Let’s say an app came out that allowed pirating without consequences; that it connected every user to a fast, anonymous network, and users could donate anonymously to content creators and/or uploaders.
Piracy were so normal that even your grandma could just search “ahoy movie name”, be directed to a third party store, download and install the “Ahoy App” and start watching movies and TV shows like on Popcorn Time or listen to music like on Napster and Spotify. It reached mainstream popularity and had download numbers like WhatsApp or TikTok.
Is this something we would want? Would the entertainment industry survive?
Forget your ideas of utopia for the time being. First let’s reduce the copyright term to something reasonable like 14 years or less, and abolish legal protections for DRM such as the DMCA. It’s a big enough change to start with, and might lead to more people respecting the law. The absurdity of works being locked up by the heirs and successors of authors who’ve been dead for three generations is unjustifiable.
Abolish all intellectual property as part of abolishing all private property and enshrine the four fundamental software freedoms as universal human rights.
Given that there’s no hope for my scenario happening, I suppose that one will do.
No more half measures, Walter
My utopia would just be a single reasonable paid service that provided everything. I pirate because its simply more convenient than 20 subscriptions.
exactly. I have not pirated games in a long time because steam is at that perfect balance for me. With a few exceptions of course
For me, too, mostly. There are edge cases:
- Things I know I want to have a copy of, that are unavailable outside of streaming. Favorite movies.
- Things that are unavailable to me, because of regional locks. This most frequently happens with books, oddly; books that were never released in the US, and second-hand copies are hen’s teeth. But also out of print (but not yet public domain) books, or books that have been withdrawn because of controversy. You can get a copy of Mein Kampf, but not It Happened on Mulberry Street SMH.
- Things I’ve bought before, sometimes on multiple different media (LP, tape, CD) that I feel as if I’ve paid my dues and don’t want to buy again.
But yeah, mostly it’s that streaming services are the movie studios, and you’d need to subscribe to at least 4 to cover the majority of new content. This overlaps a lot with my first point, about wanting to have an offline, in-perpetuity copy.
Is this expectation unreasonable? If consumers look for a monopolized service then won’t that service attempt to exploit the users? Just thinking out loud. I don’t know what the solution is.
Unreasonable? Depends on what you consider reasonable. Yes absolutely they would try to exploit the users, in which case we go back to piracy. Perhaps a better solution would be federated content providers with some sort of combined (reasonable) fee determined by the providers collectively. We get one system to subscribe to, and pay one fee.
A large IP reform that consolidates licensing and patent agreements into a single one: automatically granted to anyone who applies, cannot be denied to ensure competition, always provides a fixed percentage that cannot be arbitrarily changed on a whim.
Also, rights to IP can only be held by living human beings that are also its creator or have been directly involved in its creation, cannot be sold or inherited. and are relinquished upon death.
The idea being that IP rights cannot stifle innovation or competition, but ensure that good ideas are still rewarded appropriately. This will also end corporations vacuuming up any new idea potentially useful for mankind to make a for profit version later.
Not necessarily a pirate dream, but I really wouldn’t mind paying a fair amount for a good product as long as it goes to the person who actually made it and is freely available immediately. Fucking geoblocking
I’m living this utopia now.
How?
Imo making piracy so easily available would likely create a massive free rider problem. Because ultimately, the people making media still need to get paid, and a lot of things are beyond the scope of “well, I hope donations cover it”, especially considering that this would effectively end major points of revenue like tv/streaming licensing and box office sales. You better like franchises that exist for selling merchandise a la pokemon, because that’s going to be the only thing that can reliably earn enough to stay afloat.
But what if the economy started to change and make up for the offset when piracy is common?
I directly mentioned that. The industry would lose all of its primary means of revenue, and that’s going to impact what does and doesn’t recieve funding and approval for production. Media would, even more than it currently does, lean towards things that create external revenue streams. Toys, merchandise, that kind of stuff. That, and like, kickstarter projects where people pay up front before the media is made.
My ideal would be something like Bandcamp, but for all the music, books, videos, audiobooks and whatever available to purchase and download drm free with only a minimal cut going to the platform.
Would the entertainment industry survive?
No
entertainment should not be an industry, should not be a capitalist profit generator.deleted by creator
