It's funny, but whenever I run into weird DRM restrictions, I tend to switch to piracy. When I had no income, I never would have bought, and while I did pirate, no sales were lost. Now that I have income, I don't mind buying. But if buying is sufficiently more cumbersome, I do sometimes go back to piracy.
I'd love to see a proper market study on this. As far as I can tell, all of this is based on ego and executives' knee-jerk reactions.
That's the big draw of piracy for me as well - not that I can get out of paying for stuff, but that it's easier (by a mile) than trying to get it the legitimate way. Example: a few weeks ago, I wanted to catch up on The Strain before that night's episode. Went online to try to find a legitimate way to watch it, got blocked because my cable provider (Charter) wasn't on the list of blessed providers. Same story at Hulu. I wanted to watch it, and watch the ads, so they could get their revenue, because that's how the economy works. But they wouldn't let me, so I turned to PB and, after <5 minutes, had the full episode ready to watch with 0 advertisements.
Piracy will continue until there's an easier way to acquire and own content.
Interestingly, some technologies have made me take the opposite route. Now that I have chromecast, I find it more convenient to buy a movie on Google and cast it rather than pirate it and watch on a laptop.
Of course, you can open the video in a chrome tab and cast that, but I've found that's not as smooth. And nothing beats the convenience of a simple touch :)
But if buying is sufficiently more cumbersome, I do sometimes go back to piracy.
Even after I've bought films/series, I tend to pirate them because it's faster than getting the DvDs out and switching them every 4 episodes etc if just watching on my computer. I continue to thank everyone and anyone who does the service of ripping disks
And the freaking FBI warning at the beginning of the disc, and then with some publishers (Disney, you're the worst offender) forcing me to sit through ads every time I put in the disc.
> When I had no income, I never would have bought, and while I did pirate, no sales were lost.
Did you go back and pay for everything you pirated once you had income? If piracy weren't an option, maybe your demand for the products would have persisted and you would have bought them when you could. If so, sales were lost.
> But if buying is sufficiently more cumbersome, I do sometimes go back to piracy.
I'd love to see a proper market study on this. As far as I can tell, all of this is based on ego and executives' knee-jerk reactions.
Interesting that you use the word "ego." You decided that your desire for content delivered on your own turns outweighed the interests of the content creators (or their agents) to determine how their work would be distributed. That strikes me as egotistical.
If you believe that all information should be free and that creators/owners of information should have no say in how it's distributed, none of these arguments apply. Tangentially, if this is the case, you might find your philosophy uncomfortably close to that of the NSA.
The opposite is also true. In college most people got their music from places like audiogalaxy because that was really the only good option. Now most people I know just use the iTunes store because it is so simple.
I'd love to see a proper market study on this. As far as I can tell, all of this is based on ego and executives' knee-jerk reactions.