usage. So we've definitely got the resources available to deliver broadcast-quality CGI video to the masses, and the right tooling could make it accessible.
I could imagine franchises that started with modest visuals, and if they can find bigger backers (more subscribers, advertisers, merchandising, whatever), they can level up with more resources behind them.
I also imagined that studios and directors would love the idea of CGI actors-- you could do things that are still infeasible with practical effects, you can pull them back out 10 years later and they haven't aged, and you don't need to worry that they'll suddenly go on a binge that effects their ability to film.
Copyright laws protect small creators too. I'm not sure how they could expect to make a living if their work could just be copied and sold or given away by anyone.
> Copyright laws protect small creators too. I'm not sure how they could expect to make a living if their work could just be copied and sold or given away by anyone.
Blatantly false. The majority of these small creators are Twitch Streamers, Tik-tockers, Youtubers these days. All of them give their work away for free effectively.
In particular, the value in the Twitch-stream is from interacting with the chat realtime. Its effectively a live performance tied to a chatroom in some niche subject matter that the audience is interested in.
All of those can probably be released public-domain and free to copy, and they won't lose a single subscriber.
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Others are paid primarily through their Patreon account or other forms of merchandise (dolls, plushies, etc. etc.). Or direct advertisements inside of the content (see Oversimplified and VPN). You can't "skip" the ad because the Ad is part of the video itself and worked into the script.
FWIW if you don't want to see sponsored segments in youtube videos etc, there's a tool for this called SponsorBlock which uses crowdsourced timestamp information and allows you to opt out of seeing various different kinds of content you'd rather skip over (sponsorship, self promotion, likecommentsubscribe segments etc.)
Well, economics has something called “revealed preferences”. Despite your opinions, most people do prefer media from the juggernauts based on where they spend their money.
Based on where people spend their money, your preferences are in the minority.
Is it that they prefer media from juggernauts or that they're more likely to know of media from juggernauts?
Juggernauts are able to put their movies in theaters or cable/streaming television, put trailers in front of other movies or tv shows, take out billboards, etc. Juggernauts are able to market the hell out of their products, while most little guys don't have that opportunity.
I imagine that this also has a lasting effect. For example, juggernauts are more likely to have a streaming service trying to pick up their media while also putting that media ahead of little guy's media in that streaming service's recommendations. I'd also guess that over time the probability of organically finding little guy's media drops at a significantly faster rate than juggernaut's media .
Well, we have studios like Blumhouse that create low budget movies that do get a lot of press, have trailers, get plenty of promotion etc. They do well on an ROI basis. But they don’t top the box office.
Since 2014, all of Blumhouse's movies are owned, distributed, and co-produced by Universal Studios. Well, except for their BH Tilt division, which is partnered with Neon for co-production and distribution. Their most notable low-budget film that kickstarted their rise was Paranormal Activity, which was straight up acquired by Paramount Pictures for an actual theatrical release.
Blumhouse wouldn't be where they are without the juggernaut's purposefully propping them up.
I think you’re presenting a false dichotomy here. Piracy has always been there and studios still make a lot of money.
People are still willing to pay for things, they just want a copy of the thing that they paid for so that it cannot be stolen from them later. The only answer here IS piracy.
It would be if Blu-ray disks and DVDs weren’t covered in copy protection making it close to impossible to backup your physical purchases, or guarantee your long term ability to watch them.
How many people here still have a functioning VCR? Hell, how many still have a functioning DVD player?
Dvd and Blu-ray are deeply upsetting things. Used to be that there were unskippable adverts and all sorts of junk I don’t expect if I paid for it.
Continually adding on user hostile additional revenue streams, like adverts, on top of something i already paid for is one of the major drivers of piracy.
How about i pay for things I’m buying but take a pirate copy as a backup?
It’s already clear that if you make digital content available at a reasonable price people will pay for it. The thing we’re arguing about is who is stealing from whom.
Here’s a genuine dichotomy. Assuming I’m interested in the media, then I’m either buying or I’m renting. If I’m renting call it renting. If I’m buying don’t steal it from me later by hiding the fact that it’s a rental in thousands of lines of legalese.
No. Piracy is the only reason things moved in acceptable direction for regular consumer. Were it not MP3, P2P, codecs, matroska and other technologies and formats, we would all still be beholden to some ridiculous locked down standard imposed by the copyright holders and bricked-by-design devices ( ala Zune, which had crazy DRM approach ). Let us not forget that there were ideas of destroying your PC if there is an indication of not allowed content on it.
And even those gains, which were won with overwhelming disobedience, because early internet people were at least technical enough to burn a cd are now being eroded again, but under different guise. Piracy stopped being a thing, because it got easier to get stuff you wanted when you wanted it without trolling the internet. Now with streaming wars coming to a close, content owners think they will get to impose rules not realizing that they are making the same mistake thinking kids will not learn how to bypass whatever restrictions they put in place all over again.
I don't like this argument. It's true that without copyright we would not have the current status quo, that much is obvious. But what we could have instead if everyone was allowed to remix any content and create things freely based on other published works is unknown and unknowable.
It is not obvious to me than having copyright is better than not having it. It would be better for some people and worse for others.
Agreed, I do think we need to make sure creation is rewarded, but creation should also be used for the good of society not hoarded for wealth. That's the problem we need to solve, we need to look for systems that encourage creation WITHOUT the need to create artificial scarcity and means for people to collect rents on intellectual property.
To wit, intellectual property itself is likely a concept that keeps us locked in a local maximum.
There’s a middle ground. If I want a movie or TV show, I’ll buy it from iTunes and then strip the DRM / pirate it. If I can find it streaming somewhere that yt-dlp works, I’ll download it. I don’t mind paying for content but only if it can’t be taken away from me after the fact.
Sure. I guess in this very narrow situation where the content is no longer available, I don't have an issue. But the person I responded to seemed to be suggesting stealing content as some sort of broad solution to an undescribed issue.
we need less superhero movies, more independent content that is there for the sake of itself, and not for the sake of making money.
tying money to art cheapens it.
art is priceless, attaching a price therefore is a regression.
Not everything is about money, not everything needs to be done.
better that it is free: if you couldn't sell movies - the only ones that would exist are the ones people truly wanted to make - the quality of the artform would skyrocket, even if the quantity plummets.
It would depend on what your definition is, I suppose.
The general narrative and has been if you copied it without written authorization, you are a pirate. Even if you are archiving a copy for future generations.
You can't even look up news articles from 10 years ago because of that.
