That is a moral judgement. I’m not going to pretend that pirates are particularly evil or deserve excessive punishment, but I’m also not going to say that piracy is some moral right for content that was released in the last 5 years. It isn’t. And just because there isn’t a better distribution scheme doesn’t mean that pirating the material is a good thing or the morally right thing to do. If you pirate, whatever, I don’t really care. But don’t justify piracy as being the only choice that a good person should take. You are pirating for your own reasons and your own self interest. Don’t try to pretend that you are doing it because you should.
Apparently pirates have crappy taste because Netflix streaming selection sucks.
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Of course this is a moral judgement. I am saying that the morality is pretty clear. We have laws that create artificial scarcity. We do this to pay authors/writers/actors/etc. The purpose of these laws isn’t to create a drought, it is just to ensure that no one rips off the works and collects all of the rewards. Corporations then use these laws that have been perverted beyond all comprehension (century long copyright protection, making DRM cracking illegal even when done for a legal purpose, crushing fair use, etc) to not just collect the their due, but to make it illegal to view content outside of a handful of extremely artificial methods. This is done to give monopoly like power to a handful of cable companies who are selling the 21st century version of the buggy whip the ability to continue to be absolute shits. There isn’t a single reason in the world why all TV that isn’t specifically live, shouldn’t be streaming, other than that the people who own the pipes (cable companies) can squeeze you for more money if it isn’t.
We have a company ransoming a very nice piece of culture to protect 21st century buggy whip makers, using laws in ways they were never intended for, and backing up their perverse use of such laws with the implied threat of violence through police, or at the very least a big fat lawsuit, which would be collected using a threat of violence. Law, i.e. men with guns, keep these shit cable companies in business, not technology.
So yes, I am making a moral judgement. These people are acting like shits by using laws that shouldn’t exist and threats of lawsuits to get people to buy a shitty product that should have been dead the second you could pump out video on demand. I am making the moral judgement that it is a-okay to copy this content and watch it. If they don’t want to provide a way to pay for it, and you don’t want to pay ransom to a cable company, that is their problem. I am not suggesting you have some moral duty to go pirate shit you don’t want to watch. I am suggesting that these corporations are acting like shits and that if you want to watch some of this content, you should do so with absolutely zero guilt.
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Wow, you just gave the most general argument humanly possible. The level of entitlement you must feel is amazing.
Now how does this all apply to HBO releasing a new product and who aren’t using their power to crack down on people? I get it: there are evil companies out there, therefore, any company and anybody who is associated with one is guilty by association. C’mon. [quote=“Rindan, post:24, topic:9826”]
There isn’t a single reason in the world why all TV that isn’t specifically live, shouldn’t be streaming, other than that the people who own the pipes (cable companies) can squeeze you for more money if it isn’t.
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Did you miss the entire discussion about business models? Are you assuming that HBO’s purpose is just to milk people for more money? Or perhaps the economics doesn’t work when you go a la carte. For example, how would The Wire have ever been made? It was one of the lowest rated shows that HBO ran and it had an enormous budget to produce. The truth is that the surplus from cable companies and exclusive agreements spurned on by The Sopranos viewers is what gave HBO the money to take a risk like that. By tying their program into a network they can afford themselves the opportunity to take risks. If they didn’t, they would be forced to run a risk analysis on every program, much like the non-cable networks do, which is why their programming generally sucks.[quote=“Rindan, post:24, topic:9826”]
We have a company ransoming a very nice piece of culture to protect 21st century buggy whip makers, using laws in ways they were never intended for, and backing up their perverse use of such laws with the implied threat of violence through police, or at the very least a big fat lawsuit, which would be collected using a threat of violence.
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HBO has been very restrained in the exercise of lawsuits. And this threat of violence? Hyperbole, much?[quote=“Rindan, post:24, topic:9826”]
So yes, I am making a moral judgement.
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No, you are just trying to justify your selfish impulses and make them sound like the moral thing to do. Sorry, but you are not a better person because you refused to help pay HBO for the great risk and great costs they took to make some of the best TV in history.
