In fact, Channel 10 is actually a network.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_Ten

Ten's programming is national. I highly doubt they do their in-program advertising on a per-station basis.

The writer wasn't blaming the movie producer for the advertising, and I'm not sure what gave you that impression. He was lamenting the fact that the quality of the viewing has been damaged by broadcasters' greed.

Netflix isn't available in Australia.

I don't want to deal with physical media nor the DRM that entails. I don't want to have to go to a store every time to find something to watch. It's 2011, and I want digital access.

iTunes is really expensive, and only works on the Apple TV or whatever it's called.

Cable on-demand has a shitty selection, and is exorbitantly priced. And the quality sucks (compression to the max!).

I would pay for the convenience of preventing any legal issues posed by pirating content. I would pay for the convenience of high-definition content which I can download from high-speed servers, and be able to watch it on any player I want. I would pay to support future content creation. Such a service isn't available to me. That's the problem.

What you write reads like this to me:

"It's an argument that attempts to justify rape by pointing to the supposedly heavy burdens born by... if people found a way to rape gas station owners cheaply and easily, they'd... if raping Whole Foods were no big thing..."

Copying a digital artifact is not the same thing as rape, but neither is it theft. It sounds similarly ridiculous to many people.

(For that matter, I don't think it's "piracy" either -- more accurately "bootlegging" or "counterfeiting" (depending on circumstances) -- but I think that term has been successfully repurposed to the point that it's not worth arguing.)

I think the real problem is that folks arguing form this position really don't want to admit that tangible goods and intangible goods are very different things, that they both demand their own governing codes, and (critically) these codes have very little overlap, either conceptually or practically.

Ultimately, this whole "duplication is theft" comes across as a giant land-grab. Thanks to technological developments, we've seen explosive growth in the realm of intangible goods. The folks in the IP business (who did next to nothing in creating this new state) would like us to ignore the fact that the laws governing IP were written before the internet existed. And they'd like us to pretend that those laws would be exactly the same had they been written after the emergence of the internet. Accordingly, we should just transpose our legal code from one sphere to another, and expect everything to work perfectly.

Never mind that the application of this law in the new sphere leads to instant conflicts with the underlying authority on which the initial law was based. Ignore, too, the fact that enforcement, to be effective, must involve surveillance with an absolutely nauseating ubiquity (itself a clearly illegal proposition). And pretend - for a moment - that this is really incidental regulation, not something that has a determining role in the fundamental architecture of the internet.

In short, pretend that's it's possible to discover fire, but legislate away some of the heat.

But there's more to it than not wanting to see a new code that's not as favorable to distributers as the old code. What folks making the "copyright is theft" argument would also like us to ignore is the degree to which our political system has been captured and undermined by private lobbies - a very nasty development that is presently generating a larger crisis of legitimacy that threatens everything Congress touches - including the old code.

Having already spent millions to (legally) bribe congresspeople, the folks saying "theft!" know they are deeply, deeply wrong. They know they represent a corrupting influence in America life. They know that they depend on a set of rules that have become odious. And they want - desperately - to avoid any clear conversation about this. Ergo, you see the constant effort to confuse the meaning of words, to ignore the actual scope and wording of the law, and - above all - to avoid any reckoning with the fundamental premise that allows the issuance of copyrights in the first place.

Well, they're not the only ones who can set the rules of engagement. And I think the first rule that honest people should insist on is the accurate and precise use of language.

I realize that this small bit of honesty is, itself, a threat to those who would use "theft" to describe unauthorized duplication. The fact that they're willing to fiercely defend their tendency to abuse semantics should signal just how thin the ice under them really is. I mean, if you can't have a conversation without warping the meaning of the words you use, is it because you don't actually have anything to say? Or are you worried that the whole edifice you've built is so fragile that the slightest crack will cause the entire thing to implode?

