Mentioning Pirates of the Caribbean, when I saw it there was one of those commercials before it too.
Sad-looking worker: Stealing movies hurts little people like me even though we don’t actually get any portion of the film’s proceeds. Piracy is just plain wrong. You should never do it.
Entire following movie: Sometimes piracy is just what you need! In the end even the commodore will have to admit it. It gets you adventures and babes and is just plain awesome, folks. Pretty damn awesome.
File sharing is killing home-taping!
“Between Wind & Water”? Is that inside the toilet bowl?
Edited to remove surplus Rs.
BTW, it’s no mistake that that campaign against home taping was around at the same time that punks and hip hop kids were using taping to carve out alternatives to being part of the mainstream music industry.
I had a Dead Kennedys tape that said “Home taping is killing record industry profits. We left this side blank for you to help”
I think a lot, and I mean a lot of the studios had forgotten why iTunes and Amazon and Netflix were so successful in reducing unlicensed copying: it’s because they were convenient. People don’t “pirate” because they want free stuff so much as because the “pirated” copies did not hassle you like the videotapes and DVD’s did, with their “oh no, you have to watch us call you criminals before we will let you see your precious little movie!” attitude.
No, they have short memories, blinded by avarice and the itch to have an even bigger piece of the pie. Disney led the lay, now Paramount is busy slicing open the goose that lays the golden eggs, and Warner is most likely dreaming of how they can get those sweet, sweet streaming fees as well, not just the juicy morsels that Netflix and Amazon give them. They imagine they can make money hand over fist if they took the whole fee! The whole infrastructure thing will sort itself out, right?
Nope.
People are losing interest in having more than one steaming service. Two tops. And cancelling Netflix to use Disney, or Disney to see Paramount, only oh no, you already cancelled Disney and getting back in will cost you extra, damnit, this all will result in black market streaming getting popular. Because it will be more convenient.
Yep.
Everyone wants their own little island and exclusives, and IMO, that is not tenable for most.
They are going to have to like license each others catalogs, even if they are on like a 6 month delay on when they come out, or people will just pick one good all around one like netflix or hulu, and then pirate the specific shows they want to watch from other venues.
OR these island services have to make it super cheap. $3 a month. Maybe $5 if you have first run movies. Even the if the market fractures too much, then it become untenable.
My vision I had like 10 years ago - have a centralized streaming service, you pay your monthly fee, and 30-50% of that fee goes to running the servers and services, etc. The rest gets divided based on what you watch. So let’s say $15 a month goes to the content providers. If you watched just ONE movie that month, all $15 goes to them. You watched 15 different shows and movies over 20 hours, it gets divided based on how many minutes of each was watched. (credits don’t count toward run time).
Probably never happen…
Not to mention geo-blocking, which supports the paranoid fantasy that folks are enjoying the programming without supporting the advertisers because they live in a neighboring country. I mean, all they have to do is look at the market research to know that there are a LOT of folks from Mexico or Canada who cross the border regularly to buy products in the USA. 
My dad was the goodiest two-shoes that ever goodied a shoe and even he let my brother keep the games he copied from someone who copied them… after we got a lecture about why it was wrong. But his reasoning was that we were never going to buy those games anyway (he knew what our allowance was after all) so there was no lost sale in his view.
And that’s the story of how I got to play Karateka.
When corporations and governments start to respect the copyright law and their obligations to the public, the public should respect copyright. Until then, its open season on the open seas.
When the episode of IT crowd with the parody piracy PSA the show was only available in the UK or by downloading it via a bittorrent, I was downloading the show each week and found the piracy PSA so funny and knew some others would also
I uploaded it to Youtube to share with boingboing, then in some kind of copyright folding in on it self situation I first got a take down from CH4 then that was rescinded then one from the production company, then CH4 wanted to monetize it but the production company did also, and then at some point youtube gave up and took it down, at the time it was the only version on youtube …then weeks later there where many on youtube and I had a copyright strike
Billy Bragg’s “Workers Playtime” has a declaration that “Capitalism is Killing Music” on the cover.
Which turns out to be exactly correct! 
Research in the years after the first wave of computer game piracy showed that sales were not impacted because the people pirating were not people who could or would buy the games.
Still a fave of mine today! Those of us who pirated it did miss out on one of the greatest gags in computing history, though. For anyone who isn’t aware, if the original disk was inserted upside down in the drive, the game would play upside down. They shipped a complete second copy of the game on the back of the disk with all graphics inverted. Absolutely legendary and not something any publisher would spend money to do today.
I watch anything I want for free, no subscriptions to any service. 
No guilt. All the writers, cast and crew were already paid.
If it’s something really good I go to the theater. If it’s something I really like I buy the Blu-ray.
I’ve seen Everything Everywhere All At Once three times in the theater now and cannot wait for the Blu-ray. Dr Strange 2 I will pirate.
Obligs…
Al’s actual gripe about piracy was that lower quality raunchy songs were falsely labeled with his name, and he would have to respond to complaints about music he had nothing to do with.
So it’s okay to steal a thing if you couldn’t afford the thing or weren’t going to buy the thing anyhow?
Does that apply to all things? If so, cool, I want a few things that I would never pay money for.