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Yes, I feel “entitled” to ignore unjust laws. I’ll also pretty happily advocate people going out and smoke some pot or drink booze in a dry countries, break gender laws in countries that have them, violate restrictions on speech, and in general ignore laws that don’t have a victim so long as they can avoid the potential penalties. I apparently have to spell this out as you take what I say word for word literally, but I also only suggest people doing this if they get some sort of pleasure out of it.
HBO isn’t as bad as some, as they tend to not actively sue individuals, but they in fact are relying on some utterly fucked copyright laws to run a particular business model. HBO is kept in check by the utter impossibility of stopping piracy, and the fact that they don’t need to actively enforce the law with lawsuits to get what they want out of it.
No, I understand their business model as I mention it in literally every single post, including the post you quoted. Fucked laws that make your business model possible don’t make the law unfucked. Without the laws that HBO relies on to produce the way it does, cable boxes would be a thing of the past, instead of an archaic technology that still dominates the living room. Those laws certainly let HBO nice things, but it also prevents the creation of untold other works.
[quote=“bzishi, post:25, topic:9826”]And this threat of violence? Hyperbole, much?
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A law is a threat of violence. This is okay. We want to threaten violence on people that do bad things. Sometimes the threat of violence is one of being snatched and thrown in jail. In the case of copyright law, the threat is essentially indentured servitude for life. I don’t know about you, but being tossed in jail for a year or two is vastly less scary than being hit by the maximum fine for snagging a complete TV series could bring (~7.5 million dollars for Game of Thrones). Threatening violence to defend our byzantine copyright laws written specifically for entertainment corporations at the expense of all other parties and giving them greater penalties than what you could get in a civil court if you raped and killed someone is amazingly fucked up and a gross misuse of the legal system.
Like I said, I pay for all my TV when I can. I will happily pay HBO for their TV, but there is literally no way to do so other than to subscribe to a few hundred channels of shit TV spewed out by an archaic and shitty computer that spits out programming at preset times.
You also seem to be utterly confused by my moral argument. I am not saying that it is morally good to go download a A Game of Thrones when HBO flatly refuses to sell it. I am saying that it isn’t immoral to ignore utterly fucked copyright laws when they are being abused. You don’t have some duty to go pirate A Game of Thrones, but don’t let your sense of morality stop you if you want to. This is no different from saying that you have a moral right to smoke pot or have gay sex. Smoking pot, having gay sex, and downloading A Game of Thrones are just activities that are neither virtuous or immoral. Laws that prevent you from doing those enjoyable (to some) activities on the other hand are immoral, and the only thing that should keep you from ignoring these laws is when you have a rational fear of the government enforcing its unjust laws on you.
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Ok we need to find a way to Hollywood-ify netflix…
I know! Before every video there’s an un-skippable ‘PSA’ about piracy, sung by Miley Cyrus or whoever is her tween replacement, with a lil’ Wayne interlude, and they’re both in THE MALL OF AMERICA because that’s still relevant, right guys? Them stupid millennials will lap it right up.
You going for a Don’t Copy that Floppy kinda vibe here?
Or the awesome sequel, Don’t Copy That?
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Well, that, and it’s not exactly like shooting a pseudo-period sex-filled hack-and-slash fantasy show in Ireland is cheap.
Wait, you mean it costs money and that people who do this stuff expect to be paid for their efforts? Women don’t just want to drop their clothes and pretend to have sex/be raped for the sheer joy of it? People don’t get covered in fake latex gore for giggles? I’ll be damned. It’s almost as if there’s work involved, or that people who have spent their adult lives learning how to do practical effects and honed their acting craft don’t do so purely out of the love of the craft during their spare time. (Having seen some of that, I’ll take HBO’s model, thanks.)
We prefer to be called Buccaneer-Americans.
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Point #1 revolves around HBO having to create its own streaming-infrastructure - a situation that doesn’t exist if it licensed content to Netflix.
Nbr 3 is also not an issue for Netflix – it’s not about where the content is going - the 1million cord-cutting figure. It’s about the Netflix subscriber base, which was 29.7 in the first-quarter of 2013.
Nbr2 is another story, though. “Taking one for the team” or “(corporate) family values prevents this” is interesting, and does not have a technical solution.