Here's a bit of advice: stop worrying. It's already too late. The old order has already failed. What we're living in now is an Interregnum - the period of limbo that exists between the end of one system, and the point where a new system is strong enough to sweep away the remaining dregs. I'll be the first to agree that this is a very difficult time for artists caught in the crossfire. I mean, the old system can no longer protect them, while the new system cannot yet provide for them. It's awful. But that's reality. All anyone can hope to do is hold on long enough to ride out the disruption stemming from what is, by any measure, a tremendous historical development.

So onward through the fog.

My point is that piracy was an act of convenient theft long before it became an act of supposedly high-minded moral rebellion. And if the impetus for the moral rebellion were removed, the theft would continue. Let's not pretend otherwise.

C'mon - if that's as far as you are looking you aren't really trying;)

No they don't. They make a living doing something else. Putting the music online for free is advertising.

http://www.pronobozo.com/music *If you download the music for free, at least do me a favor of telling a few of your friends to come to the site as well. If you can afford it please make the 5 minute effort to purchase the album, it’s very much appreciated and lets me know you want to fuel the art. -pronobozo"

http://www.pronobozo.com/cred

He generates buzz and advertises his product by giving it out for free.

He makes money from the product for sale, even if it's the same one.

If this is not clear, you can try a thought experiment: how much money would he make if he discontinued selling the product for some amount of money (and did not substitute it with donations or something else)? How much money would he make if he stopped giving it away for free? Arguable less, but > 0, no?

How much money would he make if he stopped giving it away for free? About the same, since his music is CC licensed and allows free distribution anyway. If he stopped licensing it that way, he would lose a lot of money because a lot of his supporters are pro-free culture types. It would be a different business model than the one he's using now.

If he were not asking for donations, but still gave the music away for free, he would make no money.

Free == no money, in and of itself, you have to get the money elsewhere. Sometimes that works, sometimes it does not.

To be "constructive" about it as a consumer, I would first have to be allowed to be a customer. Never mind the fact that the industry has never, ever listened to customers.

BTW, as soon as you call copyright infringement "theft", and by extension me a thief, all constructive discourse ends.

Here's why: most of us like the product Hollywood puts out. But we hate the way it's distributed to us. (For instance, this article's rant about loving "Gladiator" but hating the way it was exhibited in one case). By pirating the material, we end up hurting the creators just as much as we hurt the distributors. So everyone loses.

Piracy will always be around, because it's really easy, and the genie is out of the bottle. At the same time, I believe that people will gladly pay for better distribution strategies. Witness the rise of Netflix and iTunes.

That is a good simple way to put it.

> But it's a voice that cries, "I will cut off my nose to spite my face." ... By pirating the material, we end up hurting the creators

But hold on. Hurt? There is a hidden assumption here: that current 'protections' of copyright stuff are at the right level. But what sets that level? (It could be made law that everyone must pay not just for a copy, but for every use: would you then say creators are hurt by someone who did not pay that?) The level is set according to an overall aim: whether sufficient new stuff is created -- it is not about whether creators are 'hurt', it is about whether consumers are satisfied.

Is there any evidence that creative product is diminishing? (doubtful) Just casually, anyone can look around and see plenty of new books, music, film, TV is being made. That means producers are getting enough, and it is the consumers being 'hurt' (more like ripped-off and annoyed).

Now that there's a new, unlimited supply, the business model has to change. It's not that people won't pay for good content, it's that they won't pay for the same product anymore.

A quick thought experiment: People paid for CDs because they wanted access to music in their own homes. They paid for _access_. A new business model could continue to charge for the same product.

Access could include live streamed concerts, studio recordings, first-access downloads of new tracks, notifications of new bands similar to what you like, small, local, live performances, etc…

Scroll to the bottom here for a quick idea of what they _can_ charge for: http://newsosaur.blogspot.com/2009/10/how-to-sell-news-on-we...

TL;DR It's not the consumer's fault that the industry can't make money on their product.

As an example of a hole, none of your post addresses the point made in the article that it is often impossible to get the culturally-relevant thing that you want legally, whereas it is easy to get it illegally. Take the example of "Lost" that was given.

