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Netflix Is Not Going to Kill Piracy, Research Suggests (torrentfreak.com)
Even as more people than ever are tuning to Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime and other streaming services to look, piracy too continues to thrive, a research suggests. An anonymous reader shares a report: Intrigued by this interplay of legal and unauthorized viewing, researchers from Carnegie Mellon University and Universidade Catolica Portuguesa carried out an extensive study. They partnered with a major telco, which is not named, to analyze if BitTorrent downloading habits can be changed by offering legal alternatives. The researchers used a piracy-tracking firm to get a sample of thousands of BitTorrent pirates at the associated ISP. Half of them were offered a free 45-day subscription to a premium TV and movies package, allowing them to watch popular content on demand. To measure the effects of video-on-demand access on piracy, the researchers then monitored the legal viewing activity and BitTorrent transfers of the people who received the free offer, comparing it to a control group. The results show that piracy is harder to beat than some would expect. Subscribers who received the free subscription watched more TV, but overall their torrenting habits didn't change significantly. "We find that, on average, households that received the gift increased overall TV consumption by 4.6% and reduced Internet downloads and uploads by 4.2% and 4.5%, respectively. However, and also on average, treated households did not change their likelihood of using BitTorrent during the experiment," the researchers write.
I would use legit services if they offered the same functionality as torrents, but they just don't...
Most limit you to streaming rather than downloading... My connection isn't fast enough to stream at any decent quality, especially at times of day when i'll actually be awake. I can happily torrent overnight and watch the following day.
Sometimes i want to watch when i don't have internet (eg while travelling), downloading and watching later is useful.
Netflix has limited content and arbitrary limitations on where it can be accessed from, most other services are the same. Useless when travelling. A lot of these services don't walk at all in some of the countries i regularly visit.
DRM restricts what kind of devices and players you can use, the content available from torrents can be played on anything.
So long as the legit services are inferior to torrents, people will torrent. Make them as good or better and people will have little excuse for using torrents.
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The difference is that I will not be controlled. I don't mind paying a FAIR price for content. I will view the content on the operating system and player of my choice legally, or I'll do so illegally. I will not be charged twice for same content. If I paid for it once I will not pay for it again under any circumstance. i.e. a CD of music. If I am charged the same for "un-owned/rented/streamed" content as I am for owned content, I'll just have to be illegal. The streamed/rented content needs to be WAAAAY cheaper. There is a better/cheaper alternative, although illegal so they have zero negotiating power. But even if I had to do without, I would not be forced to Windows or Apple. I just cancelled my Spectrum cable, not because I have gone completely over to Netflix or something else, but because I can no longer run a home grown DVR on linux with a cablecard tuner because of the encryption. I'll be illegal or even do without before I would give them my money.
I am ALL for a completely unencrypted, unblocked open format that is uniquely fingerprinted and traceable back to me. If I give the content away to someone else, by all means come after me. But I simply will not be sandboxed into using any operating system or player that is not open and under my control.
Digital is, by definition, imperfect. Analog is the way to go.
Explain where it says that you have an entitlement to the content that you want simply by virtue of wanting it
Explain how anyone is harmed when a "pirate" torrents a movie that they otherwise would not have watched at all.
Disclaimer: I don't pirate movies, but my kids do it all the time, even for movies they could watch for free with Amazon Prime.
If you don't agree with the ethics of copyright in the first place, then just admit that you don't care about intellectual property in the first place instead of hiding behind the notion that you didn't have a choice in the matter, because it's plainly obvious that you do.
I think that's because it's blatantly obvious to everyone but IPR shills that it's not actual property. It's newspeak to create a fraudulent impression of a few abstract and temporary rights as granting permanent ownership and control. Even the people who think the authors of the books they read, artists they listen to, developers of the game they play and so on deserve compensation balk at the non-monetary demands and restrictions like arbitrary limitations on playback hardware and software, region locks, disabling fast-forward, activation servers, installing hidden rootkits, replacing sales with limited licenses and so on.
I think a lot of people feel that way, that they should make a reasonable effort to make sure the creator gets paid but if that's unreasonably difficult he's forfeited that right and that there's no other ethical objections. It's unfortunately not how copyright law works today, at least not in general. But I think it's a pretty far cry from the "information wants to be free" crowd. I actually didn't mind copyright when I went to the store and bought a book or CD and owned it, it's the current incarnation that in my mind is unethical.
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