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The Time-Warner family argument is compelling.
Cable companies blocking a channel due to Netflix-licensing is not quite as compelling.
How many cable companies are blocking AMC over “Breaking Bad” or “The Killing” ?
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For me the tip off to “market failure” is that there is NO price at which you can stream an HBO show without a cable subscription. As a freelancer who gives flat bids, I know there’s always a price for a job you don’t want to do. It’s called the F-U price, the compensation at which you’ll do it happily with no regret. Where’s HBO’s F-U for people without cable? Even if it was $10/show, at least it would demonstrate there was a market, rather than an evil plan to force people to buy a whole lot of crap they really don’t want in order to get that product they do. Millions of people that never watch ESPN pay $5/month for it anyway. That’s insane.
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I got it. It is too expensive and you don’t want to pay for it. Now again, please tell me how HBO could have created The Wire. Just do that, okay.[quote=“Rindan, post:26, topic:9826”]
You also seem to be utterly confused by my moral argument. I am not saying that it is morally good to go download a A Game of Thrones when HBO flatly refuses to sell it. I am saying that it isn’t immoral to ignore utterly fucked copyright laws when they are being abused.
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No, you seem to be confused by what a moral argument is. You used the word ‘should’. And then you doubled down and said it is a moral right. But now you are backing off? Fine, just admit that you were wrong.
Flesh out your statement and make an argument please. I’m not going to respond to posts with quickfire “I think/I don’t think” style posts. Explain why you think these things.
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You had two main points, as I saw it:
- TimeWarner owns HBO, and licensing HBO content to Netflix encourages “cutting the cord” and TimeWarner doesn’t want to encourage that, so HBO will never license to Netflix. Unless Netflix buys HBO. [empasis added]
- If Netflix bought HBO, cable compaines would block HBO.
I missed the “Unless Netflix buys HBO” part of the argument before, which makes my response somewhat confusing – my example of no-cable-company-is-blocking AMC revolved around AMC not being owned by Netflix and licensing content to Netflix and not being blocked by cable companies.
Short and sweet, but based on a mis-reading.
[I won’t deign to address your assertion of non-response in your response. That goes without mention.]
So.
I understand the “TimeWarner won’t let HBO do this argument” - it was fleshed out in your earlier link, and I agreed with it before.
Now that you’ve gotten me to think about it some more, I’m not sure I agree with it.
TimeWarner did pull its movies from Netflix earlier this year.
But other TimeWarner-family owned content is available on Netflix.
So, what is it about HBO original product specifically, as opposed to original content produced by other TimeWarner companies, that TimeWarner would never agree to license?
Why would it take a complete purchase of HBO to put HBO content on Netflix?
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[quote=“OtherMichael, post:36, topic:9826”]
So, what is it about HBO original product specifically, as opposed to original content produced by other TimeWarner companies, that TimeWarner would never agree to license?Why would it take a complete purchase of HBO to put HBO content on Netflix?
[/quote]Time Warner offers some shows that it doesn’t think people will cut their cable over. So for them, it works out. HBO is not the same at all. People would happily cut the cable for a la carte pricing. They aren’t going to do that for West Wing episodes. So Time Warner can pick and choose the parts they want to license with the goal of maximizing profits while not destabilizing their cable business model. And generally, the content that is easily licensed is the content that is off the air. Even with Breaking Bad or any current show, you aren’t getting the latest episodes.
You might respond to that last point by asking: why can’t HBO license older material? The response would be that they’ve set up their own competitor HBO Go. Every cable company is doing this right now. For example, Comcast has set up xfinity. They are all trying to move into Internet distribution while maintaining the integrity of their networks. You get their Netflix-like services, except you have to pay $80/month instead of $10.
I knew an honest-to-god pirate once. I lived in a pretty ghetto neighborhood and every week or so the DVD man would come around with homemade DVDs. He even seemed to have movies that were still in theaters.
But he didn’t carry a lot of European art films. Oddly, there wasn’t much demand.
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Am I reading this correctly? The entire premise of that article seems to be that the only people who would pay for online, streaming access to HBO’s shows are the existing HBO-included American cable subscribers (15 million) plus an un-defined portion of the estimated 3 million Americans with broadband internet access and no TV subscription.