It is credible to make the claim that Lost was a piece of culture that was unique to the time that it was shown; it was a topic of everyday conversation and its cultural significance has diminished over time. What made Lost valuable and interesting was being a part of the community that watched Lost, in a sense. With the internet, one can reasonably claim that the community was global. If you are relegated to watching Lost several months after it has been seen (and discussed) elsewhere, the value of watching Lost is considerably lower. The artistic merit of the show was the tension of the story arc, I think, and the opportunity to discuss it with friends, colleagues and strangers.

When the blogger tried to follow the legal method of watching Lost, the behaviour of the content distributor ruined it completely. They delayed the showing so that he missed the global hype and destroyed the program by means of an advert for it in the middle of the program itself!. This is so ridiculous that it is almost kafka-esque. Had the blogger obtained the program illegally, its value to him would have been much higher regardless of his financial outlay.

The point of the original blog is not just that piracy is cheaper, more convenient and typically of low consequence. The point is that piracy allows you to participate in global culture events and results in a much better quality product.

You cannot equate this to stealing gasoline at all, I'm afraid. The loss of any resources as a consequence of piracy is debatable, which it is not in the case of a physical good. More importantly, gasoline is a commodity; stealing it does not improve the product. Whilst piracy results in a better-quality, more timely product, it will remain popular. The reason the legal services offered by iTunes and Netflix are so popular is nothing to do with their pricing models and everything to do with the quality of the product, i.e. the size of their libraries and that the media within the libraries are of sufficiently high quality.

Your last paragraph as a call-to-action is somewhat misplaced. There have been startups in this space that have been killed by the behaviours of the content companies themselves. Whilst others do appear to be succeeding (not just content distributors but content creators, which is fantastic), that takes a lot of time and is not something for which we can out the cultural participation of tens of millions of people on hold.

Pirates do vote with their wallets -- they keep their wallets closed and don't support any players in the market. You seem to be of the opinion that supporting the least-evil companies will slowly shift the standard MO in the market towards less evil activities, but there's two problems: (1) This hasn't actually helped unseat the incumbent corporations, and (2) there's nobody who is sufficiently not-evil to the point where they are worth supporting.

This isn't a consumer-and-business problem. This is not something that can be fixed by improving consumer awareness. The problem isn't that consumers aren't making smart choices, the problem is that this market exists at all. Copyright was never meant to be abused this way, and our continued compliance towards the market and the corporations participating in it are not helping.

I'd like to make an analogy. Consider the bottled water market. This is a market which takes a free good (water) which is generally considered too cheap to meter, and sets a relatively outrageous price on it. The markup is justified through the packaging, quality assurance process, and a general insistence on part of the producer that the bottled water is somehow superior to non-bottled water.

What's the answer to bottled water? Supporting bottled water startups? Seeking out and raising awareness of disruptive bottled water producers? I'd say that the answer is simply to not buy bottled water.

At this point, you're gonna say that bottled water isn't a good analogy because piracy would equate to stealing pallets of bottled water. You're right; the analogy doesn't carry that far. Feel free to come up with a more accurate analogy.

(I'm gonna get US-specific at this point.)

Do you recognize this? "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." This is the clause of the Constitution which authorizes Congress to establish copyright. This is the only authority under which copyright may operate: It must be limited, it must be aimed at content creators, not merely redistributors or advertisers; it must promote common culture. The point of copyright, as we historically know, is to ensure that artists can make money without patronization, in order to permit an artist who continually makes work to be remunerated for that work. The idea of a limit on copyright was to ensure that the common culture, the public domain, which was considered more important than the right of an artist to be compensated, would not be ignored; anything which is published will eventually belong to everybody and not any single person or group.

Know how long copyright was originally? 14 years plus an optional 14-year renewal, if the author was still alive. That was in 1790, for the "encouragement of learning." It was intended for copyright to eventually shrink as distribution improved; after all, why would we need a long copyright when authors are nearly instantly remunerated in this age of speedy international distribution? And now copyright lasts longer than most people.

