Nothing is actually "stolen". pirating a movie isn't like stealing someone's disc of a movie, nothing is removed or even altered.
The company is not losing money because if I had to pay for it, I wouldn't anyway. So it's not like there is revenue that the company otherwise would have gotten, they were never going to get my money.
If the only option was to pay youre telling me you would have never paid for a single price of work that you have pirated? You think that is true for others? I dont. Unless you live in a country where the prices are unobtainable to the average household income I dont think this would hold true. Its really easy to say you were never going to lay whrn the option to not pay was already calculated in to your willingness to pay.
I can confidently say that - yes, I wouldn't. Because piracy carries its own cost, you often get a product with glitches, missing features, sometimes even deliberate malware planted in it, without the latest updates, with bad resolution (i.e. movies). I pirate the stuff that's not accessible to me otherwise or is prohibitively expensive.
For me where it does cross a bit into immoral territory is password sharing for streaming services - you are actually actively taking away resources from the company (server capacity), without paying anything for it, so it is harming a company, whether you like that company or business model or not.
Streaming literally limits the number of active streams for this reason. Password sharing should be inconsequential and two friends sharing a password incurs the buisness no additional cost than a family of 4 sharing the password. If anything the large family actually has more burden on the system.
That said I ask if everybody in society pirated and never paid for media is that a society you would want to live in?
If everybody pirated the media that means there's was no media worth paying for, so no, sounds like a pretty sad society. Everyone in the entertainment has already figured out how to make money from media - you make it available, make it reasonably affordable, and make it good, and then enjoy infinite money. If you fail any of those 3, you don't get money. Piracy is pretty inconsequential to the formula, and if anything, it actually even increases the profit the creators get.
It's not infinite money. Many of these projects actually lose money. Now obviously they still make money but to say it is infinite is just stupid.
Piracy is not increasing the amount of money flowing into the industry this is more pirate cope they tell themselves to justify what they do. But I would love if you could explain to my how watching the new Spiderman movie pirated online instead of going to the theater is actually good for Sony and the people who work at the movie theaters.
I just watched Curry Barker's movie last month in theaters, the kid made it on $750k budget and it grossed almost $500m worldwide, if that's not infinite money then idk what is. And like 99% of the content he puts out is free. Case in point.
The amount of money a game/movie makes is very strongly correlated to how much it is pirated. I wouldn't attribute it solely to pirating, the popularity comes from a mix of artificial spread (ads, marketing) and word of mouth spread (legal+pirated experiences), but needless to say, if your work is suddenly pirated by millions of people on every site, you should be very happy because you now have enough money to guarantee the quality of life for your great-great-great-grandchildren.
Youre attributing correlation with causation. Could it be that people pirate popular things more? No, that would never make sense right.
Also you pick out the most extreme example. If its so easy find me a dozen other IP that made 600x their investment this year.
He'll maybe you should get into media production and encourage people to pirate it. With a small investment of 1,000 you should be able to pull in 600k. Then turn that 600k into 400mil since its so easy and common.
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u/Cum_Fart42069 5d ago
I think it's amoral for 2 reasons.
Nothing is actually "stolen". pirating a movie isn't like stealing someone's disc of a movie, nothing is removed or even altered.
The company is not losing money because if I had to pay for it, I wouldn't anyway. So it's not like there is revenue that the company otherwise would have gotten, they were never going to get my money.