So… if we completely ignore the international market, ignore Americans who pay for the cheaper cable subscription that doesn’t include HBO, and ignore Americans who don’t have broadband internet access or a cable subscription (is anyone even considering how the 4G network and smart mobile devices are, in some limited markets, the main internet access point for many people?), then HBO’s current model is more profitable than providing paid access to streamed content.
Call me crazy, but I think running your business under the assumption that your customer base has no potential for growth, even with measurable data showing otherwise, IS stupid.
First for the record I don’t pirate, however he’s not saying he’s not willing to pay the price. He’s more than willing to pay the price for HBO shows. What he is NOT willing to pay the price for is hundreds of channels that he will never, ever watch. It’s a marketing decision that HBO has made. I understand that someone who wants to watch Game of Thrones, or The Wire may decide to get them in a way that isn’t paid for when there is no way to actually, you know, PAY for them. As for HBO not being able to make the wire without being on cable, maybe. Netflix is making original programming and I’m guessing they are doing that because they believe they will recoup the costs and make a profit by getting more subscribers and keeping subscribers. It’s a different marketing philosophy, and it is in contrast with HBO’s model. I’m vaguely interested in Game of Thrones, but not enough to buy DVDs sight unseen, not enough to subscribe to HBO that shows not much else that I like (I’m not a movie watcher) and I’m not interested enough to pirate. I know others who don’t pirate, but who have stated that they just wish they could subscribe to HBO GO without getting the cable package. They can’t and there is PLENTY on Netflix, Hulu Plus and Amazon Prime to keep them watching for years, so it’s not that big a loss to them.
No dude. I will pay for it, like the way I pay for literally every single show out there with the exception of HBO shows. They won’t let me pay. You literally can not buy most HBO shows. You can give money to another company that offers a shit product that will then give a portion of that money to HBO, but you literally can not pay HBO for A Game of Thrones.
As to how HBO would create The Wire, they could charge money for it. I can’t speak to The Wire’s pricing, but I know that A Game of Thrones blows about $7 million an episode. They get over 12 million people to watch it per episode, and that doesn’t include the people that would pay to watch it but can’t! They could charge a quarter an episode and easily turn a profit in the world wide market. They could probably charge $2 an episode and turn an epic profit. Hell, they could probably charge $5 an episode and without losing too many viewer. I certainly would pay.
Now, I don’t know much about The Wire. It could very well be that without HBOs business model of exclusivity deals to archaic cable companies they simply couldn’t garner enough interest and money, and if The Wire is good (I have not watched it) it would be a shame to see it never get created. However, that isn’t a justification for a shit law. The shit copyright laws have murdered plenty of content that can’t exist in the world of entertainment monopolies that control the pipes, production, and laws.
Hell, HBO can keep doing what it is doing for all I care. They can create The Wire and A Game of Thrones exactly the way they did. I just won’t feel a twinge of guilt about copying their stuff if they refuse to let me pay for a copy.
You seem to be really struggling with this concept, so I’ll try one last time. You should feel a-okay about downloading A Game of Thrones, if you enjoy watching a A Game of Thrones. In the same way, you should feel a-okay about having gay sex or smoking pot if you enjoy that sort of thing. You should feel a-okay about this because HBO flatly refuses to take your goddamn money, making the copying of the media a crime without a victim. You can’t deprive a creator of their money if they refuse to take your money. Obviously, doing the act itself isn’t moral or immoral because the act has absolutely no effect on anyone outside of you. You are not “sticking it to the man” or “robbing a creator”. You seem to be terribly confused when I say “you should merrily and without any remorse, pirate the shit out of their stuff” as some sort of moral commandment. I thought it was pretty clear that the “you should” part is only to be done if you, you know… actually enjoy the show. If that wasn’t clear, let me spell it out in as clear as terms as possible, and let me make it for the more general case: If an act doesn’t have a victim, doing that act is neither moral or immoral, but having that act made illegal is immoral. It doesn’t matter if the act is smoking pot, having gay sex, or pirating a show that you can’t buy. No victim? No crime. Feel free to merrily do the act if it makes you happy.