You and I, and everybody else, have minds filled with cultural information. It really should belong to all of us, shouldn't it? Isn't it a damn shame that Mickey Mouse, after three-quarters of a century, being a character our grandparents enjoyed, isn't somebody we can have? That the cultural contributions of John Coltrane aren't ours to enjoy? I'm not gonna keep listing things from the twentieth century which we all know but aren't available to us; there's just too much stuff and too little space in this tiny textarea.

So, in this space, who do you see as a disruptive or interesting player, and why? Who will you support with your wallet? Because I'm done. I'm tired of it.

But yet, they still take the content. It's a half-hearted and disingenuous form of boycott. If the goal were really to send Hollywood a message, and to take an absolute moral high ground in doing so, then wouldn't a more effective message be sent in not consuming the product whatsoever? Not buying it and not pirating it?

For what it's worth, I don't disagree whatsoever with your anger toward the industry, or with your critiques of their business practices. The only functional difference in our positions is that I don't try to pretend that downloading a product I haven't paid for is somehow justified by a post-facto moral facade I bolt onto my actions.

Now, all of that aside, let's get to the heart of the matter here: people enjoy quality content. Hollywood produces a lot of quality content (despite Michael Bay's best attempts to undermine that fact). What people enjoy about Hollywood is the production side of the business. What they don't enjoy is the distribution side. Historically, those two have been intertwined because production -- in and of itself -- is not profitable. It is the cost center of the industry. Spending $200MM to produce a tentpole movie, or even $2MM to produce a little indie movie, is an investment that can only generate a return when packaged, distributed, and monetized somehow.

Therein lies the challenge. We all want Hollywood to make product, but we don't want Hollywood to sell us that product. Eventually, Hollywood might pull out of the distribution side of the business altogether, and find a way to monetize its production by charging its distributors (Apple, Netflix, Amazon, etc.) higher fees of some stripe. But eventually, those fees will get passed onto the consumer, one way or the other.

Not participating in a societies culture is a very high price to pay for not wanting to support how companies distribute said culture.

If libraries were to disappear, would you still claim people should stop reading if they won't want to or can't afford to support the publication of certain books?

> So, in this space, who do you see as a disruptive or interesting player, and why? Who will you support with your wallet? Because I'm done. I'm tired of it.

There's a lot of interesting disruption that may have been caused by pirates and outrage over DRM and other heavy handed approaches to control. Beyond Netflix, Spotify, Amazon and Apple selling DRM free files, many record companies will now happily directly sell you DRM free files, sometimes even in awesome formats like FLAC. You can often go to a band's site and find a crappy little Paypal storefront with files like this. It works pretty well. Not always, and maybe not on some of the bigger record company's sites. But their music is crap anyway ;)

It doesn't change my argument much, both Netflix and Spotify (in their paid versions, I know Spotify has ads in the free stream) basically allow customers to pay for content in a way that doesn't ruin it the way the OP described with Gladiator and the popups, and with the generally poor experience of bundled cable TV.

I think you are wrong about this. Various studies have shown that pirates are generally the industry's best customers. http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110727/16233815292/anothe... and the industry knows this https://torrentfreak.com/former-google-cio-limewire-pirates-...

Can one have an effective hunger-strike while eating?

Actually going on strike and not consuming would/could send a 'high-road' and morally correct message. Self-deprivation innately states the value of the belief. Refusing to pay while continuing to consume only reinforces that the item of consumption is where the value actually lies. It makes people look doubly foolish for claiming that they won't pay because the item has no value.

Source: http://www.tomsguide.com/us/drm-music-piracy-copy-protection...

It what sense aren't you yet able to 'have' Mickey Mouse?? Or 'enjoy' the cultural contributions of John Coltrane?

Your statement would only make sense if companies were removing these products from the marketplace and using copyright to ensure their removal. In the case of true orphaned works, I have a different mindset - but Mickey Mouse and John Coltrane are widely and continuously available in society because someone can make money off it.

I seem to recall that there's at least one person pursuing this idea. He paid an orchestra to perform all sorts of public domain classical music and was making the recordings available freely or something like that.