It's not though. You could argue it is indirectly stolen from you by impacting your potential for future earnings, but please explain how the "direct" part of your statement works. Are funds withdrawn from your bank account when someone pirates a movie?
The workforce's income is contractually tied to the amount of post box office profit the film makes. When you steal a show you get the entertainment value without cost of your money. That is directly reflected in my income.
That's fair enough and I did not know that, and will certainly take into account when making future purchasing decisions, thank you.
But the bottom line is, it's just not worth paying for digital content for me, merely by knowing the fact that it's available for free. A file has no intrinsic value, why should I pay for it?
I'll gladly pay for an experience, or service, such as a movie theatre or a streaming platform that does the work of delivering content to me. But there is so much free stuff out there, paying to download the latest Batman movie is simply not worth it.
But what if I don't like Hollywood movies, consider them cheap crap, and don't care if more of them get made? I just want to watch them to see what everyone else is talking about.
But what if someone is not pirating instead of purchasing, they're just pirating instead of doing something else?
You need to consider that maybe the product you are producing is simply not that valuable.
I'm an artist myself. If someone took a photo of something I painted, and started making copies and selling them, yea I'd be pissed. That's what copyright law should be used to protect against.
If someone took a photo of my painting for their personal use, instead of buying one of the photos of my painting that I sell myself, I'd reconsider whether my business model of selling photos is the right one.
> But what if someone is not pirating instead of purchasing, they're just pirating instead of doing something else?
By "something else" do you mean "another activity instead of watching TV/movies/etc," or do you mean "watching TV/movies/etc, just via another method?"
If the former...who cares? That still doesn't justify it. Just because I chose another recreation activity instead of watching a movie doesn't mean that I'm entitled to the movie for free. Not choosing something doesn't have an effect on the price (at least on the micro level; on the macro level, this is of course the concept of "demand," but even if the demand is so low that the "correct" price is effectively $0, that still doesn't give you the right to steal it -- the Intellectual Property is still property of the owner, and they are the only ones who have the right to sell it or give it away, just as you or I have the right to sell or give away any of our property, be it a couch, a TV, a pair of shoes, an idea for a story, whatever. It's all property).
If the latter, what could possibly fit that criteria? You're either getting the TV/movie via official methods or piracy, there isn't any other way. It's binary. There isn't a way to get your hands on a film that is neither officially sanctioned nor piracy.
> You need to consider that maybe the product you are producing is simply not that valuable.
Not that valuable? Are you serious? We're talking about products that are considered "low budget" when they cost 1 million dollars to make and at best receive profits of hundreds of millions of dollars. The entire premise of this thread is that everyone wants to watch everything, they want access to everything (i.e. the demand is high and not going anywhere). They just don't want to pay for multiple separate services -- but only because they can compare to and prefer the brief, golden period wherein everything was accessible on Netflix and Hulu, back when they were the only two games in town and were a breath of fresh air compared to the expensive cable packages (which, might I remind you, people still paid -- economically, that means that the price is considered "fair" and commensurate to demand). Back when Netflix and Hulu were both unsustainably hemorrhaging money, I might add.
Paying for 100% of the streaming services now costs <= your typical cable package just 20 years ago, and that's not even adjusting for inflation. So things are still cheaper than they've ever been, with a not-insignificant raise in convenience and overall quality of the product to boot. Had we jumped from cable packages to the current situation, HN would be jumping with joy.
Just be honest: you want what you want, for as little as you can get it for. And that's fine! That's human nature. What's not fine is, because you can get it for $0 pretty much risk-free, you'll bend over backwards defending why doing so is okay.
(Comment too long for HN, continuing in the next one...)
you are making assumptions about the prerequisites. Talking about "income" implies that the person is viewing a show inside a form of commercial contract like going to a place where the show is displayed or buying a dvd or paying a streaming plateform etc…
Downloading a file (containing the show) from a publicly accessible server on the internet is completely outside of commercial contract so there’s no income in the first place.
Authorities can decide to make it illegal to download files from internet but it’s not "stealing"
