The ability to change features, prices, and availability of things you’ve already paid for is a powerful temptation to corporations.
The ability to change features, prices, and availability of things you’ve already paid for is a powerful temptation to corporations.
the way i see it, on big budget productions anyone who is relying on their paycheck to survive already got paid for their work, and the ones collecting royalties or sales percentages are rich enough that i couldnt care less. smaller independent studios or individual creators are the ones that i will always support, and in cases like itch.io games that are pwyw i will take the free download and figure out how much i will pay based on how much i like the game.
Don’t you see the problem in your reasoning? When everyone would just pirate, nobody would be able to get paid. The money that pays the wages for the workers isn’t willed into existence, it ultimately comes from the consumer. Bigger studios pay their workers before the project is finished. That money comes from ongoing sales they produced before.
If I’m pirating, it means I either can’t afford the item, it’s too hard to get, or the ways to get it have been made overly complex and frustrating. This means literally no money was ever going in anyone’s pockets to begin with.
How am I preventing a sale that was never going to take place to begin with?
i would see your point if my reasoning were extended beyond where my boundaries are set. my position is based on a lot of factors and isnt a blanket statement that piracy is never immoral or that everyone should pirate all the time regardless of circumstances. if everyone were to pirate, it would certainly change my perspective on it as a broad practice, though not absolutely.
my argument, at least from the perspective of my original comment, was more of a reflection of my feelings that the least deserving are making the most profit off of any given large studio property, and i advocated piracy as a reaction to that given current studio structuring and the state of the entertainment market. and i understand that the profit of previous properties are directly responsible for the amount invested in subsequent works, but there is a certain degree of profitability which makes me feel like any argument about how piracy is hurting business is petty complaining over what is comparitively loose change for those that continue to be paid. i dont quite get a pang of empathy for a few thousand or even tens of thousands of instances of piracy for a property with profits in the hundres of millions considering how many instances were from people priced out anyway.
That’s Like saying I don’t pay rent to the landlord, the house has already been built.
If a society agrees on this being right, no more houses will be built. And no movies will be made.
If society agrees on something like that then houses will still get built as obviously we’ve entered the socialist utopia were all waiting for
Capitalist brains stuck on “buh peeps need money or not do nothin”
well, when reduced to those terms they so seem to be similar concepts but needs and luxuries are not exactly equivalent, not to mention the difference between a tangible possession vs an intangible “experience” which have wildly different relationships, transaction types, and even grey area over what is considered piracy.
also, claiming society has agreed on these exchanges being “right” isnt exactly accurate. society certainly tolerates these exchanges, but to what degree has changed significantly in recent years. theres a good debate over intellectual property ownership, and whether the original idea is more valuable than the creation of the work itself. certain aspects of filmmaking, for instance, are recognized as being more significant to the finished work than some other roles (directors, cinematographers, etc) but the fair compensation of other roles which make no less significant contributions to the relevance of any work is a subject on which society cannot make a fair judgment without knowing the details of every relationship.
in the end, i believe piracy is and should be viewed as an organic market force which should prompt corrections in order to minimize, but due to the nature of the transaction it will never go away.