…and its creator doesn’t much care, and has some thoughts on how the world’s distribution networks are part of the problem.
Which of course they are. The harder you make it for people to get your content, the more incentive you give them to pirate. Despite all the futile condemning and attempts at shaming, the fact is that this Cartoon by The Oatmeal still illustrates why making it harder to get content hurts businesses. Scream all you want about how piracy is theft, or people who indulge in it are just entitled whiny losers/scum/whatever: most people will never listen to you because they know damn well it’s not the same thing, and never will view it as the same thing no matter how much you browbeat them and insist that they see it your way. Content distributors should be finding more ways to work with things like the Torrent universe to make a profit off of people who just want to see stuff, rather than futilely setting up barriers that merely frustrate but do not stop people.
Or, you know, you can keep screaming that copying intellectual property is exactly the same thing as stealing money out of someone’s wallet, and most people will continue to think you’re batty. That’s up to you I guess. As someone who owns intellectual property himself and thinks it’s an important concept, I can still see how futile screaming about it is, always has been, and always will be.
Dean Esmay is the author of Methuselah’s Daughter. He has contributed to Dean’s World, Huffington Post, A Voice for Men, Pajamas Media. Neither left nor right wing, neither libertarian nor socialist.